Cubs Have Some Elite Bat Speed, PCA Elite in Center Field, Elite Injury Rates, and Other Cubs Bullets

May 13, 2024

We had a very nice Mother’s Day with the kids, who were very kind to her and each other, and sometimes that’s all you’re looking for. They got a good mom.

Starting in 2024, Statcast has begun tracking bat speed, which had previously been either proprietary data or pure anecdotal observation. For example, we knew just watching that Christopher Morel had incredible bat speed, but we couldn’t say precisely how fast he was swinging it or how fast it was relative to the rest of the league.

Now we can:

hi hello

your 2024 bat speed leaders entering today pic.twitter.com/qnR3gvpwg4
— Sarah Langs (@SlangsOnSports) May 13, 2024

That all tracks, right? A not-so-secret bit of physics: the guys who hit the shit out of the ball are also going to be the guys who swing the bat really fast! And the fact that Giancarlo Stanton is not just at the top, he’s BLOWING AWAY everyone else, well, yeah. That’s how he hits those impossible home runs. (Note that you have to actually make good contact with the ball for any of this to matter, of course.)

As far as the Cubs go, it’s crazy that Alexander Canario is ON TOP of Christopher Morel, but everyone else more or less looks like about what I would expect (right down to Seiya Suzuki having the most “squared up” swings, just ahead of Nico Hoerner and Cody Bellinger). There is maybe one exception that stands out, and I’ll see if you have the same reaction I do:

Some of the new bat-tracking data at Statcast, which shows you the relative swing speeds of the Cubs with at least 10 swings this year (Canario and Morel are both near the very top of the league). https://t.co/KrlmFGBiyx pic.twitter.com/J6z8v6GiRJ— Bleacher Nation (@BleacherNation) May 13, 2024

The one that stands out to me? Michael Busch. I did not have a sense that he was so much like Cody Bellinger, in terms of the swing speed (slower, even, but with a shorter swing). I don’t know what to make of that for now, but probably nothing. I will note that swing speed generally doesn’t improve as a guy ages, so to stay productive, your game either has to evolve in other ways, or not be wholly reliant on swing speed (like Bellinger).

I wonder if part of this is that some guys have significant variability in their swing speeds, adjusting for situation? That’s in the data KIND OF there in the “fast swing rate” stat, but you’d really want to know how much certain guys really throttle up and really throttle down. Like, eyeball Mike Tauchman’s numbers and you see the profile of a guy who very rarely takes out-of-his-shoes swings, but when he does, a whole lot of those swings, relatively speaking, turn into “blasts” (basically Statcast’s way of saying great contact that comes on a swing that was at least 75 mph). It means not a lot of blasts overall, but it’s kinda like he’s just really picking his spots – and we know his eye is good, and a lot of his non-blast contact leads to other kinds of hits. Anyway, there’s a lot to digest here. New stuff is fun.

Pete Crow-Armstrong has started 14 games in center field, and he’s already accumulated 5 DRS (h/t Matt Clapp). You can’t ACTUALLY project it out like this, but if you wanted to have fun, you say that’s a 55 DRS pace, which is comical. In the last 22 years (looks like that’s when DRS started logging), there has been ONE season that was above 40(!) DRS, and that was Andrelton Simmons at his peak. Kevin Kiermaier’s best season in center field, if you were curious, was a 38 DRS. Again, you can’t project out with advanced stats like this, but you CAN say that the metric believes PCA has been hilariously, stupidly, ridiculously good in center field this year.

Just for fun memories, two Cubs season show up on the leaderboard, too: Javy Báez was at 31 DRS in 2019, and Darwin Barney was at 28 DRS in 2012.

The Cubs’ extreme injury issues this year are not just in your head:

Trying to contextualize the volume of injuries the Cubs have faced six weeks and 39 games into the season, there are only two comparable years, according to team historian Ed Hartig:

2021 (13th player to IL at 44th game) & 2022 (13th to IL at 29th game). Data goes back to 1960 https://t.co/Pyg5vpmLJx— Meghan Montemurro (@M_Montemurro) May 11, 2024

So, that’s just three times in the last 64 years that the Cubs have have had this many injuries. Of course, it’s REALLY interesting that all three of those season took place in the last four years. I think that suggests maybe a little different philosophy about the IL in the Jed Hoyer Era, at least as part of the explanation, right?

Some pre-start reading at FanGraphs on Shota Imanaga, and how he’s having so much success with the fastball and the splitter. The short versions will not surprise you, as you already kinda knew: the fastball is just really extreme and weird, and he locates the splitter exceptionally well. The Braves’ lineup, at home, will present quite a challenge, though, because if either pitch is off a little bit, they are the ones that can get sent a long way.

OUCH, this looked bad:

Jung Hoo Lee exited today's game after appearing to injure himself on a collision with the center field wall pic.twitter.com/ocXon6JI8F— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) May 12, 2024

After the game, the Giants said it was a dislocated shoulder for Jung-Hoo Lee, who’ll get an MRI to determine the extent of the damage. Lee, 25, was a star in Korea and was a surprisingly enormous signing this offseason (six years, $113 million), so losing him for a significant period of time would be a big early-season blow to the Giant’s Wild Card hopes.

When you watch this at first, you kinda think maybe the pitch just REALLY sawed off the bat. But that’s not what happened:

The weirdest foul ball you'll ever see! 😳 pic.twitter.com/YcKJpVkoRY
— Cut4 (@Cut4) May 12, 2024

The bat snapped BEFORE the pitch even got there, and a tiny bit of the barrel clipped the ball as it flew off. Thus, an extremely weird foul ball.

written by

Brett Taylor

Brett Taylor is the Lead Cubs Writer at Bleacher Nation, and you can find him on Twitter at @BleacherNation and on LinkedIn here. Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Chicago Cubs. Later growing to incorporate coverage of other Chicago sports, Bleacher Nation is now one of the largest regional sports blogs on the web.

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