The Newest Statcast Leaderboard Should Boost Your Confidence in Kyle Tucker's Fit with Cubs

[Matthew Trueblood]

Many worry about how much power the Cubs' newest slugger can generate, without the cozy dimensions in each corner that he enjoyed in Houston. Let's assuage those worries.

Image courtesy of © Thomas Shea-Imagn Images

Every month or so, Baseball Savant rolls out something new and fun—another set of interesting data, or a new way to break down what was already available. This week, it's a new Batted Ball Profile leaderboard, which shows how each hitter's array of batted balls breaks down, not just by trajectory or direction, but by trajectory and direction. For instance, to no one's surprise, the hitter (of 288 qualifiers) for whom pulling the ball in the air made up the largest share of all his contact last year was Isaac Paredes.

The Cubs, of course, traded for Paredes in July—then turned around and dealt him in December. That's despite the fact that, as offensive skills go, pulling the ball in the air consistently is an awfully valuable one—especially for a right-handed batter at Wrigley Field, where the ball carries much better to left field and the dimensions are subtly but importantly more hitter-friendly in that direction. Pulling it in the air often is the most reliable way to hit for power consistently, if you have any meaningful amount of power in the first place. Hitting to left at Wrigley is also valuable, in and of itself. 

If, instead of Pull Air%, you sort this leaderboard by Straight Air% (the share of all batted balls by a hitter that were in the air to center field), you get another Cub atop the leaderboard: Seiya Suzuki, at 32.0%, with no one else topping 30.0%. This is a slightly unfortunate fact, because although hitting the ball hard in the air is always valuable, doing it too much to the big part of the park limits one's ability to clear fences. This is why Suzuki has 80 career doubles and 14 triples, but just 55 home runs, despite plenty of raw power to hit 25 or 30 homers in a season. Like his issues with the sun in the outfield, it wasn't nearly as much of an issue when he played in Hiroshima, where the orientation of the park and the prevailing wind patterns meant the wind was almost always blowing out, so he hit more homers there. Now, though, it makes him more of a gap power guy than his build, his swing, or his exit velocities would suggest.

You didn't come here to have your confidence in Suzuki vaguely and slightly downgraded, though. Let's slide over one more column on the Savant page, and sort all qualifying 2024 batters by the share of their contact that was hit in the air to the opposite field. Why, look here! It's another (now-)Cub, and the very one for whom Paredes was dealt.

Firstly, note that these are mostly not guys who also lift the ball well to their pull field. They tend, in fact, to be guys who don't lift the ball a whole lot overall, and those who do (Taylor Ward, for instance) mostly would benefit quite a bit from finding a way to do it to the pull side much more often. A few of these guys (Edouard Julien, who takes a very patient approach, like Suzuki, which will often mean a deeper contact point and less proclivity to pull one's best-struck balls; Gleyber Torres and, ahem, Mike Tauchman, whose home parks were much more favorable to fly balls to their opposite field than to their pull field) might have been doing this consciously, but usually, you want to pull fly balls.

Well, Tucker does so, at an above-average rate. It's just that he also lifts the ball to the opposite field at a rate no one else in baseball tops. The only other players with even 23% of their batted balls being in the air to the opposite field and 20% in the air to the pull side last year were Alex Bregman and Davis Schneider—and neither came close to Tucker, really, in either column.

Now, we should avoid extrapolating too much, here. Tucker missed half the season, so his sample was smaller than many of the others on the list of qualifiers. If you zoom out and look at the last two, three, or four years, he does still rate as above-average at hitting it in the air to both the pull and opposite fields, but as you'd expect, it looks less extreme. Still, we know he made concrete adjustments last year, and if he maintains them, that flat, shallow wall in left-center at Wrigley Field is going to be very, very friendly to him in 2025.

Let's take a moment to review one more thing. If you're a left-handed batter who wants to hit for a good average on balls in play, one key thing to avoid is pulling ground balls. Even in the age of the ban on infield shifts, pulled grounders by a lefty are outs a huge majority of the time; it's a short throw from that side of the diamond to first base. It's notable, then, that Tucker had the 11th-lowest share of his batted balls be pulled grounders last year. Of lefty batters, only Steven Kwan, Parker Meadows and Sal Frelick had lower pulled grounder rates—not because Tucker hits many grounders up the middle or the other way, but because he hits it on the ground so rarely, in general.

We've seen a lot of lazy fly outs from Tucker this spring. When he's not going well, that will happen, and it will be frustrating. It's better than either of the alternatives when a player is struggling, though: better than whiffing when he's off, because that tends to signal less overall hitting acumen and strikeouts can't turn into hits even on windy or sunny days; and better than hitting grounders when he's off, because that would mean that when he's on, he only hits line drives. Tucker is an air-ball specialist. When he's right, he's going to hit for lots of power, and because his profile fits Wrigley Field so well—much better, for instance, than Suzuki's does—that will include a bunch of home runs. He's dangerous, to all fields, which is a wonderful thing for a hitter to be.

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