Why (and How) Chicago Cubs Trade Bat Speed for Efficiency at the Plate

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Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images

There's an old (probably overused) adage in the world of golf: drive for show, putt for dough. It speaks to the idea that sheer power will take you only so far. It's the efficiency on the backend that'll make the difference in matters of actually winning. It's not a like-for-like comparison with the world of baseball, but the 2025 Chicago Cubs are applying their own spin to the idea.

After all, the Cubs are scoring more runs than just about everyone in Major League Baseball. Only the Los Angeles Dodgers have scored more than the Cubs' 349 runs, and nobody has a better run differential than their +102. They're a top-five team in terms of power (81 home runs, .186 ISO), too. Notably—and impressively—they're doing this without a ton of bat speed in the mix. 

A look at the bat speed leaderboard reveals a lot of what you would expect. On a team level, the New York Yankees are atop the heap (72.7 MPH average). Individuals sitting at or near the top include Oneil Cruz, Kyle Schwarber, and Aaron Judge. Again, nothing surprising. But when you're sorting through the leaderboard, what you won't find is a ton of involvement remotely near the top, on the part of this Cubs lineup. 

The fastest average bat speed by a qualifying Cubs hitter is Seiya Suzuki's, at 73.0 MPH. He's 70th. One must proceed even further to find Kyle Tucker, at 97th (72.2), before Ian Happ at 105th (72.0). The rest of the team's regulars include Pete Crow-Armstrong at 115th (71.8), Dansby Swanson at 152nd (70.8), Michael Busch at 182nd (69.7), and Nico Hoerner at 205th (68.2). If we wanted to change the perspective to include Carson Kelly, he'd be 186th of those with at least 200 swings. 

Given that, it's no surprise that the bat speed distribution (on a team level) looks as follows: 

The Cubs are effectively tied with the Cincinnati Reds for the lowest average bat speed among all 30 major-league clubs. Their rate of "fast" swings (over 75 MPH) is ahead of only those same Reds (15.2%). They're also ahead only of the Miami Marlins in swing length (7.2 feet). So it's a group with slow, short swings. And it's working.

The y-axis of the above graph is the squared-up rate per swing. There, the Cubs rank fourth. They're also 11th in rate of competitive swings (90.4%) and just 23rd in swords (i.e. non-competitive swings), both no doubt a byproduct of the other data we're looking at here. Which is, quite obviously, the point. 

As a team, the Cubs feature a swing rate of just 47.0%, which ranks 17th. They're chasing at the league's fifth-lowest rate (26.3%), but swinging inside the zone at the seventh-highest clip (65.8%). As a result of their approach and their trends when actually swinging, only the Toronto Blue Jays feature a higher contact rate than the Cubs' collective 79.2%. When they do swing outside the zone, they're making contact at the fifth-best rate (58.5%) while making contact within the zone at a rate of 86.8 (which ranks ninth, but is less than one percentage point behind the league-leading Kansas City Royals). 

Although the Cubs are very much a middle-of-the-road squad in terms of hitting the ball hard (39.9% of their batted balls), they rank eighth in Barrel rate (9.8%). That, dear reader, is the point of all of this.

Swing speed is, generally, a good thing. You can compensate for some things and generate a certain level of run production based on the speed and violence of a swing alone. But it's inefficient. As an example, the Yankees, for all the power they may feature, are also just 26th in contact rate and, subsequently, 27 runs behind the Cubs (with only one fewer game played) on the leaderboard. The Cubs have designed an approach that thrives on efficiency.

They're making contact on the barrel of the bat. When you do that, good things tend to happen. It guides you through the wildly free-swinging Pete Crow-Armstrong experience at the plate or those months when Dansby Swanson swings at every single fastball he can find. It's a tradeoff, but one that is extremely worthwhile. No team in baseball has more accurate bats than the Cubs'.

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