After an Inexplicable Crater of a Season, is Brandon Drury a Rebound Candidate on a Dirt-Cheap Deal?

[Matthew Trueblood]

In 2022 and 2023, the versatile, powerful infielder batted .262/.313/.495 and swatted 54 home runs. He won a Silver Slugger Award. Then, in 2024, he was the worst hitter in baseball.

Image courtesy of © Gary A. Vasquez-Imagn Images

Ok, technically, 86 big-league batters came to the plate at least once and ended up with a worse OPS than the one Brandon Drury posted in bis age-31 season. Drury hit .169/.242/.228 in 360 plate appearances, though. The closest player to having that much playing time with that bad a batting line was Tim Anderson, who only got 241 trips to the plate. Drury went from being a plus slugger and avid lover of the dinger to utterly lost in record time. It's hard to make a strong case that the Cubs should have any interest in him.

Yet, the case is there to be made, assuming that the still-far-fetched Alex Bregman opportunity never materializes. Drury is versatile, in his way. He's a right-handed batter, and thus a good fit as a platoon partner for Michael Busch, should that need emerge. He's played plenty of second and third, and not (as is true of Ty France) only in the semi-distant past; he can legitimately handle those positions. His offensive showing in 2024 was also not nearly as bad (or, rather, as ominous) as it looked. He did fail to produce anything, but his whiff rate didn't spike, and neither did his chase rate. He hit the ball hard less often and hit it on the ground much more often, but he still showed the same ability to lock in and blast the ball when he did catch the barrel.

We only have swing speed data in the public sphere for 2024, so we can't contextualize Drury's by comparing it to what he was doing in previous years, but he was above-average in swing speed, and he got faster as the season went along. 

Nor was Drury mishitting everything; he just didn't tap into the full potential exit velocity created by an efficient collision between bat and ball. That, presumably, is what he used to do so well, and it went missing for him in 2024—but he can still make mid-range contact fairly consistently.

The above does suggest a problem, because the bimodal distribution you see there for the whole league is the one you see from most individuals, too. It reflects the fact that most hitters have two gears, and thus, can handle multiple pitch types and cover the whole zone. Drury lost that capacity in 2024.

Does that mean that he won't recapture it. though? Again, we might guess that this augurs badly for his future, because he's reaching the very age where the minimal available data (brought to us by the Guardian of Statcast, Tom Tango) suggests that the aging curve tilts dangerously downward for bat speed. But Drury was still on the right side of average, and we'll need more time to tell whether hitters who reach his age tend to lose their ability to square up multiple pitch types, specifically. 

With Drury, we also have the confounding factor of a hamstring strain that sidelined him early in the season and appeared to derail his whole campaign. That's not the kind of injury that can rightfully be called a season-ruiner, so it's up to Drury to prove it if that was the underlying cause. Still, despite the hideous topline numbers, the fundamentals of Drury's movement don't seem terminally compromised. The solid bat speed and lack of catastrophic whiff rates argues powerfully that he has rebound potential.

He was so bad, though, and is at such a delicate age that Drury will surely sign a split contract, or a straight-up minor-league deal. If the Cubs end up going a fairly expensive route to round out their pitching staff (like, say, signing a free-agent reliever but then also trading from their minor-league position-player depth to make a pricey upgrade to the starting rotation), Drury might be the perfect bench bat to add, because he would cost them none of their precious remaining financial wiggle room and might not even require a 40-man roster spot right away.

This is a bit of a poor man's Yoán Moncada situation. Signing a player coming off a seemingly irredeemably bad season is simply a risk some teams have to be willing to take, accepting the low, low cost of doing so as the compensation for not getting any real certainty in the bargain. Even the under-the-hood numbers on Drury aren't good. They're merely decent, as opposed to his atrocious results. Signing him would be a dice-roll on fixing the broken dude, and while that's not sexy in this highly analytical era, it can be one way to find solid value.

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[G.Krisch]

Drury has been worth 2.0 WAR in 10 seasons, when 2.0 is the measure for a starter. For one season. He was -2.0 WAR last year. No. Avoid like the plague.

[D.J.]

Not worth the roster spot at any price

[Development DL]

Without Trying to claim victim status .  My wife and I have had some health issues we are working  through . ( older by the day lol  )    Matt Trueblood and his Socratic style , data driven essays , hit ,  like when I weekly , looked  forward to my Sporting News arrival as a youth . 

 

 

 

 

it’s not the promise of a perfect solution . But the contextual what if’s , that are so creative and fun   
 

I put you above the Athletic , which I enjoy also .  Thanks and please keep them coming .