Cubs Video
I have written about this phenomenon before. Our brains are built to recognize patterns. Close your eyes and picture Nico Hoerner swinging at a pitch. In all likelihood, he is making contact with that pitch in your head, because almost every time he swings, he is making contact with that pitch. Except for when he doesn’t, and it leaves me very confused.
I had another one of these moments this past week while watching Chicago Cubs highlights. I didn’t get to watch any of Thursday’s win over the Rockies live because of my full-time job, however, I did get to watch the condensed game. I was happy to see that Alex Bregman hit a home run, even if something about the highlight seemed odd to me:
Bregman has found success over his career with a very flat bat path, or as it is known on Baseball Savant, swing path tilt. He typically hits home runs on pitches middle up. With a flat bat path and short swing, Bregman has an easier time getting to those pitches and driving them in the air to the pull side of the field for home runs. It’s incredibly rare to see him go down and get a ball that is that low and power it over the fence. That is usually reserved for hitters with a steeper bat path, like Mike Trout, for example.
In fact, according to Baseball Savant, that pitch was the fourth-lowest pitch he has ever hit for a home run, and two of the three examples that were lower were from 2017. That long ball was very much something we haven’t seen very often, and certainly not in more recent memory. We can see that on this chart showing every home run of Bregman’s career. That tiny little bottom right-most blue hex is where the home run against the Rockies was:
So, what does this mean going forward? The former Astro has been served a steady diet of breaking balls to this point in the season: 40.2 percent of his pitches seen have been some form of breaking ball. That is the highest mark of his career, and is up from 31.3 percent last season.
This has come at the expense of fastballs. Only 50.4 percent of the pitches he has seen have been fastballs, which is down from 57.1 percent last season, and is also the lowest mark of his career.
I assume you already know this, since you’re willingly reading an article about baseball, but just in case: When a pitcher throws a breaking ball, they typically want it to end up down in the zone. More breaking balls means more pitches down in the zone, and less pitches up and out over the plate where Bregman prefers them.
Pitchers have profited from this strategy, as Bregman is slugging just .281 on breaking balls. Using the new swing timing data at Baseball Savant, we can see that he is way early on breaking balls more often than he was in 2024, when he slugged .479 on those pitches:
In 2024, which is in orange, he was on time much more often, which is that big peak in the middle. In 2026, which is in blue, we can see a large blue section that peaks out from behind the orange on the far right. That is bad. Those are the swings where Bregman is disastrously early. This is what that looks like:
The new Cub said as much himself, telling Patrick Mooney “I am out in front on soft and late on fastballs.” This would certainly back that up.
Last week, our own Randy Holt did a deep dive on Bregman, and ultimately concluded he was being way too patient and needed to try to jump at pitches out over the plate more often. That, most certainly, is a solution to this problem. On Thursday, he simply decided to just go down and get the pitch that was thrown to him. If he wants to start doing that instead, that could also work.
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