Nico Hoerner Pulls off One of the Oldest Tricks in the Book

When the Cubs signed Nico Hoerner to a six-year contract extension on Opening Day, they knew exactly what they were getting. You see, Hoerner has been remarkably consistent throughout his career; over his four full seasons in the majors, his wRC+ has had a peak of 109 and a low of 102, to go along with sterling defensive metrics. His seasonal WAR marks during that four-year span have ranged from 3.8 to 4.8. The only reason why this isn’t a five-season sample is because, in 2021, three separate IL stints curtailed his campaign to just 44 games. In those 44 games, though, he put up a 106 wRC+ and 1.6 WAR.

However, the Nico Hoerner that has showed up to play this year isn’t the same as before. He’s still playing excellent defense at an up-the-middle position, but he’s also rocking a .320/.393/.515 slash line (a 156 wRC+) with four home runs, meaning that in just 24 games, he’s already nearly halfway to his career high of 10, set back in 2022. Last week, he racked up nine hits, two home runs, and two stolen bases to earn NL Player of the Week honors. It’s still early in the season, but there are enough underlying changes in Hoerner’s performance that it’s worth digging into how he’s been able to power up this year.

To review, here’s a short description of Hoerner’s offensive profile from Ben Clemens’ writeup of the extension:

His offensive game is most notable for its lack of extremes. He doesn’t walk much. He doesn’t strike out much. He doesn’t hit for a ton of power. He’s not excessively swing happy like so many contact hitters. He doesn’t pound the ball into the ground, but he equally doesn’t sell out to lift and pull.

That description from just a few months ago looks slightly different in almost every way now. The changes are small, but they all add up to a player who is hitting better than ever.

Let’s start with the power, since that’s diverged the most from his established norms. He’s never really been the kind of batter who punishes pitches; his short, quick swing allows him to make a ton of contact, but without much authority behind it. That’s no different this year. In fact, his hard-hit rate has fallen slightly, down to 26.4%. So how has he produced so much pop without much hard contact? He’s pulled off one of the oldest tricks in the book: He’s pulling the ball in the air more often.

With a short stroke that doesn’t have a lot of oomph behind it, Hoerner’s approach has long been to spray the ball to all fields. That’s allowed him to be a consistently above-average hitter, even if it has cost him some power production; case in point, he has exactly one opposite-field home run in the big leagues. His limited power, then, has always come from pulling the ball in the air. If he could adjust his approach slightly to lift and pull a little more frequently, he could do a bit more damage while mostly remaining the same player.

That’s the thinking behind what we’re seeing so far this season, though this little power-up actually dates back to the second half of last year. His Pull AIR% was 24.5% last September, helping him produce a .133 ISO and a 138 wRC+ that month.

Hoerner has continued on this trajectory in 2026. His 33.3% groundball rate over the first month of this season is lower than ever, and by a pretty wide margin. Previously, his lowest monthly groundball rate was 39.1%, in August 2024; that corresponded with a 20.7% Pull AIR%, which at the time was his highest in any month. The results didn’t quite follow (103 wRC+), but he was still lifting and pulling some the following month (18.2% Pull AIR%), when he ran a 144 wRC+, his second highest in any month, behind his current mark of 156. The big difference, then, seems to be the extent to which he is now lifting and pulling. He’d dabbled with it in the past, but never this much and it never quite stuck. That his two highest Pull AIR% months have come consecutively, and with an offseason between them, reflects a greater commitment to this approach and suggests that this new version of Hoerner might be sustainable.

Matt Trueblood wrote a more in depth analysis of Hoerner’s batted ball changes on Wednesday. Here’s his summary of Hoerner’s new approach:

[Hoerner] locked into a new approach that, without sacrificing the ability to go the other way or to make good swing decisions and draw the occasional walk, produced many more line drives to left field. It boosted his batting average more than his isolated power, but once you’re pulling the ball in the air a bit more, power increases almost on its own.

While pulled contact in the air is the result of Hoerner’s change in approach, I wanted to dig a little deeper into the genesis of that shift through his plate discipline metrics. He has always had a good idea of what to do at the plate, but it looks like he’s made an adjustment that allows him to access that limited power a little more often. His overall swing rate is at a career low this year, at just 43.0%; interestingly, most of those lost swings have come on pitches in the zone. His in-zone swing rate is down 9.1 percentage points from where it was last year. When he does swing at pitches in the zone, he’s making contact on nearly every swing; his Z-Contact% is currently 98.0%, the third-highest mark in baseball. Put simply, it looks like Hoerner is swinging a little more selectively, limiting his hacks to the pitches he knows he can handle.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Hoerner’s Swing% heatmap, with 2022–25 on the left and ‘26 on the right:

A lot more of his in-zone swings are coming on pitches on the inner and upper half of the plate this year — the same pitches you’d expect to see him swing at if he wanted to pull and elevate his batted ball contact more often.

Using Robert Orr’s SEAGER plate discipline metric, Hoerner has improved from 6.4 last year to 10.1 this year. That metric measures how aggressive a batter is at swinging at hittable pitches while also taking pitches that are more difficult to handle. A 10.1 doesn’t land Hoerner anywhere near the top of that leaderboard — he ranks 112th out of 243 batters — but it is an improvement for him, and I think it explains some of his power gains. When he sees a pitch he can pull on the inner half of the plate, he’s swinging aggressively and putting it in the air.

The other knock-on effect of this change in approach is a slightly higher walk rate. Being more selective on in-zone pitches has increased the number of strikes called against him, but he’s also been more willing to spit on pitches just out of the zone, which has led to more walks. On pitches in the Statcast-defined Chase zone, his swing rate has dropped from 28.0% in 2025 to 20.7% this year, and he hasn’t swung at a pitch located out of the zone in any of the three-ball counts he’s been in this year. In fact, in three-ball counts, his swing rate is way down at 26.1%, well below his career norms. Now, that kind of approach in three-ball counts isn’t going to last through the whole season, but I think it shows how he’s honed what he’s looking for in a plate appearance.

We’re less than a month into the season, so it’s certainly possible that this is just a hot streak for Hoerner. If we look back across the last four years, Hoerner has had 20-game stretches with similar power output, though this month is certainly the highest his ISO has ever been.

What makes this hot streak different is that he’s doing all the right things to make this small increase in power stick. He’s selectively swinging at pitches he can handle, allowing him to pull more balls in the air. If he can keep this up through the entire year, he’ll blow past his career-high 4.8 WAR from last season. In fact, he’s currently pacing to double that total. That surely won’t happen; he’s bound for some regression. Even so, if these changes are sustainable, and it appears they are, Hoerner could be establishing a new, higher baseline for his signature consistency. That would be far more than the Cubs bargained for when they extended him.