Was Nico Hoerner’s Slump Beanball Fallout or Bad BABIP Luck?
Other than his walk and strikeout rates, Nico Hoerner’s numbers are worse across the board this season than what we’ve grown used to. Some believe his steady expected stats point to a coming surge, but others point to a specific inflection point. On a recent episode of Mick Gillispie’s Cubs Baseball Channel podcast, former Cubs great Jody Davis opined that Hoerner has been slumping since being beaned by the Giants’ Matt Waldron on April 29.
Those who rely more on data than anecdotal evidence tend to believe otherwise. North Side Baseball’s Matthew Trueblood believes Hoerner has busted his slump, Bleacher Nation’s Michael Cerami has also been bullish on Hoerner’s future ABs, and BCB’s Sara Sanchez wrote that the second baseman’s rollercoaster is headed up. Hoerner’s underlying metrics have remained fairly constant, suggesting that he has simply been the victim of bad BABIP luck. His contact rate is in line with career norms and his .320 xwOBA is actually higher than he posted in 2022-24.
Trueblood goes into great detail in a very readable piece, utilizing newer statistical information. Here’s a salient quote:
As far as hitting coach John Mallee’s concerned, Nico Hoerner was never even slumping, really. He just got unlucky for a while.
“Look, some years, you hit .300, and other years, you hit .250 or .260, just because of whether it’s finding gloves,” Mallee said Sunday. He watched Hoerner square the ball up relentlessly from late April through the end of June but find lots and lots of gloves.
Hoerner is hitting .268/.279/.317 in his last 11 games since that article appeared. This lends some fuel to my feeling that some of the slumping Cubs are due for regression to their personal means, and bodes well for future games — provided, of course, that they are able to send reasonably able people to the mound to throw the ball.
Was Davis right, or was Hoerner’s downturn the product of some other undiagnosed injury? Maybe it was really just bad luck, as his .257 BABIP this season sits 43 points below his lifetime mark. Odds are that we’ll never know for sure, but the most likely truth is that it was a combination of all three.
My eye test says that Nico has been swinging at pitches that Pete Crow-Armstrong learned to take this year: the low outside slider, the eye-high heater, the cutter on the hands. His bat-to-ball skills are such that he continued to make contact, but not the kind that could produce good results. Until recently, that is, when he has once again been barreling the ball regularly.
What say you? There’s plenty of food for thought in the three quoted articles and the videos, so the floor is open.
