A Check-In on the Progress and Profile of Michael Busch

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Chicago Cubs made a big commitment this winter, to a player they hope will be their first baseman of the future. There's a lot of noise mingled with signal so far, so let's try to pin down where things stand for him.

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports

Earlier this week, I saw a couple of comments in our forums espousing uncertainty about how Michael Busch is really doing. On Thursday, @CubinNY started a thread with the simple and startling title: Is Michael Busch cutting it at first? There's more of this sentiment out there than I would have guessed, because for me (unlike for NY), he is passing the eye test, despite some bad mistakes in the field and some obviously rough edges at bat.

I remain very high on Busch, and was surprised that NY closed with the question, "How much time does he get?" I wouldn't have even guessed a clock was ticking, but it's pretty clear that multiple folks are thinking along those lines, and since his game does seem to tend toward extremes so far, I think this is a really good question to try to tackle in a robust and exhaustive way. Let's try it.

Firstly, there are the surface-level numbers, which tell the story of a fairly useful (though not star-caliber) hitter. Busch is batting .254/.323/.472, with a strikeout rate just shy of 35% but a walk rate north of 9%, too. (These numbers were entering Friday, but they've changed little. Busch hung in as well as any of the Cubs against Paul Skenes Friday, then appeared only as a pinch-hitter Saturday.) That strikeout rate is unnerving, because sustaining those overall numbers with that kind of punchout rate is impossible, but there are some exciting things to note here. Obviously, he had that streak of five straight games with a home run, and he also clobbered a clutch homer against the Padres last week.

When he's running hot, he's a well-rounded hitting machine, and not just because he can clear the fences. Busch has eight doubles and a triple, in addition to his seven homers. He's capable of being a complete slugger. The league has just picked apart some of his weaknesses, making his numbers ugly as he adjusts.

It's a mile from being the only (or even the best) way to evaluate him, but maybe one way we can gain insight on where Busch stands is by digging into the new bat-tracking data released from Statcast this week. Firstly, we need to understand Busch's big limitation: he doesn't have good bat speed.

For a starting first baseman, this is a bad place to start. Busch needs to generate average-plus power to be a long-term part of the solution for the Cubs, and swing speed and power (as one would intuit) go hand-in-hand. It's not easy to generate consistent power with a sluggish swing, and Busch has one. That does show up when you watch him, too, doesn't it? It's part of why he was getting beaten so badly, for a stretch, with fastballs at the top of the zone. He has to fight an uphill battle from below-average bat speed to reach above-average power.

But bat speed isn't everything. How has Busch even cracked seven homers (let alone hit some of them so impressively, and split gaps with a good number of hard line drives, too) without average or better bat speed? One of the other measurements released by Statcast was squared-up percentage--the share of batted balls on which the hitter met the ball squarely enough to generate at least 80 percent of the possible exit velocity, given their bat speed and the speed of the incoming pitch. Kyle Bland of Pitcher List created an app that lets us go even deeper, and see the specific squared-up percentage (the actual per-swing percentage of possible exit velocity achieved) on a swing-by-swing basis. Busch is stellar when it comes to squaring up the ball.

His seasonal squared-up rate is above the 90th percentile for the league, and when he's hot, he's as good at squaring it up as anyone in baseball. That makes up for a bat-speed deficit, and then some. Swing speed matters, but if you just clip the top or bottom of the ball, a good amount of bat speed can be wasted. One way to be a good power hitter is just to get a bigger piece of the ball most of the time than other hitters, even if they swing faster than you.

What's interesting, though, is that Busch is having such severe strikeout problems, despite squaring the ball up with such regularity. There's a strong negative correlation (about -0.6) between squared-up rate and whiff rate, which is to be expected. Guys who get the fat part of the ball most of the time don't usually also whiff a lot, because between squaring it up and whiffing should be a good number of mishits. It hasn't been that way for Busch, perhaps because there are gaps in his swing that can still be exploited.

The bat-tracking data also includes a measurement of the length of swings, based on the total three-dimensional distance traveled by the tip of the bat. It's a noisy measurement, but mapping it by pitch location does help us understand some things. There are two places where Busch's swing is longer than the average for that zone: low and in, and up and away.

That's not a problem down and over the middle or inner part of the plate. On the contrary, it means he's catching that ball out front, and squaring it up a lot, even for a relatively hitter-friendly segment of the zone.

Up and away, though, length kills you. A long swing can't get to a high fastball, unless you really cheat toward that pitch, get started early, and open yourself up to more trouble if it's any other offering or in any other location. Whiffing often despite the ability to square the ball up exceptionally well at other times is part of the penalty you pay for guessing up there, in order to cover holes in the swing. Dansby Swanson, Nelson Velázquez, and Elly De La Cruz are among the other hitters like Busch in this regard, and Cubs fans will recognize all of those as aggressive, smart "guess" hitters who occasionally look bad but can do real damage on contact.

I talk often about players with "grooved" swings--those who will tag anything in a certain selection of spots, based on their swing path, but don't seem able to manipulate and modulate their bat path to reach pitches in other spots. A low contact rate against a high squared-up percentage is what I'd expect to see from a player with a grooved swing. It's also what I'd expect to see from a young hitter still learning how to cover the zone against big-league stuff, despite having the requisite skills to be more well-rounded. I think that's where Busch is, along with (to name one) Baltimore's Jordan Westburg.

Defensively, of course, the edges are even rougher. He's had some bad defensive misplays and errors, and few impressive plays to balance things on the other side. I do think he'll be a rangy first baseman, making some plays you don't expect coming in on the ball or going to his right, and I think more experience will allow him to clean things up enough that the balls clanking off his glove (for instance) will be less of an issue. Right now, though, the growing pains there are more painful than the ones at the plate.

I doubt this is the next Anthony Rizzo, but I think the Cubs are comfortable giving him all of this year and next to smooth some things out, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's a solid hitter in the middle of their order for the next half-decade. Though I don't think either thing is right on the horizon, I would bet that Busch is closer to becoming an extension candidate for the Cubs than to losing his job. It'll be interesting to see him continue making adjustments as he goes through his first full season in the big leagues.

View full article