I Know, I Know. But I’m Going To Miss Nick Madrigal Anyway.

I know that it had to be done. The Cubs are trying, in their own way, to build a contender, and non-tendering Nick Madrigal was the right thing to do. He’s 27 years old, and for every big-league home run he’s hit, he’s appeared on the injury list twice. Without an ounce of power in his bat, Madrigal needs to run a .330 batting average in order to justify a spot in the lineup, and he’s instead batted .251 over the past three seasons. In 2024, he batted just .221, while his defense and baserunning fell off a cliff as well. As Patrick Dubuque and Craig Goldstein noted on Tuesday, Madrigal hit just one ball over the fence in 2024: a ground-rule double. According to FanGraphs, he somehow racked up -0.7 WAR over just 51 games. That made him not just bad, but one of the worst players in baseball. All of this is to say that I understand the problem. I really do. Nevertheless, I reserve the right to feel sad. During his time as a Cub, Madrigal was quite simply a joy to watch, and I will miss him.

It's not just that Madrigal represents a throwback to an earlier time, although he certainly does. The 5’8” second baseman (if we're accepting his official, listed height, which is a generous indulgence) used top-of-the-scale bat-to-ball skills to run a .361 average in college. He stole 58 bases and batted leadoff (ahead of teammates Steven Kwan, Adley Rutschman, and Trevor Larnach) for a national champion Oregon State team. He racked up accolades, including Pac-12 Freshman of the Year, Pac-12 Player of the Year, All-Pac-12, and the College World Series All-Tournament Team. Although a broken wrist during his junior year seemed to deprive him of some power that he never quite got back, he went fourth overall in the draft and put up a career .319 batting average in the minor leagues. FanGraphs called him, “the best draft-eligible hitter we saw last year, a complete player with few, if any, flaws.” Through the first two seasons of his big-league career, he batted .317. And he was a gamer. When the Cubs asked him to play third base for the first time since high school—during which time he played there for exactly one inning—Madrigal didn’t miss a beat. If this were, say, 1952, Nick Madrigal would be worshipped as a god. But like I said, it’s not just that.

There are plenty of short, gritty, singles hitters out there, but something about Madrigal’s game makes him magnetic. As milquetoast as he tends to be off the field—here’s a long mic’d up segment wherein the only even slightly interesting thing he says is, “They got some bomb pancakes there. Wildberry is fire.”—he’s electric between the lines. Here’s some scouting footage of him in college. Just watch the first 20 seconds or so, and watch how fast his hands are. They’re a blur. It’s like the ball never touches his glove.

You don’t have to be a prospect hound to notice that, but just to be clear, those folks noticed it, too. “He has some of the fastest hands I’ve ever seen around the bag,” wrote Eric Longenhagen in 2020. Madrigal also seemed to have a bizarre talent for singling directly off the pitcher. That sounds like an improbable thing to be good at, but it actually makes sense for a batter whose whole game was predicated on the ability to shoot grounders and low line drives through every gap in the infield with outrageous consistency. Just watch: