Chicago Cubs emphasis for 2021: Making contact

Jed Hoyer appears to restyling the Chicago Cubs to be more contact-friendly, both offensively and on the mound

With Jed Hoyer now in sole command, the Chicago Cubs appear to be going seriously retrograde.

The Cubs, who in recent seasons have emphasized power (at the expense of contact) on offense and strikeouts in their rotation, are adopting an old-school approach entering 2021.

Kyle Schwarber, with a career .40 slugging average but a 28 percent non-contact rate, has been jettisoned. Rumors continue to swirl around the future of shortstop Javier Baez’s .473 slugging average and 28 percent whiff rate.

On the mound, Hoyer has already traded 95.9 cutter and career 30 percent strikeout rate while allowing the 2020 rotation’s second and third fastest heaters, Tyler Chatwood and Jon Lester, to depart.

What’s left is a rotation straight out of the 1980s. The only projected starter possessing even a 90 mph heater is rookie Adbert Alzolay, and the evidence on him is based on just 87 plate appearances last season.

The lead mound horses at  this stage are holdovers Kyle Hendricks and Alec Mills along with Zach Davies, who came over from San Diego in the Darvish deal.   As a group, they’d fit with slow pitch softball.

Mills is the hardest thrower of the three with an 89.9 mph average heater. But none of them ranked among the top 350 in fastball velocity last season. The changes mean that Chicago may be the first team in years to start the season with a staff average fastball velocity under 90 mph.

From that velocity standpoint, it also projects to be substantially the least intimidating rotation in the NL Central. Here is the average projected fastball velocity for NL Central rotations:

• Reds                      93.78
• Brewers               93.48
• Pirates                  93.30
• Cardinals              91.86
• Cubs                      88.53

In an era when teams believe in no-contact pitchers, Hoyer appears to be placing his faith on his team’s defense. Probably because Cubs arms largely throw soft-toss, opponents contact rates are unusually high. Here’s the average contact rate for projected NL Central rotations based on 2020 performance.

• Cubs                      74%
• Cardinals              70%
• Reds                      66%
• Pirates                  62%
• Brewers               62%

Partly because they don’t throw hard, the projected Cubs starters are likely to also use their fastballs less than any other team in their division. In 2020, projected Cubs starters threw their most-often used variation of the heater only about 27 percent of the time. The comparables for their division rivals were: Reds 46.74, Cardinals 39.98, Brewers 39.94, and Pirates 39.74

How much this trend toward putting the ball in play extends to the offense is not yet clear in large part because Hoyer has not yet filled in some of the offensive blanks. The only pickup of any significance to date is Phil Ervin, likely a backup outfielder.

The departures of Schwarber and catcher Victor Caratini will open up playing time for a couple of somebodies, possibly including Miguel Amaya. Projected as the backup catcher, Amaya spent 2019 at High A Carolina, where he struck out 69 times in 410 plate appearances. That’s a 17 percent no-contact rate.

The Cubs certainly need to improve their contact ability. In 2020, more than one in four Cub plate appearances resulted in a whiff. That was the second highest no-contact rate in the NL, far worse than the 20.3 percent league average.

That was a main reason why the Chciago Cubs offense averaged just 4.42 runs per game, 10th in the league. What saved them in their run to the NL Central title was the extraordinary coincidence that their four division rivals held up the 12th through 15th spots in NL run production.

Hoyer cannot count on that happening again in 2021.