The Horror! The Horror! (Of Pitching to Nick Kurtz)

You’re probably pretty good at baseball if you end up on this list:

I get it. “Doing damage when you elevate the ball” isn’t the only skill that’s necessary to be a good major league hitter. It’s not even close to the only necessary skill. On the other hand, look at that list! It goes 10 hitters deep, and they’re all great. The worst guy on that list is probably Christian Yelich, and he’s having a nice year despite dealing with his chronic case of can’t-ever-get-the-ball-off-the-ground-itis.

Psh! Who cares about wOBA? What even is wOBA? First of all, good news, here’s an article explaining it in great detail. Second, fine, let’s use a different statistic then. Here’s slugging percentage, same minimum of 100 batted balls:

The title and image have already given it away, but this is an article about Nick Kurtz, and no matter how you slice it, he ends up at the top of the league if you’re looking for power in the air. He’s second in wOBA, seventh in xwOBA, second in slugging, fifth in xSLG, seventh in average exit velocity, 10th in hard-hit rate, and eighth in barrel rate. He looks right at home on a list of giant major league hitters doing giant major league hitter things. And why wouldn’t he? After all, he’s one of the best hitters in baseball.

You heard me. Consider this a mea culpa to Kurtz, who absolutely should have been on my Top 50 Trade Value list, but got lost in the shuffle because he didn’t embark on his power-hitting binge until after I got going on the list and instead ended up as an Honorable Mention. I won’t mention it again, but I’m just getting it out here: This dude rocks and I’m totally in on him. Slide him somewhere close behind Ketel Marte. Anyway, on with the article!

Another quick look over that list of top hitters makes one thing clear: These are large men who generate huge bat speed to get to their results. Kurtz fits right in. Lower the minimums so that he qualifies, and he’s fourth in the majors in bat speed this year. He’s second in fast swing rate, the percentage of his swings that are 75 mph or harder. This isn’t rocket science. Well, it is, actually – we’re using incredibly advanced technology to measure ballistics – but “why is Nick Kurtz doing well?” is an easy enough question to answer. He swings really hard and hits the ball really hard.

Oh, you think pitchers should lean into the art of pitching and keep this guy from getting off his best swing? It doesn’t work that way. Change his timing, mess with his eye level, put him in a situation where he should be defensive? Good luck! If he swings, he’s swinging with an intent to capture extra bases, regardless of where you put the ball. Give him a sinker down? He’s made contact with 12 of them so far, and he’s batting .667 with two doubles and two homers. Get him to two strikes? First, hey, congratulations, everyone is bad with two strikes. Second, Kurtz still swings ludicrously hard with two strikes; his swing speed declines by less than a mile an hour. And when he makes contact with two strikes, he’s batting .510 and slugging 1.000. If you want to beat Kurtz, you can’t let him get his bat on the ball.

That brings me to Kurtz’s next great skill: discernment. Plenty of guys swing hard. He’s a standout even there, but still, Riley Adams, Jordan Walker, and Jhonkensy Noel are in about the same spot on the bat speed leaderboard. Jac Caglianone, a fellow top-10 draft pick from 2024, has the same bat speed – and a 29 wRC+ in his first 41 games as a big leaguer. Swing as big as you want; if you can’t make contact with the ball, no one cares. Those less-fearsome sluggers have an aggregate chase rate of 37%. Kurtz checks in at 21.9%, in the 82nd percentile for major league hitters.

That’s the Kurtz skill set: Wait for a ball in the strike zone and take the biggest imaginable hack at it. It’s a really effective skill set! It has one obvious flaw, one that he shares with many of his big-swingin’ brethren: contact. Yes, Kurtz is great at figuring out which pitches to hit. No, he doesn’t always hit them. His 70% contact rate and 79% zone contact rate are both well below average. That’s not an unworkable issue – Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge have similar numbers – but it’s definitely his weak point. His 30.3% strikeout rate is scary. The only player in baseball who chases less often and strikes out more often is Pavin Smith.

So yes, Kurtz is one of the best hitters on the planet, but as is the case with all of the elite offensive players who’ve come before him, he is going to have to make adjustments if he’s going to become a regular member of this camp. You simply can’t strike out this often and hit this well in the long run. Oh, you can be very good, but not quite as good as Kurtz has been.

What adjustment should he make? From the outside, I can only guess at what his thought process is at the plate. Even so, it seems to me that he still needs to learn how to rein his swing in at times. He hits the ball so cartoonishly hard that it would still go far if he eased off a little bit. Here’s one way of thinking about it: Most hitters have similar whiff rates with and without two strikes. You might think that’s weird, that their whiff rates should decline when they start defending the plate, but they’re not operating in a vacuum. Pitchers start throwing nastier, more chase-seeking pitches with two strikes. Across the majors, batters whiff 25.4% of the time without two strikes and 24.4% with two strikes, pretty much indistinguishable.

Kurtz is always going to come up empty more often than the average big leaguer. His non-two-strike whiff rate is 30.7%. But with two strikes, it jumps to 38.6%. He’s not doing his part to make more contact, so the nastier pitches balloon his whiff rate. That, in turn, means more strikeouts. Kurtz strikes out on 28.1% of the two-strike pitches he sees. The only player in the majors worse than that is Michael Toglia, and Toglia is two wins below replacement level this year. Major league pitchers are so good that two-strike counts come up frequently for everyone. To keep his absurd power production going, Kurtz is going to have to change what he does in those situations.

Well, I’m being a little generous there. There’s no chance Kurtz keeps hitting for this much power. He’s sporting a .609 wOBA on contact. Don’t try to make it about the park, either; he has a 178 wRC+ at home and a 180 wRC+ on the road. I don’t need to give you xStats or anything like that to tell you that this can’t continue. I can just use recent history as a guide.

The best wOBACON of the Statcast era belongs to Judge, at .566. The only other guys above .500 in any meaningful amount of time are Ohtani (.506) and Mike Trout (.504). I’m not ready to say that Kurtz is a standard deviation better than Judge as a power hitter. Let’s instead call it a really nice hot streak from an already-high true-talent level. Joey Gallo put up a .644 wOBACON one year. Judge set his full-season high of .617 last year, though he is topping that by more than 20 points this season (.639). It’s almost not worth considering the exact magnitude of how much damage Kurtz is doing on contact – he’s not going to keep doing this much, period.

If you think about it, that makes sense. Kurtz strikes out 30.3% of the time, walks only 11% of the time, and has a 179 wRC+. Shohei Ohtani strikes out 26.8% of the time, walks 13.7% of the time, and has a 164 wRC+. Kurtz is hitting for so much power that he’s more than making up for his disadvantages in strikeouts and walks. If you scale his true talent down to merely having top-shelf power instead of top-shelf-on-a-hot-streak power, the strikeouts will start to matter more. To be a truly transcendent hitter, he’ll need to figure them out.

A rookie needing to improve on something? That happens all the time. A rookie needing to improve on something, yet still posting a 179 wRC+? That’s a lot more interesting. It also gives me a chance to make more tier lists – this time for rookie performance. Here’s how I look at it: Over the past 15 years, you can break rookie performers up into several tiers. The top two tiers are the interesting ones, as you’ll see.

At the top, you’ve got the guys with no holes in their offensive performance. My archetypical recent examples here are Trout, Yordan Alvarez, and Juan Soto. They posted huge seasonal lines. They got on base. They hit a pile of homers and made enough contact to keep their strikeouts under control. They had solid plate discipline across the board, from low chase rates to high walk rates. You could look through the entirety of their rookie statistical records and find very little to dislike. The players in this group are shooting stars, guys who seem can’t-miss and probably are. It’s more about breadth of performance than raw wRC+. These guys are great and without flaws, that’s the key thing.

The next tier down? It’s certifiably elite too. This group has plenty to like but a flaw or two that will need sorting out. The flaw is almost, but not always, strikeout rate. Ohtani, Pete Alonso, Fernando Tatis Jr., Gary Sánchez, Matt Olson, Keston Hiura, and Miguel Sanó each put up a 150ish wRC+ but a scary strikeout rate. Trea Turner, Michael Harris II, and Julio Rodríguez had great rookie years with chase rate/walk rate concerns. Adley Rutschman and Jackson Merrill were amazing but with middling power output.

Below that, you get to the merely good rookie seasons that make me continue to think whatever I previously thought about the prospect. In recent years, think of Bobby Witt Jr., Wyatt Langford, and Jordan Walker. The guys in this group can go either way; they are still adjusting to the majors, and their careers still have both considerable upside and considerable risk. These are tough evaluations, the time to dig in the most.

The bottom tier of the list is just everyone else. There’s no reason these guys can’t pan out, they just haven’t yet. Maybe there are some potentially fatal flaws, maybe the upside is unclear, but writing a player off after a single season never makes sense. Certainly, though, they’ll need to do some improving to succeed long-term in the major leagues. The bottom group is the biggest, naturally; it’s really hard to succeed as a rookie against a group of grown men who have been doing this as a full-time job for years.

For me, Kurtz’s season has already landed him solidly in the second tier. He can unquestionably demolish major league pitching. Even if that always comes with a huge strikeout rate, his otherworldly power gives him a high floor. In my head, I’m picturing his season as an updated version of Alonso’s rookie campaign, with similarly huge power (Alonso set the rookie home run record) and plenty of strikeouts. If Kurtz hits his current projection for the rest of the year (125 wRC+), he’ll finish with a wRC+ in the mid-150s and a ton of great counting stats; that sounds a lot like a good Alonso season to me.

That’s not the extreme upside case, though. The extreme upside case is that he just keeps doing what he’s been doing so far, and that his Judgian batted ball quality only declines to otherworldly instead of falling way back to the pack. If you’ll notice, I didn’t include Judge’s rookie year in the tiers above. He’s something else. His rookie year had an obvious red flag – he struck out 30.7% of the time — but he also posted a 174 wRC+, the highest in AL/NL history since Joe Jackson in 1911, and set the rookie home run record that would be eclipsed by Alonso a year later. It was an off-the-charts start to a career that suggested a previously untraveled path to stardom.

That’s probably a 99th percentile outcome for Kurtz, just so we’re clear. There’s only one Aaron Judge. But Kurtz is off to the kind of start to a career that everyone should sit up and take notice of. He’s not a complete hitter yet – but he hasn’t needed to be. He’s a premium power threat with elite plate discipline. He was in college last year. The trajectory is hard to ignore. I’m very excited to watch Kurtz try to handle everything the league throws at him, and to watch teams try to grapple with the horror — yes, the horror — of his monstrous, game-altering power.

Note: All statistics current through August 2, 2025.