Can Kyle Tucker Break the Cubs Record for Statcast-Recorded Barrels?

[Matthew Trueblood]

Through 13 games, the Cubs' major offseason acquisition is paying off in spades. If he keeps this up, he could—fairly easily—end up having the most prolific power season by any hitter for the North Siders in the Statcast Era.

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images

I still chuckle a little bit each time I type "the Statcast Era," but there's a bit less irony in it than before. We're up to 10 full seasons over which every (or very nearly every) batted and pitched ball has been tracked by Statcast. We have 10 years of exit velocities, launch angles, spin rates and sprint speeds. Thus, there's a real era defined by this technology, rather than a few years' worth of data. We can, with a straight face, start using Statcast numbers in historical contexts.

In those aforementioned 10 years, the Cubs have only had three batters top 50 Barrels—the batted balls that blend exit velocity and launch angle in a way that yields hits most of the time and extra bases a plurality of the time—in a single season:

• Javier Báez, 2018: 56
• Kyle Schwarber, 2019: 55
• Kris Bryant, 2016: 53

That's pretty puny, honestly. The Cubs are dramatically underrepresented in that regard, league-wide. There have been 197 player-seasons of at least 50 Barrels, an average of about 20 per year throughout the game. Aaron Judge holds the record, naturally, with 106 Barrels in 2022—nearly double the highest total any Cub has posted. Judge (105), Shohei Ohtani (103) and Juan Soto (91) all had gaudy totals of them last year, too. The Cubs have not had that caliber of slugger, even in their World Series-winning peak season.

Kyle Tucker could change that, and push the highest Cubs entry on that single-season Barrels leaderboard from a tie for 111th (where Báez's best year stands) toward the top 50. Already, he's cranked 9 such batted balls this season, including one that died only at the wall Monday night, when hitting a home run was impossible. He nearly defied Wrigley's fiercest anti-offense measures; that's how impressive his power has been.

Technically, Tucker is on pace to break Judge's record for Barrels in a season. It's very safe to assume he won't maintain that torrid clip. However, the chances that he'll eclipse Báez seem to be superb. His approach changes last year and (already) this spring indicate increasing commitment to hitting for power. If he merely stays healthy, he seems like a lock to get to 65 Barrels or more. The weather at the Friendly Confines could decide whether or not he reaches milestone numbers of positive outcomes. (He would, for instance, be the first left-handed batter in over a century to hit 40 or more home runs for the Cubs.) The elements can't blunt the indicators of a great process at the plate, though, and Tucker is proving himself to be a breed of hitter the team just hasn't had since Derrek Lee's peak—and perhaps longer than that.

Statcast records will still feel strange to talk about for a while. By now, though, we should be able to take them seriously enough to acknowledge what they're saying. Right now, the numbers are saying that Tucker is on a level of power production his team hasn't enjoyed from anyone in this era—be it that of Statcast, Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer, or that of the Ricketts family's ownership. In that sense, he's a test of a kind that has never been offered to that ownership group before.

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