Kyle Tucker’s Walk Year Is Off to a Strong Start

Kyle Tucker’s final year before hitting free agency is shaping up to be a big one. Traded from the Astros to the Cubs in a blockbuster deal last December, the 28-year-old right fielder has yet to play a regular season game with his new team at Wrigley Field, yet he’s settling into his new surroundings in impressive fashion. At this writing, he’s riding a streak of homering in four consecutive games, one that has helped him to a prominent spot on the leaderboards.

Tucker went hitless in his debut for the Cubs during the Tokyo Series against the Dodgers on March 18, though in his second game, he drove in a run with a bases-loaded walk against Roki Sasaki, then added a ninth-inning double. Still, he was just 2-for-16 through the season’s first four games before going to town on the Diamondbacks’ Brandon Pfaadt on Saturday, collecting a single, a double, and a two-run homer against the freshly-extended righty in a 4-3 win. He followed that up with a three-run homer off Arizona’s Joe Mantiply in a losing cause on Sunday, then on Monday went 4-for-7 in an 18-3 rout of the A’s in their Sacramento debut, with doubles off Joey Estes and Noah Murdock, a homer off Jhonny Pereda (the team’s backup catcher), and three RBI.

Tucker kept the streak going — and sent me back to the MLB.com Film Room to redo this supercut — by homering off Luis Severino on Tuesday night; he later added another double.

Through Tuesday, Tucker is hitting .353/.450/.853 for a 252 wRC+. He leads the majors in WAR (0.9), is tied with Aaron Judge for second in homers (the Diamondbacks’ Eugenio Suárez has five), shares the lead with those two in RBI (11), and ranks third in the NL in slugging and seventh in wRC+. Particularly given his two-game head start on the field, none of that means a whole lot except that he’s among the handful of hitters putting up video game numbers during the season’s first week, but he couldn’t have asked for a better start to his walk year.

The fifth overall pick in the 2015 draft out of a Tampa high school that is also boasts Pete Alonso and Hall of Famer Wade Boggs as alums, Tucker had a rough big league audition with the Astros in 2018, but performed much better in a September 2019 return. He was a key part of six straight postseason teams, making three All-Star teams, winning a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger award, finishing as high as fifth in the AL MVP voting, and helping the Astros to three pennants, including a 2022 World Series win over the Phillies. During that run, Tucker emerged as one of the best players in the game, and one of the most consistent. From 2021–23, he averaged 30 homers, 23 steals, and 5.0 WAR while hitting for a 138 wRC+, numbers that barely moved more than a few inches in any direction — seriously, we’re talking two seasons of 30 homers and one of 29, two of 5.0 WAR and one of 4.9. His slash stats varied a bit more than those figures suggest, and he had a couple of near-misses when it came to 30-homer, 30-steal seasons (30 homers with 25 steals in 2022, 29 homers and 30 steals in ’23), but you could set your watch by that guy.

Tucker took his game to the next level during the first two months of last season before fouling a ball off his right shin on June 3. Initially diagnosed with a contusion, he later revealed he had sustained a small fracture. He lost three months to the injury, taking a bit of the shine off his .289/.408/.585 (180 wRC+) slash line, which otherwise represented career bests in all but batting average. Even while playing just 78 games and taking 339 plate appearances, he still totaled 23 homers and 4.2 WAR. As Michael Baumann noted in May, Tucker was more disciplined than ever and hitting the ball in the air more often than ever. Swinging at just 41.8% of pitches and chasing just 16.8% — rates that both represented drops of over five points from 2023 — he set a career low in swinging strike rate (7.3%) and a career high in walk rate (16.5%, a spike of 4.6 points above his previous career high). The selectivity served him well, as he also set new career highs in fly ball rate (52.4%), pulled air rate (26.2%), and barrel rate (12.7%), while falling just a few whiskers short in average exit velocity (91.1 mph). It all would have been more impressive if he could have sustained that performance over 600 or so plate appearances, but it was a potent showing nonetheless.

Particularly with Alex Bregman hitting free agency last winter, it would have made sense for the Astros to view Tucker as one of their cornerstones along with Yordan Alvarez (who’s largely confined to designated hitter) and Jose Altuve (who’s 34 and now a left fielder, having played himself off second base). Yet the team, which had previously let stars Carlos Correa and George Springer depart in free agency because of the wealth of talent in their pipeline, not only let Bregman slip away (though they did offer him six years and $156 million), they found themselves unwilling to consider paying the market rate for Tucker, perhaps spooked by the inflationary effects of Juan Soto’s contract with the Mets. So rather than work on an extension, they instead traded Tucker to the Cubs for a pair of third basemen, Isaac Paredes and Cam Smith, as well as righty Hayden Wesneski. (They didn’t do badly in that regard, as Paredes took over third base from the departed Bregman and will have two more years of club control remaining after this season, Smith transitioned to right field during spring training and is in the majors after just 32 minor league games, and Wesneski claimed the fifth starter spot.)

In December, both Tucker and Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer paid lip service to negotiating an extension (“I’m always open to talk and see where that leads,” Tucker said at the time), but if the two sides made progress towards one, news of their discussions hasn’t surfaced. Obviously, they can continue to talk, but past the point of Opening Day, the assumption is now that Tucker is playing for his big free agent payday.

What could that look like? I asked Dan Szymborski to whip up a ZiPS projection. With his typical generosity, Dan offered two of them. First, here’s one where he described the system as “a little leery of him at the moment since injury missed time predicts injury missed time”:

I’ve added Tucker’s preseason ZiPS projection and actual salary for the first line; that year is projected for him calling Wrigley Field home, while the rest of it is for a neutral park. The value for the post-2025 projection comes to an estimate of $203.6 million over 13 years, an AAV of just $15.66 million. Obviously, that AAV could be higher with a shorter deal (say, $21.8 million over nine years), but it hardly seems like one that’s going to push any contractual envelopes, post-Soto.

Here’s a second projection based on the assumption that Tucker makes 600 PA this season:

That’s not a dramatic step up, with a value of $224.4 million for 2026-38 ($17.3 million AAV) and $216.2 million over the first nine years ($24 million AAV). Particularly given that Tucker could be vying with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — who’s two years and two months younger, but defensively limited — for the title of the winter’s top free agent, that’s almost certainly shy of what he’s going to get. It’s one of the dangers of trying to do these projections a year out.

If Tucker can beat his 2025 projection, it has a ripple effect for the rest of those years, but even to get to the $300 million stratosphere — to say nothing of the recent $350 million estimate offered by The Athletic’s Tim Britton — is going to take some kind of sales job, particularly given that he’ll be heading into his age-29 season. Note that the list of outfielders with $30 million AAVs is a short one, consisting of Soto ($51 million), Judge ($40 million), Mike Trout ($35.54 million), and Mookie Betts ($30.42 million). Tucker isn’t perceived as belonging in that class of perennial MVP candidates (again, he’s never finished higher than fifth in the voting), and playing in a National League with Soto and Shohei Ohtani, he has his work cut out to join that tier, even though he does rank ninth among all position players in WAR, and fourth among outfielders behind Judge, Soto, and Betts, since the start of 2020. Of the other active $30 million-plus deals for position players, three belong to shortstops (Correa, Francisco Lindor, Corey Seager), and five to third basemen (Bregman, Nolan Arenado, Rafael Devers, Manny Machado, and Anthony Rendon). That’s it.

I don’t think it’s at all a given that Tucker gets to $300 million, and even Dan, in our informal conversation about the above projections, only suggested $270 million. Still, that’s a big jump from what’s above, probably dependent upon Tucker showing that his half-season 2024 performance was no fluke and selling himself as an MVP contender. Tucker can do a good bit of next winter’s sales job himself so long as he’s healthy, and right now, he’s really selling it.