How Mike Tauchman's Approach Flexes to Meet Every Moment

[Matthew Trueblood]

He's not just the Chicago Cubs' WAR leader, at this point. He's an outright leader. He's not just a valuable role player; he's their MVP. Mike Tauchman was the reason the Cubs stayed afloat so long in 2023, and in 2024, he's been their heartbeat.

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports

It was just cute, at first. It was a nice little story. Mike Tauchman was a nice little complementary piece on a scrappy Cubs team, and he was from Palatine, Ill., so there was a nice little zing of extra emotion attached to him finding success with the club. He gave the media the saccharine storyline denied them when the Trey Mancini signing fell flat. Tauchman's arrival (and the way he quickly assumed a meaningful role) took some of the sting out of the Cody Bellinger injury last May and June.

As that season progressed, though, Tauchman became unexpectedly indispensable. His availability and his broad-spectrum competence allowed the Cubs to use Bellinger at first base for much of the second half. He came up with huge at-bats throughout the month of July: a two-run, game-tying, ninth-inning double in Milwaukee; a homer and two RBI doubles in a night game against the Nationals at Wrigley Field; a leadoff single and a bases-loaded walk in the fifth-inning rally on the South Side a week later that sealed the Cubs front office's decision to buy instead of selling. Then, there was that magical catch to save and win a game in St. Louis.

Tauchman lacks significant power, which puts a ceiling on his potential production and shrinks his margin for error. When he's not getting on base at an exceptional rate, his utility becomes fringy. He's now 619 plate appearances into his Cubs career, though, and he owns a .366 OBP. Even better, when the stakes get higher, he gets better.

When you think of Tauchman, you think of patience and pitch recognition, and with good reason. He excels at fighting off tough pitches, and at discerning balls and strikes. This season, throughout MLB, there have been 12 plate appearances leading off a game in which the batter forced the starting pitcher to throw five different pitch types--to empty their arsenal one plate appearance into the game. Two of them were Tauchman, at the end of last month, against Miles Mikolas of the Cardinals and Colin Rea of the Brewers. He grinds his way through every trip, giving his teammates extra looks at a pitcher, wearing that pitcher down, and increasing his own chances of reaching base.

To that end, Tauchman transforms as a hitter when the count reaches two strikes. Before that point, he covers the whole strike zone, but he doesn't get aggressive, at all. His swing rate is 41.7%, and he only chases 17.2% of pitches outside the strike zone.

With two strikes, though, Tauchman goes into protect mode. He chases 32% of pitches outside the zone, and swings at 61.5% of all offerings, refusing to give away an at-bat by taking a third strike unless he's completely fooled.

That's most of the time, anyway. In low- and medium-leverage situations, with fewer than two strikes, Tauchman swings just 40.4% of the time. In high-leverage situations, in the same counts, that number shoots up to 53.8%. In fact, overall, Tauchman becomes a different hitter (though, remarkably, no more prone to expanding his zone) when the stakes get high.

Leverage	Swing %	Chase %
High	54.6	19
Medium	47.9	20.2
Low	47.8	24.8

The ferocious energy that bursts out of him when he comes up clutch--the outbursts we saw when he stole that home run last July, or when he homered to tie the game late on Sunday Night Baseball in Boston earlier this year--stays well under control. It's there, though, and it subtly transforms him. You can get away with pitches to him in relatively unimportant situations that he will punish violently if it's time to cut it loose.

In his paean to Ted Williams in the wake of Williams's last game at Fenway Park, author John Updike wrote this: "Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money." Tauchman is hitting .476/.520/.762 in high-leverage situations this year. Is he, then, a vulgarity?

No. What Updike said carried real merit, and echoes through the six-plus decades since for that reason. It overlooked something about the interaction between human nature and the gut-wrenching difficulty of hitting big-league pitching, though. Tauchman couldn't sustain the approach he uses to get on base so frequently and grind down opponents so effectively if he were even this small fraction more aggressive all the time. He might have a harder time staying healthy, since his swing gets a bit more violent in those situations. He might also just not be able to consistently barrel the ball with the same precision, owing not to a character defect, but to the fact that adrenaline naturally heightens a person's concentration and sharpens their vision.

If the balance of this season goes the way the Cubs hope it will, Tauchman won't finish the campaign as their top WAR guy. In a perfect world, he probably wouldn't start against most left-handed pitchers. Still, he's indispensable--still, again, and for the foreseeable future. Craig Counsell surprised some by revealing, late in spring training, that he had told Tauchman not to sweat about his roster spot when the outfielder showed up in mid-February. By now, it should be obvious why he did that. Tauchman adapts and excels by knowing and managing situations, and he's right at the center of what the Cubs want to do this year.

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