Nico Hoerner is the Cubs' Most Dangerous Man In NLDS

[RandallPnkFloyd]

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images

In Major League Baseball's postseason, nothing happens in a vacuum. You can win individual games during the regular season on the strength of just one phase of the roster. The offense pops off to a point where pitching and defense have to merely show up. The pitching might do its job to carry a team across nine innings despite a slow day at the plate. Perhaps it's less about either, and more about what the defense is able to do to stifle an opponent. Stack enough of them and you're playing in October. Regardless of the shape it takes, it's difficult for one phase to carry a team over a particular stretch beyond the confines of an isolated nine innings. 

In the postseason, the calculus changes. Yes, those individual components can still win games, but it's a much more nuanced process in being able to stack the requisite wins that lead to a legitimate October run—and each individual win is a bigger part of such a run. The Chicago Cubs were able to bounce the San Diego Padres on the strength of their pitching and of their defense. A pair of 3-1 wins offered just enough offense to get the job done, but it was on the strength of their arms and their gloves they were able to advance into the National League Division Series. Now staring down their division rivals in Milwaukee, it's going to require some support from the other phase of the roster if the team is to progress beyond the first legitimate round of play.

That means that Nico Hoerner could very well be the most important (and most dangerous) player on the positional side of the Cubs' roster. Don't get it twisted: the Cubs have more impactful players than Hoerner. Michael Busch, Seiya Suzuki, and Pete Crow-Armstrong are among the players capable of popping at any particular moment. But in order to beat a team like the Brewers, there's a certain level of stability that's needed: stability of bat, stability of glove, stability of mindset. At a time when the vibe has the chance to become anything but, Hoerner represents a calming presence for this group. 

At some point throughout the season, there's been a stretch of poor production or a concerning trend for seemingly each player on the Cubs' roster. Such a stretch doesn't exist for Nico Hoerner: 

It's a fairly standard rolling wOBA chart for the first 300 or so plate appearances. But as you get closer to the middle of the season, there's a consistent brilliance that begins to manifest. Hoerner's full season numbers (a .297/.345/.394 line with a 7.6% strikeout rate, 6.0% walk rate, and .324 wOBA) aren't buoyed by an especially torrid stretch, in the way that Crow-Armstrong or recent opponent Fernando Tatis Jr might have been. Instead, this is a picture of consistency. 

In the months prior to September (which stands as something of a positive outlier), Hoerner never had a batting average over .295 in an individual month—but he also never had one go below .283. His on-base percentage was at its highest in July (.347) but never fell below .330. He had three separate months where it was .339. His wOBA never fell below .308, and never went above .324. Not only is it remarkably steady output, but it's quality. At the absolute worst of 2025, Hoerner was a league-average bat. His outlying performances have been well above that. 

It's consistency not only in production, but in process. His swing rate never fluctuated more than five percentage points from month to month. Nor (and perhaps this is more important) did his contact rate, where he topped out at 92.0% and sat at a season-low 87.1% back in May. It's the same story mechanically, where he's had the same amount of tilt in his swing since June, the same swing length in each month except June, and has remained within 0.5 MPH of the same efficient bat speed he started with back in March & April (68.4).

All of this leaves us with little surprise as to the quiet steadiness of Hoerner through the Cubs' first three playoff games. Hoerner has yet to notch a walk or a strikeout, but is still rolling with a .364 average through a dozen plate appearances. None of this even begins to bring his defense into the equation. But Hoerner's clear commitment to process on both sides of the ball is how you end up getting something like this in a crucial spot: 

A player this sound is an intensely dangerous player under the heat of an October spotlight. Sure, Suzuki or Busch may make more noise at the plate and Crow-Armstrong might turn a game on the bases, but it's on the strength of the steadiness of someone like Hoerner that the difference is going to be made. 

This is a Brewers team that can pitch and manage a staff effectively. Their team ERA ranked second in the league (3.59), while possessing the league's sixth-best strikeout rate (23.7%). They put balls in play, with Milwaukee hitters tied for fourth in strikeout rate (20.3%)). A player like Hoerner is exactly how you can begin to mitigate each of those factors.

It's process-oriented in a way that correlates with postseason success. There will surely be players to make a louder impact at any point, for however long this series against Milwaukee lasts, but it's hard to imagine a presence of more sustained importance than Nico Hoerner in the 2025 NLDS.

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