Cody Bellinger Is in a Much Better Place

Cody Bellinger
Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports

The Cubs signed Cody Bellinger to a one-year deal in December, hoping that the combination of improved health and a change of scenery could help the slugger rebound from a pair of dismal seasons in the wake of injuries to both his left leg and right shoulder. Though the 27-year-old center fielder started the season slowly, he’s since heated up and just completed his most productive calendar month since his MVP-winning 2019 season. He may not beall the way back to his award-winning form, but he’s in a much better place that he was in his final years with the Dodgers.

Though he went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts in Wednesday’s 2–1 loss to the Nationals, Bellinger is hitting .291/.364/.573 with seven homers and a 149 wRC+. He finished April with a 158 wRC+, his highest for any month in the past five seasons:

Cody Bellinger’s Best Calendar Months, 2019-22
Season Tm PA AVG OBP SLG wRC+
2019 March/April 132 .431 .508 .890 247
2023 March/April 105 .297 .371 .604 158
2019 May 109 .319 .413 .585 154
2020 August 115 .255 .339 .588 143
2019 July 102 .262 .382 .560 141
2019 June 110 .272 .391 .576 140
2019 August 113 .235 .336 .582 129
2019 September/October 95 .280 .379 .512 126
2021 June 62 .260 .387 .440 125
2020 September/October 89 .267 .382 .413 122
2022 March/April 80 .205 .275 .438 100
Minimum 60 plate appearances.

You’ll note the token representation of months from the 2020–22 seasons there (to be fair there were only two from 2020 due to the pandemic); I went to 11 on the list above just to include the last of those, as they’re the only ones in which Bellinger even hit at a league average clip. On the flipside, within the same span he had five months with at least 59 PA and a 72 wRC+ or worse, and three ranging from 83–94 in terms of wRC+. At his worst, he hit an unfathomable .118/.186/.215 for an 11 wRC+ in 102 PA in July 2021.

Bellinger was a Dodger for all of those months except the just-completed one. His 10-year run in the organization, from the time he was drafted in the fourth round in 2013 out of an Arizona high school to the point when he was non-tendered last November, included some incredible high points: the 39-homer season for which he won NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2017, the 47-homer season for which he took home the NL MVP award two years later, and some outstanding defense and timely hitting during the ’20 postseason, capped by a World Series ring.

One of those timely hits precipitated Bellinger’s historic plummet. Celebrating what proved to be the decisive home run in Game 7 of the 2020 NLCS against the Braves, the exuberant Bellinger dislocated his right (non-throwing) shoulder after bashing forearms with teammate Enrique Hernández. Though he played through the World Series, he underwent arthroscopic labrum surgery in November, started slowly in spring training, and then in the fourth game of the season suffered a hairline fracture in his left fibula, knocking him out for eight weeks. Unable to find his rhythm as he recovered from both shoulder and leg issues, he hit a grim .165/.240/.302 (48 wRC+) in 350 plate appearances, though during the postseason he showed signs of life by temporarily adopting a shortened swing with lower hand placement, hitting .353/.436/.471 and putting together some tenacious plate appearances. But while he got off to a solid start last year, his season quickly went downhill just after some lunkheaded scribe suggested he might be recovering his form. Exceptional defense center field kept him in the lineup, but while endlessly tinkering with his swing, he hit just .210/.265/.389 (83 wRC+) with 1.5 WAR.

Updating the numbers from a piece Dan Szymborski wrote in late August, Bellinger experienced the steepest decline of any player who had produced a 150 wRC+ in at least 400 PA during a season in which they were 25 or younger. He fell from a 161 wRC+ in 2019, his age-22 season, to a 78 wRC+ from 2020 to ’22; that 83-point gap is 18 points larger than second-ranked Bryce Harper’s fall from 197 in 2015 to 132 from ’16 to ’18, though Harper was still a dangerous hitter. In fact, Bellinger was the only player from among the 130 in Dan’s data set who even fell below a 100 wRC+ over the ensuing three-season span.

Thanks in large part to a record-setting first-year salary in arbitration ($11.5 million for 2020), Bellinger’s paycheck quickly outstripped his production. He made $16.1 million in 2021, when he finished with -1.0 WAR, but dodged the non-tender and received a $17 million salary last year. But with the Dodgers planning a winter of cost-cutting — they would let Justin Turner, Trea Turner, Tyler Anderson, and Andrew Heaney walk without a fight — Bellinger was the first to depart.

Despite his precipitous decline, Bellinger didn’t lack for suitors once he became available, with the Blue Jays, Giants, Rockies, and Yankees among those reportedly expressing interest, and with agent Scott Boras telling The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal that he had received multiple multi-year offers. Wanting to capitalize on a potential bounceback, Bellinger chose a one-year, $17.5 million deal with the Cubs. He’s making $12.5 million this year, with a $5 million buyout on a $25 million mutual option for next year.

Bellinger went hitless in his first 12 plate appearances as a Cub before clubbing a three-run homer off the Reds’ Connor Overton on April 3. But even with a three-hit game the next day, he started just 5-for-30 without another extra-base hit and brought just a 90 wRC+ with him for his return to Dodger Stadium on April 14. He went 3-for-11 with a double and a homer in that three-game series, teaming up with Patrick Wisdom to go back-to-back off Julio Urías in a sequence that decided the rubber match. He hit two more against the Dodgers in Chicago (including another off Urías) less than a week later and, after returning from a three-day paternity leave last week (he was one of five players on the 2022 Dodgers who apparently kept busy during last year’s All-Star break), homered in back-to-back games against the Marlins.

One reason Bellinger signed with the Cubs was his familiarity with hitting coaches Dustin Kelly and Johnny Washington, with whom he worked while in the Dodgers’ system. The pair’s familiarity with his seeming endless search to remake his swing — an effort that goes back at least to 2019, as he worked to cut his strikeout rate — helped. Via The Athletic’s Sahadev Sharma and Patrick Mooney:

“A lot of it with Cody was just understanding and letting him talk about and explain what he’s felt over the past couple of years,” Kelly said. “We knew that he’d gone through a couple different swing changes and tried a number of different things. You don’t really know what that is until you actually talk to him and get in the cage and figure out some of the drills he’s done, some of the moves and feels. We didn’t want to backtrack and try a bunch of different things he’d already tried once or twice before.”

…The Cubs identified smaller things with Bellinger’s lower half, trying to get him more into his back hip and adjusting where he places his hands without overloading him with suggestions.

…“The core values of what we identified as being athletic, creating a little bit more of a hip hinge and setting a really good hand placement, has remained the same,” Kelly said.

In early March, CBS Sports’ Danny Vietti put together a side-by-side video showing four years worth of Bellinger stances and swings:

Bellinger’s feet appear to be closer together than last year, his hands still elevated but his bat less wrapped. To my eye based on having seen a whole lot of his struggles, he’s doing a better job of staying back on the ball, but beyond that, I’ll leave the detailed visual analysis to colleague Esteban Rivera if he chooses to take a swing, and instead dive into the numbers. Before that, though, let’s enjoy a few Belly Bombs.

One thing The Athletic article mentioned is Bellinger’s success in handling high fastballs thanks to his adjustments. Here’s his performance against four-seamers in the upper third of the strike zone.

Cody Bellinger vs. Four-Seamers in Upper Third of Strike Zone
Season Pitch% PA H HR AVG xBA SLG xSLG wOBA xwOBA SwStr
2017 6.3 36 10 4 .313 .226 .719 .639 .453 .391 29.9%
2018 7.2 53 10 2 .196 .156 .412 .323 .256 .210 32.4%
2019 6.7 49 13 5 .265 .280 .653 .693 .368 .394 26.7%
2020 8.8 25 3 0 .120 .130 .120 .146 .106 .121 31.8%
2021 8.8 38 6 3 .158 .178 .447 .347 .247 .221 39.7%
2022 6.3 36 5 2 .143 .152 .343 .257 .218 .190 24.0%
2023 6.9 11 4 0 .364 .283 .364 .332 .324 .268 35.3%
SOURCE: Baseball Savant

He’s still swinging and missing at the high heat a fair amount, but already Bellinger has nearly as many hits in the upper third as all of last season, and he’s making better contact. Meanwhile, when it comes to four-seamers above the strike zone, his 20.9% swinging-strike rate is a dead ringer for his 2019 rate, where he’s been at 30% or higher in each of the past three seasons.

Overall, Bellinger’s 29.7% chase rate is down 6.8 points from last year and 4.1 points from the 2020–22 period. His 9.1% swinging-strike rate is the lowest of his career, 0.4 points lower than in 2019, and down from 12.2% from 2020–22. Particularly of note given that strikeout rate starts to stabilize at 60 PA, he’s cut his strikeout rate from last year’s 27.3% to 17.8%; the 9.5-point drop is the majors’ third-largest among players with at least 400 PA last year and 90 this year, trailing only Victor Robles (-12.9%) and Jorge Mateo (-11.1%).

As for what happens when he does make contact, Bellinger’s batted ball stats are actually a mixed bag:

Cody Bellinger Batted Ball Stats
Season BBE GB/FB GB% FB% Pull% EV Barrel% HardHit%
2019 454 0.74 31.5% 42.4% 47.9% 91.1 12.6% 45.6%
2020 171 0.93 37.6% 40.6% 45.6% 89.3 9.4% 41.5%
2021 224 0.65 30.9% 47.5% 45.1% 89.3 7.1% 34.4%
2022 360 0.75 35.6% 47.2% 47.2% 89.4 8.3% 38.1%
2023 84 0.59 31.0% 52.4% 48.8% 87.8 9.5% 33.3%

Bellinger is hitting the ball in the air more often, pulling the ball more often, and barreling the ball more frequently, but his average exit velo and hard-hit rate are down relative to last year, and well below average. Where his barrel rate ranks in the 64th percentile, the exit velo is in the 36th and the hard-hit rate in the 27th.

That said, Bellinger is pulling the ball in the air more frequently and getting a tremendous amount of extra carry on those balls relative to recent years. Some of that may owe to the ever-changing baseball, but at the same time, he hasn’t even reached the warm-weather months this season:

Cody Bellinger on Pulled Fly Balls
Season Pull% Pull FB% Avg Dist PA HR SLG xSLG wOBA xwOBA
2019 47.9% 8.6% 367 39 21 2.289 1.946 1.098 .952
2020 45.6% 8.8% 349 15 9 2.400 1.581 1.187 .801
2021 45.1% 11.2% 324 25 8 1.333 .920 .642 .465
2022 47.2% 9.4% 328 34 11 1.515 .749 .782 .394
2023 48.8% 10.7% 358 9 6 2.667 1.588 1.355 .818
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
Pulled FB% = pulled fly balls per batted ball.

Driven by those fly balls, Bellinger’s Statcast expected numbers are much better than last year, though they do lag behind his actual numbers:

Cody Bellinger Statcast Expected Stats
Season AVG xBA SLG xSLG wOBA xwOBA xwOBAcon
2019 .305 .319 .629 .635 .415 .430 .488
2020 .239 .284 .455 .494 .337 .374 .413
2021 .165 .209 .302 .358 .237 .281 .344
2022 .210 .213 .389 .354 .284 .278 .348
2023 .291 .269 .573 .489 .396 .364 .389

Bellinger’s 103-point gap between his SLG and xSLG is the 12th-largest of the 271 Statcast qualifiers, and his wOBA-xwOBA gap is 22nd among the same group. His xwOBA and xwOBA on contact are both well ahead of 2021–22 but still behind even ’20, to say nothing of ’19.

In following Bellinger’s ups and downs, I’ve been burned before. When I checked in on him in late April of last year and noted positive signs of a rebound, he had produced just 41 batted balls, and his early success proved fleeting. He’s got just over double the number of batted balls now (84) and 50 more plate appearances (118 to 68) — enough so that his exit velo, barrel rate, hard-hit rate, strikeout rate and more have passed the point where the numbers start to stabilize. I’d love to be able to report that he’s recovered his MVP-winning form, because the combination of that power and athleticism made him one of the game’s most entertaining players. The data makes clear that he’s not back to that extent, however, and it’s quite possible that he never will be. Even so, it’s also clear that he’s on a much better path than in his final years with the Dodgers, and for now, that’s enough to be excited about.





Brooklyn-based Jay Jaffe is a senior writer for FanGraphs, the author of The Cooperstown Casebook (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) and the creator of the JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score) metric for Hall of Fame analysis. He founded the Futility Infielder website (2001), was a columnist for Baseball Prospectus (2005-2012) and a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated (2012-2018). He has been a recurring guest on MLB Network and a member of the BBWAA since 2011, and a Hall of Fame voter since 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jay_jaffe... and BlueSky @jayjaffe.bsky.social.

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frankenspock
10 months ago

I think he just didn’t like what the hitting coaches in LA were telling him and needed someone fresh to tell him the same thing. Because he “tinkered” with his swing every year since winning the MVP. Why would an incumbent MVP need to change his swing? Super good question. But every time he did something with it, it messed up his mechanics and every time he’d get a little hot he’d second-guess himself and “adjust”. Hopefully it sticks this time, because the swing he had when he came into the league was a thing of utter beauty.

mikejuntmember
10 months ago
Reply to  frankenspock

I think I can answer this: I watched pretty close to every Bellinger AB as a Dodger.

As you might notice from the chart Jay includes here, his MVP season was the result of a strong start – each month was weaker than the previous. Over his first 3 seasons, Cody’s hitting followed a pattern that exists for many hitters, but it was more exaggerated: He would be successful (very successful), then opponents would find a hole in scouting and exploit it and he would struggle quite a bit, and then he would adjust in some way to compensate and be very successful again. This is how all good MLB hitters work (constantly tweaking to adjust the way they’re being pitched, and pitchers constantly trying to find and exploit the weakness of what the hitter’s currently doing), but because Cody’s success was so high when he was on and his weak points so vulnerable when exploited (see: 2017 world series and the inside curveball), it was particularly important for him.

In his MVP season, this started to extend to defense. In earlier 2019, Cody ran his huge numbers because of ridiculously high pull rates, line drive rates, and consequently base hit rates on those line drives. In the 2nd half, it was quite evident how teams adapted their defenses for this – in particular, it became really noticable how teams were tweaking not only the ‘short right fielder’ in the shift, but their first baseman, to optimize the chance of catching all these low line drives for singles (and doubles) that he was hitting. So by the later part of his MVP season he was already searching for a way to adapt because he was quite a bit less successful than he had been at the beginning of the year – he wasn’t really all that different from the player who the Dodgers had turned into a platoon-only player at the 2018 trade deadline, and his MVP would have been very tightly contested if Christian Yelich hadn’t gotten hurt and missed the last 3 weeks of the season.

Bellinger has always been a particularly boom and bust player due to his batted ball profile, moreso than typical, and this has made the process where he’s hunting for the tweak needed to boom again as exploitation of his weaknesses trends him towards a bust period more obvious than many other players. But the pattern of constant adaptation to how he’s being attacked is something that pretty much all good hitters in MLB are doing – the only players who are not constantly adapting in this way are the ones who are not good enough to do so, marginal hitters who the league figures out ‘the book’ on and have that same weakness pattern exploited for their whole careers. These are often pretty marginal to league average type hitters – anyone who is good enough to be 30%+ above average is getting there via this cat and mouse game of adjustments.

cartermember
10 months ago
Reply to  mikejunt

Except Arozarena. Claims he has never researched what a pitcher throws, or watched film except Cole

mikejuntmember
10 months ago
Reply to  carter

Even guys who don’t watch film still observe information like “They keep getting me with the slider on the outside corner” and adapt to that. There’s a difference between the level of data people use, but no one good isn’t trying to adapt to how they’re being pitched. The question is whether they try and make deliberate tweaks to their stance and swing (like Bellinger) or just are able to handle it with stuff like “I need to move a couple inches in the box” or “I need to try and stay back so that I can react to that breaking ball better”

It’s all the same game, though – scouting finds a hole, pitchers try and exploit it, and the hitter either A: adapts or B: doesn’t and becomes a marginal major league hitter, punishing mistakes but always having an achilles heel that the whole league knows about and tries to exploit.

jtricheymember
10 months ago
Reply to  frankenspock

Quite honestly he is a constant tweaker no matter what. Look at that crazy April 2019 and Bellinger still made swing changes right there in the middle of an insane hot streak. It never stopped with him.