Nico Hoerner Can Catalyze Cubs Lineup, If He Gets Back to Being Who He Is

At his best, Nico Hoerner is an old-fashioned sparkplug. He can hit .300, with plenty of walks to push the on-base percentage associated with that average toward .380. He can steal bases and wreak havoc for opponents. Be it from the top of the order or as a rally-starter in the bottom half of it, Hoerner can be a dynamic offensive weapon. We know all this for sure, because he did it just last year, going .297/.377/.391 and stealing 23 bases after the 2023 All-Star break.

This season, Hoerner has not been at his best. For the season, he's hitting .256/.325/.343, with 27 extra-base hits and 20 steals in 461 plate appearances. He's just not the player who keyed the team's offensive resurgence in the second half last year; the team has had to work around his subpar contributions.

When you look at the essential numbers that inform most hitter evaluations, though, it's hard to see what's missing from Hoerner's game. To be more fair to Hoerner, let's compare his performance this year to all of last year, rather than focusing on a stretch that might have been at the outer edge of his capacity.

You can pick nits here. Hoerner is hitting the ball slightly less hard, and he's expanding his zone slightly more often. In broad strokes, though, this is the same hitter. He's sustained one of the lowest strikeout rates in baseball. Almost the whole difference between last year and this year is in his worse BABIP, and as you can see, it's not like he was clobbering the ball before and is now just hitting dribblers. What's missing, leading to a deeply damaging sag in his outcomes on balls in play?

In short: he's trying to pull the outside pitch way too much. Last year, Hoerner batted .312 and slugged .392 on pitches on the outer half of the plate. Especially in that second half, he was sensational at simply shooting the ball--sometimes on the ground, sometimes on a line toward the gap--to right field, often on pitches his opponents thought were just setting him up for later in the at-bat. This season, those numbers are .240 and .272, respectively. He's making more contact on pitches away from him, but having far, far less success.

One problem that creeps into Hoerner's game often is the quest for power. Nico Hoerner will never successfully hit for power; it's not in him. Frequently, though, feeling pressure to produce even more than he does in his most successful forms, he tries to generate that punch, and it's always bad for him. In this case, it's meant trying to get around the ball and drive it to left field, even when it's on the outer part of the plate. Here's his binned spray chart for pitches on the outer half (or off the plate away) for each of the last two seasons. It paints a clear picture.

Trying to pull and drive the outside pitch has Hoerner rolling over the ball more, so he's hitting more ground balls. He is successfully putting more of those batted balls to the outfield in left and center, but with his limited raw power, there's not much value in that. He was much harder to defend when he could attack right field, from the gap all the way to the foul line, more consistently.

Hoerner has to get back to thinking opposite field when pitchers work him away. He also has to get back to being aggressive on the bases. Last season, Hoerner attempted a steal in 13.7% of his opportunities, and in the second half, that number was 15.4%. This season, he's at just 9.8%, despite going 20-for-22 and only having been caught on two pickoffs in April. Like Pete Crow-Armstrong, it seems possible that he just can't be thrown out, on a traditional steal attempt. He should be pushing the envelope more than he is.

So much of this--so much of life, really--comes down to honest self-knowledge and self-understanding. Hoerner can be a powerful offensive force, but he has to stop trying to do it the same way Seiya Suzuki does. He's a singles hitter, but one with tremendous speed. He can have the same impact as a doubles hitter, and put up even gaudier numbers in the process. If he regains that concept of himself, he could steal another 20 bases over the next seven weeks, not least because he would be on base more. If he doesn't make that change, he'll continue to struggle, and the Cubs will have to head into the winter seriously contemplating a move that would send Hoerner elsewhere to make room for a needed offensive upgrade.