Cody's choice
Should he stay or should he go?



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I admit that I’m playing with fire here. For the second straight week, I’m going to use a Boob Nightengale report on the Cubs to base an entire article on. Boob’s been getting scoops wrong since he reported that Thomas Dewey had won the 1948 presidential election.
But, we’ll just argue both points of Boob’s latest, and cover our proverbial asses.

A year ago at this time we’d have been thrilled if we had somehow known that Cody would not only be back for 2024 but also 2025. After two downright terrible seasons with the Dodgers, Cody had returned to near his MVP form. He was the Cubs best player in 2023, slashing .307/.356/.525 with 26 homers and 97 RBI, despite missing a month in the middle of the season when he hurt himself making a wall climbing catch in Houston.
His decision to opt out after last season was a given, as it was a soft market for offensive players and surely some team (maybe even the Cubs) would be motivated to give a five or six year deal to a versatile, rejuvenated five tool player who was still only 27 years old.
And then, the winter came and went and nobody showed much interest in Cody. Baseball eggheads tried to figure out why and the best they could come up with was that Cody’s bat to ball numbers didn’t match his slugging.
It’s not that Cody didn’t make contact. He did. A lot of it. But when he hit the ball he didn’t hit it terribly hard. His average exit velocity was just. 87.9 MPH, which was a tick below league average (88.5) and that’s not that big of a deal, except even when he hit it hard he didn’t hit it hard. HIs Max EV was 109.2 and the average for big leaguers is 122.4. That is a big difference.
He outperformed his expected batting average by 39 points, and his slug by a whopping 91 points. His hard hit trade was 31.4 percent which was the lowest of his career, even accounting for the years in LA when he was injured and bad.
But he also vastly improved at handling lefthanded pitchers, and his actual slugging was good and he’s a gold glove outfielder (and gold glove caliber first baseman) and he can run, and surely, some team was going to say, “Fuck it, he’s a good baseball player,” and sign him. But nobody did.
So the Cubs backed into a nice deal. They signed Cody for three-years, $80 million with options after this and next season. There was no risk. If he played well he’d go cash in somewhere else, and even if he regressed some, he’d still be good.