Nico Hoerner, Still At It

Before they fell into the turbulent wake of the white-hot Brewers, the Cubs were flirting with the best record in baseball for much of the season. You know the highlights: Pete Crow-Armstrong flies through the air and smacks homers. Kyle Tucker is a superstar making a name for himself before hitting free agency. Michael Busch is having a mini-breakout of his own. Seiya Suzuki is a consistent power threat. Dansby Swanson is a metronome in the form of a glove-first shortstop.

You can keep naming names for quite a while, in fact, before you get to the Cubs’ two longest-tenured hitters. Ian Happ debuted way back in 2017. He’s transitioned from a superutility role to the corner outfield while featuring in the middle of the lineup for nearly a decade, a first-division regular though rarely an All-Star. He’s not the focus of today’s article, though. That would be the other longest-tenured Cub, Nico Hoerner.

Hoerner got a cup of coffee at the end of the 2019 season, played a bench role in 2020, and got injured repeatedly just as he seemed to be settling in as a starter in 2021. He’s been a locked-in everyday guy ever since, at shortstop for a year and then at second after Swanson signed with the team in free agency. And between a succession of newer and more exciting Cubs debuting and the jack-of-all-trades nature of his game, Hoerner’s stardom is often overlooked. But overlooked or not, Hoerner is a star, and so I thought I’d examine his consistent excellence as he churns through yet another quietly outstanding season.

It’s fitting that the last two FanGraphs articles about Hoerner, both by Davy Andrews, are about homerless seasons and always making contact. Those two things perfectly explain the extremes of Hoerner’s game. But despite those two extremes, Hoerner’s offensive skills are in fact almost exactly average.

His career 102 wRC+ doesn’t even begin to describe it. Hoerner has never had a season with a wRC+ above 108. Starting in 2021, the first year he was a regular, he’s never had a season below a 102 wRC+. He’s been 6% above average OBP-wise in his career, while being 7% below average when it comes to slugging. His BABIP? An extremely normal .306; there’s nothing strange or seemingly unsustainable going on here.

A lot of minor league defensive wizards try to put together offensive games like Hoerner’s. Nearly all of them fail. Nick Allen, Nicky Lopez, David Fletcher, Nick Madrigal, Joey Wendle, Isiah Kiner-Falefa – some of these guys are solid players, but none of them ever managed to make the powerless, whiffless game work. Pitchers just didn’t let them; a steady diet of fastballs in the strike zone early and nasty breaking pitches from advantageous counts is just too well-oiled of a combination.

It’s very difficult to remain both choosy and contact-oriented. Fouling off tough pitches is all well and good, but if you’re in the habit of swinging defensively, the transition to chasing pitches outside the zone is both disastrous and hard to avoid. Something generally budges, whether it’s too many strikeouts or not enough walks. Those aren’t normally disqualifying issues, but for players of this general style, they’re problematic. Making this much contact generally involves sacrificing power completely; Hoerner, for example, is in the seventh percentile for bat speed and the sixth percentile for hard-hit rate. If you never draw any walks, or if you strike out too much, the math won’t add up.

For Hoerner, the balance has always held. He’s chasing about as often today as he did at the start of his career, and making contact at a spectacular rate just like always. Look at how consistent his performance is:

That cohort of contact-first middle infielders I compared him to? Their numbers mostly have the same pattern: A higher zone rate over time, a higher chase rate and lower K-BB%, a lower ISO. All of these make sense together, flowing naturally from the hitter’s limitations. But Hoerner just hasn’t done that. He’s kept his aggression almost perfectly unchanged even as he sees more strikes; he’s walking less than ever but striking out less than ever too. If pitchers want to throw him a bunch of stuff in the zone, that’s fine; he’ll put it in play. It makes sense that Hoerner almost never walks — with a career ISO of .100, the opposition should really make him put the ball in play instead of giving him a free base, so if a pitcher can find the zone against Hoerner, they will. But it also makes sense that he almost never strikes out, because he makes a ton of contact and doesn’t swing at bad pitches.

That doesn’t sound like an amazing skill set, and in truth, it’s not. It’s almost perfectly average in the aggregate. But perfectly average is great! Baseball is hard! Hoerner’s bat was always the sketchiest part of his profile as a prospect. When he gets on base, he’s a frequent and successful thief. He’s fifth in the majors in steals since 2022, and he succeeds at an 86% clip when he takes off. He’s instinctual on the basepaths and fast, too. He’s inarguably one of the best baserunners in the big leagues, year after year. And that’s not even his best skill.

Defensively, Hoerner is a rarity, a true shortstop playing second base. He’s doing so because Swanson occupies short, but there’s no question about Hoerner’s bona fides there. He was great in 2022 and has been nothing but outstanding, overqualified even, at second. The best defensive second basemen are all like that – Brice Turang, Andres Gimenez, Bryson Stott, and Marcus Semien all fit the bill. Somewhere along the line, they ceded short to a superior defender, but it was by choice rather than out of necessity. Most teams don’t have this luxury because they play their excellent shortstop defenders at, well, shortstop. Like those other four, Hoerner is superb with the glove. He’s sure-handed, rangy, and has enough arm strength to make the whole package work. Between playing a lot and playing well, he’s been the 10th-most valuable defender, period, since the start of the 2022 season. The guys in front of him? A pile of great catchers and elite shortstops.

What do you get when you combine elite defense and baserunning with an average bat? About four wins a year, as it turns out. Hoerner’s WAR has been as consistent as his wRC+. He checked in with 4.3 in 2022, 4.6 in 2023, and 3.9 in 2024. He’s on pace for 4.1 WAR in 2025. That might not sound like much – he’s never had a breakout season – but there just aren’t many players in baseball this consistently good. It might shock you to learn that Hoerner is 22nd among all hitters in WAR over the past four years, wedged between William Contreras, Ketel Marte, Corbin Carroll, and Xander Bogaerts.

It seems strange to see him that high on the list, right? It certainly does for me. When I look at the WAR leaderboards, I tend to discount the defensive specialists. The way we calculate their value is messy, and it always seems like one guy or another is spiking a BABIP-and-OAA-fueled standout season. Heck, Nicky Lopez, who I used as an unflattering comparison earlier in this article, has a 5.5-WAR season in his rearview. But Hoerner just keeps chugging along. He’s not an outlier. He’s good across the board every year, without fail. That in itself is a striking accomplishment.

Here’s another way of thinking about it: As I already mentioned, there are 21 players who have accrued more offensive WAR than Hoerner since the start of 2022. Hoerner hasn’t yet put up a five-win season, but only three of those 21 have failed to put up a six win season. The kinds of players who dot this leaderboard are generally huge stars with MVP aspirations. Hoerner has never gotten an MVP vote. Heck, he’s never even made an All-Star team.

When the Cubs take the postseason stage this October, the promotional spots will probably focus on Pete Crow-Armstrong and Kyle Tucker. Why wouldn’t they? Those guys are great, and they’re each turning in a spectacular season. Hoerner won’t get top billing; he won’t even be second on the marquee. But he’s one of the very best players in baseball, year after year, and always in the same way. So here’s to Nico Hoerner – the star you didn’t know you couldn’t see.