Cubs Video
Last Sunday, in the Chicago Cubs’ win over the New York Yankees, something that almost never happens on a baseball field happened. In fact, I didn’t see the game live, but when I saw this play pop up on the MLB Gameday feed, I made note to go look at the highlight later:
Did you notice it? Nico Hoerner swung and missed at a pitch right down the middle of the plate. This happens so infrequently that it almost takes my brain another second or two to process what happened. It’s like Steph Curry missing a wide-open three pointer. My brain sees him go into that shooting motion and it closes the loop for me. That ball is basically already through the hoop. I have seen it so many times. When my brain sees Nico Hoerner start to swing, it assumes the ball is going to be hit in play. This didn’t compute.
Hoerner himself even seems a bit perplexed at the result. Take a peak at him right after the strikeout, looking at his bat, examining it, potentially expecting to find a large, baseball-sized hole somewhere on it. Surely, that’s the only reasonable explanation here:
For the uninitiated, the Cubs’ second baseman has a strikeout rate of just 7.4 percent this season, according to FanGraphs. That is the second-lowest in baseball among qualified hitters, with only Luis Arraez, who is almost entirely allergic to striking out, sitting in front of him.
So, Hoerner striking out at all is rare enough. But wait, there’s more! Not only did he strike out—he did so swinging. His swinging strike rate is a minuscule 4.8 percent. That’s actually only good enough for seventh-lowest among qualified hitters. Still, the league-wide average is 10.8 percent. Of Hoerner’s 28 strikeouts this season, 17 of them were of the swinging variety.
Still, we can take this even further, because like an ogre, or an onion, this has layers (shout out my fellow Shrek fans). Not only did Hoerner strikeout on a swing and miss, he struck out on a swing and a miss in the strike zone.
Per FanGraphs, the Gold Glover leads all of baseball, Arraez included, at making contact inside the strike zone, doing so on 97.5 percent of swings. He has only swung and missed at a pitch that would have been a strike 19 times this season, according to Baseball Savant, and only one other time has he struck out on such a pitch. It looked like this:
That is hardly the same thing. For one, that pitch was almost unhittable, resulting in an emergency swing from Hoerner. Second, it was right on the edge. It might not have even been called a strike had he let it pass by.
Which brings me to my last point. Not only did Nico Hoerner strikeout, not only was it swinging, and not only was it a pitch in the strike zone. It was also on a fastball right down the middle of the plate. Nobody misses those pitches. Surely our contact king never would. That’s the most hittable pitch in baseball. This marks the first time this season he has swung and missed on such a pitch, and just the third time in his whole career he has struck out on one.
That’s the thing about Nico Hoerner. He doesn’t always make loud contact, but he almost always makes contact... except for when he doesn’t and it leaves my brain scrambling. Quite frankly, I, too, would be checking that bat for holes.
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