You Can’t Stop Nico Hoerner From Doubling Down the Line

[Davy Andrews]

He who defends everything defends nothing, and Nico Hoerner's ability to spray the ball all over the field allows him to rack up hits to the pull side.

I love Nico Hoerner’s Statcast page. It’s a land of contrasts, as polarized as our stupid country. Any slider that has to do with fielding the ball or making contact with it is so red that it hurts your eyes. Any slider that relates to hitting or throwing the ball hard is blue enough to make the ghost of Harry Caray weep. Not all of this is Hoerner’s fault. The small amount of power he had was sapped by a flexor tendon injury that required surgery once the season ended. From 2023 to 2024, Hoerner’s percentile ranks in hard-hit rate, average exit velocity, and barrel rate all got cut in half. What I really love, though, is below. It’s not polarized at all. It’s perfectly balanced, harmonious even. Nico Hoerner really puts the spray in spray chart.

There’s a conspicuous lack of deep fly balls and magenta home runs here, but Horner really does spray the ball all around the ballpark. This season, he pulled the ball 34% of the time, hit it to straightaway 37% of the time, and went to the opposite field 29% of the time. That made him one of just 12 qualified players whose rates to all three fields were within 4.5 percentage points of 33.3%. However, there is one tendency that jumps out very clearly on the spray chart. Nearly all of Horner’s doubles are ripped down the left field line, and nearly all of them are fairly shallow. I was curious about that cluster of blue dots blanketing the line. How is it that Hoerner possesses a rare ability to spray the ball all over the field, but also hits so many of his extra-base hits to the exact same extreme spray angle?

Of Hoerner’s 35 doubles, 23 went to the pull side and traveled under 300 feet. Since the beginning of the Statcast era in 2015, only one player has hit more of that particular kind of double: In 2018, 24 of Nick Castellanos’s 46 doubles met the criteria. But for as long as we’ve been able to measure these things, no one has ever hit as many doubles as Hoerner while pulling such a high rate of them down the line in the form of grounders and low liners. You don’t need light-tower power to rack up this specific kind of extra-base hit. You need great contact skills, quick hands to turn on the inside pitch, and great bat control to keep the ball fair, plus enough power to sneak the ball past the third baseman. In other words, it’s tailor-made for a player like Hoerner, especially when an arm injury has sapped him of his ability to hit the ball over the outfield. Let’s watch a few of the grounders.

After watching all those, you might be wondering whether teams started positioning their third baseman deeper against Hoerner or moving them over to guard the line. Some of the defenders in those clips were playing shallow, and some were all the way back at the edge of the dirt, but overall, the answer was no. Teams didn’t cheat back or toward the line. Across the league, third basemen played at an average depth of 119 feet against right-handed batters. When Hoerner was up, they averaged 114 feet, which put him around the 21st percentile. In other words, they played him fairly shallow. I’m sure they would have loved to play back or guard the line, but they didn’t for a fairly simple reason: they couldn’t. Let’s go back to the spray chart.

Hoerner sprayed the ball everywhere. See all those singles right back up the middle? They mean that the shortstop has to respect the middle of the field. See all those singles between third and short? They mean that the third baseman can’t cheat toward the line. Hoerner’s modest superpower, the ability to hit the ball to all fields, kept defenses honest. They had no choice but to play him straight up.

Hoerner racked up all those pull-side doubles specifically because he doesn't pull the ball all the time! Third basemen definitely couldn’t prevent those doubles by playing deep either. First of all, if they did, Hoerner was likely to injure them.

Poor Matt Chapman. He was hands-down the best defensive third baseman in baseball this season, but for whatever reason, Hoerner seemed to take particular delight in tormenting him.

The second reason third baseman couldn’t play deep is that Hoerner possesses way too much speed and hits the ball on the ground way too often. According to FanGraphs, he tied for second in all of baseball with 25 infield hits. Nearly 11% of his groundballs went for hits, the eighth-highest mark in baseball. You could argue that teams should have prioritized preventing extra-base hits, but it’s clear that a whole lot of big-league infield coaches disagree with you. Teams across the league decided that playing deep, accepting some extra infield singles as the cost of preventing doubles down the line, just wasn't worth it. Oh, except for the Rangers. When the Cubs visited Texas at the very beginning of the season, the Rangers tried that strategy, playing Hoerner six feet deeper than they played the average right-handed batter. Would you like to guess how that went for them?

Hoerner would score the game-winning run three batters later. It’s not just speed that puts pressure on a defense. Defensive positioning is one of the biggest stories in baseball over the last couple of decades. In 2024, the league’s batting average on balls in play was .291, the second-lowest it’s been since 1992, and a big reason for that downturn is those little cards the fielders carry in their back pockets. They know where the batter is likely to hit the ball, and that knowledge allows them to steal would-be hits. But that knowledge can only help you so much, and it’s more helpful against some batters than others (just ask Hall of Famer former baseball player Mark Teixeira). Hoerner’s ability to hit the ball anywhere, supplemented by the speed to beat out infield hits and stretch singles into doubles, means that there is no right place to put your third baseman (or your shortstop, or second baseman). You can’t beat him with an over-shift. You can't shade him to pull. You can't play deep. You can't guard the lines. You have to defend the whole field, and even then, he’ll find the gaps.

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