Michael Busch is On Time, On Target, and On a Tear

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images

The first duty of the big-league batter is to be on time for the fastball. That's the ante; that's how you demonstrate that you deserve at least a brief look in the majors. It's much easier said than done, of course, because modern pitchers throw so hard and have such devastating secondary offerings, but you can't really move on to doing anything else well until you're consistently on time for heaters in the upper 90s, with life and location.

Michael Busch produced fairly well against fastballs last year, but this season, he's taken another big step forward. Busch whiffed on 21.3% of swings against fastballs in 2024, but that figure is down to 12.3% this year. Since he crushes the heater when he makes contact with it (92.2 mph exit velocity and a 17° launch angle), that extra helping of contact on the heat goes a very long way—sometimes literally.

A more selectively aggressive approach has unlocked Busch's power this year. He's swinging at 37.4% of first pitches within at-bats, up from 32.2% last year, thereby giving pitchers no quarter if they try to sneak a strike past him. Teeing off more early in counts means pulling and lifting the ball better, but not necessarily pulling off the ball more. Indeed, though his pull rate is up significantly in 2025, he's also figured out how to use the cozy dimensions of left-center at Wrigley Field to greater advantage than he had in the past. Here's his spray chart for 2024.

Here's the same chart for 2025. Note how he's traded in a lot of outs down the left-field line (although some of those were somewhat promising line drives, and not every hitter would have recognized the need to sacrifice them for a different kind of contact) for more balls to left-center and harder, deeper flies to the pull field in right.

Always having had a discerning eye, Busch is spitting on pitches outside the zone and accepting his walks just as well this year as last year. Within the zone, on the other hand, he's much more dangerous. His contact rate within the zone is up from 79.6% to 84.4%, thanks to staying closed with his front shoulder longer and accelerating later within the hitting zone.

With a strikingly similar swing path and ideal timing zone to Pete Crow-Armstrong, Busch can feed off what Crow-Armstrong does and sees from opposing pitchers, usually batting a spot or two behind Crow-Armstrong in the lineup. He doesn't have Crow-Armstrong's bat speed—not by a longshot—but his swing is much more compact. Each of them swings with a steep tilt of the bat and tries to catch the ball while going uphill with the barrel. Each generates their best contact when they pull it in the air, which might sound obvious but isn't true of all batters. Busch's keen eye more than offsets the lack of relative bat speed, and while he and Crow-Armstrong are very different in offensive production profile, they're playing off each other wonderfully.

On a team chock-full of offensive stars—with Kyle Tucker having his customary superstar-caliber season; Crow-Armstrong enjoying a dazzling breakout; Seiya Suzuki tapping into his power for the first time since coming to the United States; and Carson Kelly hitting like Johnny Bench—Busch has the best overall numbers. It's never a good idea to evaluate a player when you know they're at a local maximum or minimum; he obviously isn't better than Tucker on a true-talent level. After the weekend he just had against the arch-rival Cardinals, though, Busch has announced himself as a legitimate slugging star.

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