Nick Kurtz’s Strange Encore

To start things off, here’s a riddle for you. Which of these two batting lines would you prefer?

They’re similar, no doubt. I’m pretty sure you’d pick Batter B, though. He walks a lot more and hits more line drives. He also hits the ball hard more frequently while swinging and missing less frequently. Batter A is Nick Kurtz’s spectacular 2025 season (.290/.383/.619, 170 wRC+). Batter B? Nick Kurtz’s slow start to 2026 (.244/.412/.412, 130 wRC+). Huh?

Kurtz’s early-season power outage is hard to understand. His process statistics all look phenomenal. His xwOBA is up year over year. He’s already posted a higher maximum exit velocity, and his average and 90th-percentile exit velocities are both in the top five in baseball. But they don’t play the game in a Statcast spreadsheet, and Kurtz’s results have dipped meaningfully. In 2025, he hit a homer every 13 plate appearances. This year, that number is above 30. His ISO is down from .329 to .168.

Here’s a representative home run from his rookie year:

That’s a swing designed to hit the ball with authority the other way. Opposite field god James Wood produced a .594 wOBA on balls he went the other way with last year. Aaron Judge managed a .569 mark. Kurtz checked in at .750 – and .789 when he kept the ball off the ground. Both marks were the best in the majors by more than 100 points of wOBA. Take a look at all the purple near the left field fence on his spray chart:

Opposite field power is strange. We tend to think of power as coming to the pull side. That’s because hitting the ball to the pull side generally requires getting your bat further into its swing path, further out front, when you make contact. That gives the bat more time to accelerate. If you’re looking for an example, take Alex Bregman. His pulled elevated contact comes on swings that are 1.5 mph faster on average than his opposite-field elevated contact. He also gets the ball into the air more effectively to the pull side – he hits it at dangerous angles, basically. That’s how he squeezes the maximum possible juice out of his batted balls.

Kurtz faces the same tradeoff, at least on the surface. He, too, records higher bat speeds when he pulls the ball. But if you hit the ball as hard as he does, that’s less of a problem. Kurtz is “sacrificing” two ticks of bat speed, just like Bregman, but Kurtz’s 77.3 mph mark to the opposite field is ludicrously good anyway. He hits balls to the opposite field harder than Bregman hits balls to the pull side.

You can think of Kurtz’s swing as dialed to this frequency. When commentators talk about staying back and hitting the ball to the opposite field power alley, this is what they mean. Here’s a chart from Baseball Savant showing the launch angle and exit velocity of Kurtz’s opposite-field contact:

This year, Kurtz hasn’t quite kept up that excellent oppo pop. In fact, he hasn’t hit a single home run the other way yet:

This year’s radial chart shows what’s gone wrong. Too many high fly balls, basically, and not enough pure contact:

Here’s how I think about this: It’s a small sample and anything can happen. But even with that caveat, consider this. If you ignore grounders, Kurtz had an average launch angle of 34 degrees on his opposite-field contact last year. That’s great; it’s basically the ideal home run angle. Considering how hard he swings, you can do the math. But this year, he’s hitting the ball at a 41 degree launch angle to the opposite field, and that’s a lot worse. Among balls hit with a launch angle between 40 and 42 degrees last year, and hit between 100 and 105 mph off the bat, 15% turned into homers. Among balls hit with a launch angle between 33 and 35 degrees last year, and hit between 100 and 105 mph off the bat, 48% turned into homers.

Meanwhile, more and more of Kurtz’s best contact is heading straight back up the middle. He’s absolutely tattooing the ball when he uses center field, with an average exit velocity above 97 mph, but the big part of the stadium is holding a lot of those balls in. That also explains why his Statcast x-stats haven’t moved even as his results have waned; he’s hitting more balls to center, where wOBA generally underperforms xwOBA, and fewer to the corners, where balls that don’t carry as far can still leave the park.

This problem shows up most frequently on fastballs, the pitches that Kurtz’s swing is designed to take the other way with authority. He’s slugging only .618 against four-seamers this year, down from .776 last year, and only .304 (against a previous .623) against sinkers. He’s getting the ball in the air less frequently against them, and he still swings and misses frequently. After all, his swing is ferocious. It’s just not paying the same dividends that it did in 2025.

Against sinkers, cutters, and four-seamers combined, Kurtz has added about half a run of offensive value above average per 100 fastballs seen this year. He checked in at 2.5 runs above average per 100 pitches last year, which was third in baseball, behind only Kyle Schwarber and Judge. This year, he’s ranked next to Kyle Karros and Justin Crawford, 75th out of 217. That’s some downgrade.

This might sound like a disaster scenario for Kurtz, but I see it differently. Let’s put it this way: Kurtz can’t smash fastballs right now. He’s striking out 33% of the time. His greatest superpower from last year, the ability to take the ball the other way for extra bases, has completely vanished. His contact rate is one of the lowest in baseball. Oh yeah, and he’s been 30% above average offensively while all of that has been going on.

Do you think Kurtz is going to keep flailing away helplessly against fastballs? That doesn’t feel like a smart bet to me. He’s a 6-foot-5 power monster with one of the most violent, extra-base-hunting swings in baseball. Likewise, do you think he’s going to keep swinging under balls and putting them too high in the air to the opposite field? Probably not. That kind of timing comes and goes – everyone has hot and cold streaks, after all. I can’t quite tell you what’s mechanically wrong, or even if anything is mechanically wrong. Sometimes hitters just don’t have their timing right for a while, and despite a close examination of Kurtz’s swing, I haven’t noticed much of a difference.

That’s my takeaway. Kurtz is mired in a slump right now. When one of the best fastball hitters in baseball is doing this poorly on contact, there’s no other way to put it. It’s just that his slump looks like a 130 wRC+. His slump also included a 20-game walk streak, because even though he’s not locked in at the moment, pitchers are still absolutely terrified of giving him something to hit. I’m not sure when he’ll break out of his recent run of poor results on contact. But even though his batting line is worse this year, and even though he strikes out enough to make me uncomfortable, I’m extremely encouraged by what Kurtz is doing this year. If he’s hitting like this without crushing fastballs, imagine the upside from here.

All statistics through games on May 4, 2026.