The Closest Comps to Cody Bellinger in Terms of Production Identity Might Surprise You

[Matthew Trueblood]

When Cody Bellinger hit free agency last winter, he found a market full of teams a bit more circumspect than he and his camp anticipated. That was because of his expected batted-ball numbers, and those look bad again this year. Yet, he keeps producing. How?

Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports

Twice, in mid-April, Cody Bellinger batted second for the 2024 Chicago Cubs. In all other games, when he's been healthy and in there, he's batted third. Bellinger is the player Craig Counsell trusts most with the job traditionally treated as most important to scoring runs--the spot where Babe Ruth and Willie Mays batted most often, and where teams usually put their best power hitter.

Obviously, tradition's grasp on the levers that steer teams' strategic decisions is looser than it used to be, and Bellinger doesn't bat third for quite the same reasons that Ruth or Mays did. However, he's still the linchpin of the lineup, particularly in terms of putting up crooked numbers. of the 79 innings in which the Cubs have put up multiple runs this season, Bellinger was involved 37 times--and that 47% participation rate is before you take out any of the big innings the team managed to put together during Bellinger's brief absence due to a rib injury in April.

Yet, Bellinger's game hinges less on his power than you'd be inclined to assume, and certainly much less than it did when he was winning the 2019 NL MVP. He entered Sunday's action hitting .270/.332/.440, with just nine home runs and 23 total extra-base hits in 274 plate appearances, He's been an above-average hitter because, for the second year in a row, he's striking out just under 16 percent of the time, with a walk rate right around half that, rather than because he's still showing anything akin to the 40-homer power he had a few years ago.

The Cubs need Bellinger to generate more power, and that's been a focus for him over the last month. He's still doing more with his contact and on-base skills than with his power, though, for a simple reason: he gets his power from a place that doesn't mesh all that well with his home park.

There are, basically, two ways to hit for a lot of power in baseball. One is to swing viciously hard, creating very high exit velocities at an unusual rate. The other is to turn on the ball, lift it, and hit it to the pull field, where the fences are closer and the ball is more likely to fly over them, if it's well-struck. The era of power production we're in now features plenty of each kind of thumper, but it's been defined not by the guys who can hit it 117 miles per hour every so often, but by the ones who rack up 25 or 30 homers a year without that kind of raw pop.

To help visualize the kind of power hitter Bellinger is, I offer two new spins on metrics you're already familiar with. First, for each, let's strip out walks and times hit by pitch, but not strikeouts. We want to evaluate what kind of contact a hitter makes when they swing, while discounting their production a bit for the whiffs they accept in exchange for better contact but not punishing them for taking bad pitches and drawing walks. Then, we can find the percentage of all other plate appearances that end in:

• Any batted ball with an exit velocity over 100 MPH; and, separately
• A ball hit at least 10 degrees upward and at least 95 MPH, to the pull field

There's obviously overlap between these skills, but you might be surprised to see how loosely they correlate. One skill (hitting it very hard regularly) does not predict the other (lifting it to the pull field consistently). Some hitters do both things well, but plenty of others do one at the expense of the other, and of course, some do neither well.

Here's a chart showing the EV 100+ Rate and the Pulled Hard in Air Rate for all hitters with at least 200 plate appearances this year. I've identified a fistful of hitters, including all qualifying Cubs (highlighted in blue) and a sampling of others who can help us understand the implications of landing in various sectors of the chart.

In this pairing of skills, no hitter in baseball is more precisely average than Ian Happ. Compare him to Bellinger in your mind, and you're getting a sense of his degree of separation from the center. Obviously, the best hitters in baseball (before accounting for the ability to draw walks) are on the top right. The worst are in the bottom left. The most interesting quadrants, though, are the bottom right, where guys like Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and William Contreras reside, and the top left. That's where the Cubs have two interesting representatives, including Bellinger--the biggest departure from the relationship we might expect between these skills on the team.

Two names present themselves as the closest and most important comparators to Bellinger, when it comes to this skill interaction: Isaac Paredes and José Altuve. That's probably a surprising duo, to most fans. Bellinger is a tall, upright, graceful-looking left-handed hitter with a swing clearly designed for liftoff. Altuve and Paredes are right-handed mesomorphs whose power seems to come out of nowhere.

Yet, Bellinger's not hitting the ball especially hard more often than those hitters are. If you use swings (rather than non-walk plate appearances) as the denominator, he shifts position slightly getting closer to Anthony Santander and a little further from the likes of Eddie Rosario, Jeimer Candelario, and Marcus Semien, because Bellinger trades a bit of swing speed and raw exit velocity to avoid strikeouts the way he does. That very eagerness to avoid punchouts is what makes him importantly similar to the likes of Paredes and Altuve, though, and the fact that he gets to his power by hitting a high volume of balls to the pull field in the air makes them the best parallels to his approach.

Here's the problem: Paredes has found success in Tampa Bay, where there's a short porch down the left-field line and where two of the parks within his division also reward his habit. Altuve has built a Hall of Fame career on lofting balls into the Crawford Boxes down the line at Minute Maid Park. At Wrigley Field, there's no short porch, and there are no Crawford Boxes.

Although the dimensions of right-center are, by contrast, relatively cozy, everyone who has watched baseball at Wrigley Field often over the years knows that the ball just doesn't fly in that direction. Nor is the curvature of the wall as friendly in right as it is in left, where a flatter angle means a lot more cheap homers can be found just past the end of the well in the corner.

That no left-handed hitter since Billy Williams has hit 40 home runs while calling Wrigley Field home is a testament to the Cubs' failures over the years, in some measure, but it's much more about the way the park works. There just isn't a lot of easy power to be found for lefties at the Friendly Confines, and the thing about hitters like Altuve and Paredes is that they're more dependent on their home park and its conduciveness to pull power than most guys are.

Where does that leave Bellinger and the Cubs? Well, again, he gets plenty of value from his defensive versatility, and a good amount from his strikeout avoidance. Despite swinging a lot on a per-pitch basis, he works a solid number of walks. His short-term contract, despite all the flexibility and upside it reserves for Bellinger himself, is not underwater. However, the Cubs are on the precipice of a rebuild, and two of the players in whom they'll want to invest the most playing time for the balance of this season (and over the next few) are Pete Crow-Armstrong and Michael Busch. Those two guys play the very positions at which Bellinger is most valuable, and the fact that one of those spots (Busch's, at first base) requires a high bar to be cleared offensively is troublesome, given the ceiling Wrigley figures to set on Bellinger's power production.

In other words, while he's still been a solid producer (and while this profile of hitter is very much a valid and valuable one), the Cubs should be looking to trade Bellinger this summer. They're not a good enough team to be thinking seriously about trying to make the 2024 postseason, and Bellinger is only in the way as they ponder longer-term plans. They were right to bring him back this winter, perhaps, but wrong to wait so long and very, very wrong not to better reinforce the roster around him. Now, though he'll bring back little in trade, they should move him.

You can expect the team to get either a solid (though not thrilling) prospect or some short-term salary relief in a hypothetical deal for Bellinger. They would probably need to work out a conditional arrangement with the acquiring team whereby they'd pick up the majority of the money owed to Bellinger in the next two seasons, should he opt in each time he has that choice. A fit could still be found, though, because again, Bellinger has a valuable offensive profile and the ability to play multiple positions, making him a fit in many different places.

Alas, this is likely to remain purely hypothetical. Because the Ricketts family is unlikely to dismiss Jed Hoyer and/or Carter Hawkins over the next several weeks, that regime will retain the ability to make decisions going into the deadline. They know they will be fired this fall if they sell this summer, though, so they'll hold onto Bellinger and other potential trade chips, in vain. The Cubs are in trouble, both because they were built with the expectation (now clearly frustrated) that they would be a good team in position to improve as this season progressed, and because the timing of recent leadership changes and renewed commitments means that they're ill-equipped to change that direction.

Since they're also ill-equipped to do anything worthwhile in October, fans now stare right down the barrel of a summer spent cheering for veterans whose good performances will boost their eventual trade value, with the knowledge that that thin and distasteful basis for their enthusiasm is the only one left. It's fun to go to the park and cheer for your team. It's even fun to sit down with them on a hot summer afternoon, after cutting the grass and playing catch with the kids, knowing they're not going anywhere. Rooting in the shadow of what could be a three-year extension of this team's current five-year abyss, though, is joyless and crazymaking. Cubs fans deserve better, but they're not getting it any time soon.

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