It's Come Down to This: Cody Bellinger vs. Matt Chapman

Last week, we took a look at the ZiPS projections for the 2024 Chicago Cubs. Within that article, I had openly wondered if, based off of those projections and the current roster, Cody Bellinger was the best investment for the Cubs to be making with their remaining money this offseason.

Matt Chapman is also available, and while he had a worse 2023 season by most metrics, his expected statistics were better; he’s likely to cost less money than Bellinger; and ZiPS projected him to outperform Bellinger in 2024. With both players still on the board, and both linked to the Cubs, I thought that this comparison deserved a much deeper look.

As previously mentioned, if we look purely at what was actually produced in 2023, Bellinger would by far be the better investment, especially considering he is two years younger than Chapman.

However, if we were to look at each player’s expected stats and batted-ball metrics, courtesy of Baseball Savant, we see a completely different story:

Chapman hit the ball significantly harder and at roughly the same launch angle for the entirety of a season in which he slugged more than 100 points lower than Bellinger and hit nine fewer home runs. Does this automatically make Bellinger a bad investment, and Chapman a good one?

Sorry, but no. If things were that easy, then there’d be a whole lot less intrigue in baseball. As Cubs fans, we all know the story with Bellinger in 2023, but in case you need a refresher: Bellinger posted a career-low strikeout rate by making a whole lot more contact and shortening up with two strikes. This led to him hitting .281 with two strikes, second to only contact machine Luis Arráez.

The bad news? That .281 batting average came along with an unsustainable .387 BABIP. Did Bellinger find a new way to succeed as a hitter, or did he dink and dunk his way to a batting average that will be difficult to repeat?

The other area where Bellinger far outperformed his expected statistics is on fly balls. According to Baseball Savant, Bellinger posted a .497 wOBA on fly balls in 2023. His xwOBA, though, was just .344. That difference of .153 was the 12th-highest in all of baseball. 

One way a hitter can outperform his expected stats like this is by pulling a lot of his fly balls. Not only are fences shorter in the corners (and thus, you do not have to hit the ball as far), but almost any hitter’s power is going to be out in front of the plate, after they have generated more bat speed. 

All of that aside, even if you only account for hard-hit baseballs, hitters still perform better when they hit the ball in the air to the pull side. MLB hitters as a whole posted a 827 wRC+ in 2023 when they hit a hard fly ball (95 mph or more) to the pull side, per FanGraphs. That drops to a 271 wRC+ on hard-hit fly balls to center field, and a 337 wRC+ on hard-hit fly balls to the opposite field. 

Well, 45.5 percent of Bellinger’s hard hit fly balls were to the pull side. That was 15th in MLB among players who had at least 50 of those batted ball events. He was very good at hitting the ball in the air, hard, and to the pull side. Which brings me back to Chapman and those Baseball Savant expected stats. On fly balls in 2023, Chapman posted a .381 wOBA. His xwOBA? .547. That difference of .166 points was sixth-worst in all of baseball. 

If you have been following to this point, I have a feeling you know what is coming next. The Blue Jays’ third baseman did not pull a lot of his hard-hit fly balls. In fact, he only pulled 9.5 percent of them. Not a typo: 9.5 percent! That was the worst mark in baseball, and if you’re thinking that that sounds really bad, well that is because it is! The worst mark in 2022 was Alec Bohm at 17.3 percent. 

I had suspected, with this knowledge, that if we looked at a spray chart of all of the outs that Chapman made in 2023, that we would see a whole lot of long fly outs to center and right field. You be the judge:

I’d say we found the reason for the underperformance, or at least one of them. Has this always been an issue for Chapman? While he hasn’t ever excelled at pulling fly balls, it was never this bad: in 2022, he pulled 37 percent of his hard-hit fly balls, and in 2021 he pulled 33.3 percent of them. 

This parallel is just absolutely fascinating to me. Two players, both linked to the Cubs, and both would slot in perfectly at positions of need, with Bellinger taking over center field or Chapman taking over third base. One far overperformed his expected stats, in no small part due to pulling a lot of his fly balls. The other far underperformed them, in no small part due to pulling, somehow, almost none of his fly balls. 

Which would be the better investment for the Cubs? I know the actual production from Chapman was not great for the last two months of the season, but I would tend to think his propensity to hit his fly balls the other way is easily fixable. Matt Trueblood wrote about this back in early December. He would also cost less, and figures to be elite defensively at third base for a few more years. On the flip side, while I do think Bellinger could continue to overperform on his fly balls, I don’t think his two-strike results are sustainable, and I have less faith in him sustaining his good defense in center field as he ages.

Who's your guy? Is there another big-name free agent the Cubs should consider instead of either one? Lay it on us in the comments.