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Now a few years into the peripatetic phase of his career, Harrison Bader had a fine but forgettable 2024 campaign with the New York Mets. In 437 plate appearances, he batted .236/.284/.373, with 12 home runs and 17 stolen bases. That's as underwhelming as it sounds, even if you give him more credit than defensive metrics did last year for his defensive chops in center field.
The very fact that Bader, 30, can acquit himself in center has to count for something. The Cubs need a strong backup and potential platoon partner for Pete Crow-Armstrong, and Bader still seems able to be that guy. His numbers were disastrous against lefties in 2024, but for his career, he's a .249/.315/.461 hitter against southpaws. He's never really been a platoon guy—the 35% of his plate appearances that came against lefties in 2024 was the highest share of his career—and it's possible that the reason he's still a free agent is a belief and hope that he'll find a full-time job somewhere.
He won't. Whenever he becomes more amenable to a part-time role, you could see the Cubs pounce, because Bader would be a great fit as the fourth outfielder behind a group that includes two lefty hitters (Crow-Armstrong and Kyle Tucker) and a switch-hitter (Ian Happ) who has generally been much better against righties during his career. Bader also has some upside, yet, and should one of the starters go down for a prolonged period, he could capably handle stepping into a full-time job for a stretch. In such a scenario, the Cubs might prefer to give an extended look to one of Owen Caissie or Kevin Alcántara, but Bader would give them insurance, matchup value, and flexibility, especially in case the need for a replacement comes earlier in the season than they care to promote either of their top outfield prospects.
Right now, I'm working on a parallel plane, on a piece about the relationship between swing speed, swing acceleration (i.e., how quickly one can get the bat up to that final speed), and swing length, for Baseball Prospectus. In the process, I searched for hitters who showed the ability to generate very high swing speeds with short swings, even a handful of times, in 2024. Bader is one such player. He had five swings with a speed of at least 75 miles per hour and a swing length under 6.5 feet, showing that his bat speed hasn't yet faded in any meaningful way. Happ had the most such swings by a Cub, at seven, and that was in far more playing time than Bader got.
I also developed a way to estimate the swing acceleration we would expect based on a hitter's swing speed, and Bader was in the top quartile of the league (right next to Seiya Suzuki), with swing acceleration about 25 feet per second per second better than we would have expected based on his swing speed. He needs to make better swing decisions, but one thing I discovered is that good accelerators usually can do that, because their ability to get the bat up to speed faster lets them start a hair later without losing the ability to hit the ball hard. With good coaching, Bader is a candidate to improve substantially at the plate in 2025.
Investing in the bench makes sense for this team, because they have so much youth in their projected lineup. With Matt Shaw, Miguel Amaya, Michael Busch and Crow-Armstrong set to start most days, the team is embracing some risk that these players' development will prove the wrong kind of non-linear, and a player with a track record and a balanced skill set like Bader's can be especially helpful. It would be just one small move in what still needs to be a series of them, but the team should try to bring in Bader.
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