Nico should hit like this all the time
Plus, Carson Kelly All-Star? Should Busch face lefties? Why isn't Steve Stone in the Utility Tunnel of Fame?
As if Jed Hoyer's shopping list wasn't already long enough (especially for a team 14 games over .500 on July 1), Nico Hoerner's recent home run binge must have the Cubs front office worried. I mean, how long will the suspension be when Nico inevitably tests positive for whatever steroid he's on now? Eighty games for whatever female fertility drug he's using? How many games do you get for Prevagen?
Wait, we know that one. Prevagen is just Tic Tacs in a fancy bottle.
Nico had gone 81 games over two seasons without a homer when he hit one off Cardinals' lefty Steven Matz with one out in the sixth inning last Tuesday. Then he homered again three games later in the opener of the series in Houston and then did it again the next night.
For his career Nico has 32 homers in 2,324 career at bats over 628 games.
He has hit 16 as a shortstop and 16 as a second baseman. That'd be a nice bit of symmetry except while it took him 197 games at short to hit 16 homers it took him 415 games to do it at second, and nearly 1,000 more at bats (1,740 compared to 761 at short).
On Sunday's broadcast Jim Deshaies was fighting off the inane babblings of Alex Cohen who was blathering on about how Nico could become a power hitter now. Easy there, Thumbo. With three homers in 307 at bats this season, he's hit one every 102 at bats so far. It's a far cry from when Barry Bonds hit one every 6.5 at bats in 2001.
But I wasn't fond of Deshaies' take, either. He said, "You don't want to change your approach just to hit for more power."
No, I think you actually do.
Nico's 2025 approach so far has him in baseball's fifth percentile in both barrel rate and hard hit percentage. His average exit velocity of 87.2 MPH is lower than 85% of other Major Leaguers. What he's good at--not just good, elite--is not striking out (6.7% of at bats, 100th percentile) and hitting what he swings at (100% in whiff percentage).
But simply hitting the ball isn't the goal. You need to hit the ball hard, and you need to do damage when you hit it. So in that respect, Nico does need to change his approach, and given that he just slugged .760 last week after slugging .384 for the season, maybe he has changed his approach?
It doesn't make sense that he doesn't hit the ball harder or get more extra base hits. He's not a little middle infielder. He's 5'11 and 200 pounds. He should be driving the ball more. He's too good at getting the bat to the ball to do so little damage.
This is where Ryne Sandberg would bore us to tears with the story of Jim Frey taking over the Cubs in 1984 and standing at the batting cage in spring training watching Ryne take BP and telling him to "hit the fucking ball in the air once and a while." And then Sandberg, who had hit only 15 homers total in his first two seasons in the big leagues hit 19 in 1984 alone, and went on to hit more homers (at the time) than any second baseman in big league history. The story bores us not because it's a bad story, but it's one of only three Ryne knows, so we've heard it a lot.
Nobody's expecting Nico to hit 30 homers in a season like Sandberg did in 1989, or 40 like he did in 1990. But how about 12-15?
Because Nico is so good at almost everything else. He's a legitimately great defensive second baseman, and he's an excellent base runner and base stealer. But he doesn't walk, (just 17 times in 80 games so far this year) so he doesn't help you with on base average (he's at .336 this year, which is actually below his career number of .338) and he doesn't slug (.384 this year even with the HR binge, and .381 for his career). He needs to do one or the other. Both would be great, but let's not get greedy.
He's among the league leaders this year with 32 hits with runners in scoring position. That's great. It would be better if he'd driven in more runs than he had hits, but hasn't. He has 31 RBI on those 32 hits. Mostly because 26 of them are singles. But he also has a .444 BAbip in that situation, which is just a tad bit higher than the .335 BAbip he has for his career with runners in scoring position. Just a tad being nearly 100. Sarcasm.
So, that BAbip is going go down as the season goes along. But if among the inevitably fewer number of those hits are more doubles, triples or homers? Well that'd work.
Nico's a good player. But he'd be so much better if he didn't stop at first every time he gets a hit.
All-Star Game voting is in phase two (just like the part of Del Boca Vista where Morty and Helen Seinfeld lived), and Marquee is schilling for the guys who have made it to that phase. You can, and should vote for both Petecrow Armstrong and Kyle Tucker in the outfield. And, you can still vote for Carson Kelly at catcher. He garnered the second-most votes at the position in the first phase, just behind the Dodgers' Will Smith.
On Sunday, Marquee pointed out that among catchers, Kelly has the second highest on base average (.362) and third best OPS (.827), and so, he's the second best catcher in the NL!
But, is he? His entire offensive stat line is fueled by the fact that for 17 games in April he was the best offensive catcher since Mike Piazza. He slashed .360/.507/.840 with seven homers, 21 RBI and more walks (15) than strikeouts (six).
But since? .217/.288/.308/.596 with two homers and five RBI in May and June combined.
Yee-ikes.
Smith's an easy choice. He's leading the league (all players, not just catchers) in batting average and on base average.
But if not Kelly as the other catcher, who?
Hunter Goodman of the Rockies is slashing .287/.332/.512. But the Rockies are the worst team since...well, last year's White Sox, who were the worst ever! He's also doing Coors Field wrong. His slash line is better on the road .297/.338/.588 than at home .277/.327/.433. He's on a historically terrible team and he doesn't understand gravity. Screw him. Who else we got?
JT Realmuto sucks now, he's slashing just .240/.307/.353. He probably partied too hard at the inauguration.
William Contreras got off to a slow start, and he's been better, but he's slugging just .349.
Drake Baldwin of the Barves is at .280/.352/.472 with as many homers (nine) and RBI (26) as Kelly. But he hit just .200 in June, so screw that rookie.
You know what? Kelly should be on the All-Star Team. So what if all of his good stuff happened in April? It still counts.
Last week, Jeff Agrest of the Sun-Times wrote a piece about how now that the Cubs have pretended they like Sammy Sosa, they should do the same thing with Steve Stone.
Stone was the color analyst for the Cubs for 20 seasons between 1983 and 2004 (he was gone and we suffered through Joe Carter in 2000 and 2001), and his work with Harry Caray from 1983-1997 was pretty great.
And we really missed him in those two years when he was gone with valley fever or whatever it was, and not just because the Chip Caray-Joe Carter pairing was completely unlistenable.
The end was bad and awkward. The 2004 Cubs were a talented team with some great guys, but a whole bunch of complete assholes, too (like Kent Mercker and LaTroy Hawkins). The petty complaints of guys like Moises Alou, Mercker and Dusty Baker about Stone "being too negative" were horse shit. Stone was saying things that were true and that the fans were echoing.
Stone spent a lot of time defending his partner, which I understood, but was still frustrating, because Chip was fucking terrible. And when the Cubs announced that Chip was leaving to go babble his way through Barves games for a few years, the fans were happy and Stone was mad at the Cubs and at WGN and Comcast SportsNet, and so even though the Cubs picked up his contract for 2005, he left.
Stone's kind of a prick, but that shouldn't keep him from being a part of Cubs history. He got traded for Ron Santo, after all. So that's something.
And, he posed in Playgirl once.
And, since 2008 he's toiled in the obscurity of White Sox radio (2008) and TV broadcasts (2009-present).
So Agrest is urging the Cubs to "give him the fanfare he deserves after a bitter parting."
What exactly would that be? A plaque in the coveted Utility Tunnel of Fame? Sure, why not?
Here's a fun thing to do. I wanted to see what broadcasters the Cubs have inducted into the Utility Tunnel of Fame. We know Pat Hughes is in it because they put him in just a few years ago, and we can certainly guess that Harry Caray and Jack Brickhouse are in there. But what about Vince Lloyd, or Lou Boudreau or Bob Elson, or Dave Otto?
Just try to find a list of the honorees on the Cubs web site. If you Google Cubs Hall of Fame you get links to lists to the Cubs in the real Hall of Fame, but fuck all on their own team run one.
If I were Stoney, I'd just say never mind. Unless I was too busy worrying about the visibility.
The Athletic ran a real no shit headline Monday.
They certainly need to, because their bench is basically useless. The catchers have been fine, even the Carjacker, but they get next to nothing out of anybody else. Jon Berti can run, Vidal Brujan can...uh...never mind, and Justin Tucker is cooked.
I even laughed at Patrick Mooney writing this in that article.
"Justin Turner's postseason experience brings a lot of intangible value, but he's 40 years old, and hasn't gotten into an offensive rhythm as a Cub yet."
Turner hasn't played in the postseason in three years. And since he tried to give everybody Covid in the post World Series clincher celebration party in 2020 he's played in 14 postseason games and has six hits, for a .128/.241/.191 slash with 11 K's, one homer, one RBI in 47 at bats. Seriously, the most value he could provide to the Cubs in a postseason series would be by not playing. Or by playing for the other team.
The Cubs are convinced that his veteran leadership is too valuable to lose. You know what you call old players who can't play any more?
Coach.
It's like when Dallas Green made Jay Johnstone the "shower coach" for the 1984 playoffs. "My job was to stand in the clubhouse after the game and point out where the showers were," Johnstone said.
But hey, maybe Turner's heating up. He had two hits in the Astros series (one was a double!), so for the last month he's up to .208/.259/.250.
And I do enjoy when fans "fix" the problem by saying, "Just play Michael Busch against lefties. How bad could it be?"
Well, it'd be this bad. Craig Counsell basically hides Busch from any lefty worth a shit, so this slash line is even scarier. Against lefties this season, Michael Busch is four-for-38 with a double, two RBI and 10 strikeouts for a slash line of .105/.209/.132.
The solution is to find a right handed bat better than the aged Turner, it is not to just give Busch more at bats against lefties.
When the Cubs promoted Cade Horton the concern wasn't that his stuff wasn't good enough to pitch well in the big leagues, it was that he only pitched 53.2 innings in his entire college career, and in the minors he had pitched in just 151 innings in three seasons, with the most being 88.1 two years ago and just 34.1 last year. At some point he was likely to hit a wall.
He's made two starts since he passed the 34 inning mark in the big leagues.
He was 3-1 with a 3.47 ERA in his first eight games.
In his last two he's allowed 13 runs in 8.2 innings.
Huh. Who could have seen that coming?
Can he push through it? Should they even try? Should he go to Iowa? The bullpen?
Well, every week Bruce Levine says this is the week the Cubs are going to trade for pitching help. So I'm sure it'll all work itself out.
