To start things off, here’s your riddle. Which of these two betting lines would you choose?
Mystery Batters, Selected Figures
| Batter | BB% | K% | bin % | HardHit% | SwStr% | GB/FB | LD% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Batter A | 12.9% | 30.9% | 18.3% | 50.9% | 14.2% | 0.88 | 19.1% |
| Batter B | 22.2% | 32.7% | 18.8% | 59.4% | 13.3% | 0.89 | 23.2% |
They are the same, no doubt. I’m sure you’d prefer Batter B, though. He walks a lot and hits a lot of line drives. He also hits the ball a lot while swinging and misses a bit. Batter A Nick Kurtz’s incredible 2025 season (.290/.383/.619, 170 wRC+). Bet B? Nick Kurtz’s slow start to 2026 (.244/.412/.412, 130 wRC+). Huh?
Kurtz’s early season blackout is hard to fathom. His process statistics all look amazing. His xwOBA is increasing every year. He has already posted the highest exit velocity, and his average exit velocity and 90 percent are both in the top five in baseball. But they’re not playing the game on the Statcast spreadsheet, and Kurtz’s results have dipped significantly. In 2025, he hit a homer in every 13 plate appearances. This year, that number is over 30. His ISO dropped from .329 to .168.
Here’s a home run from his rookie year:
That’s a swing designed to hit the ball with authority in a different way. Opposing pitching god James Wood produced a .594 wOBA on balls he walked differently last year. Aaron Judge managed to hit .569. Kurtz hit .750 – and .789 when he kept the ball out of the ground. Both marks were leading in the majors by over 100 wOBA points. Check out all the purple along the left field fence on his spray chart:
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The strength of the opposite field is irregular. We tend to think of power as coming from the pull side. That’s because hitting the ball on the pull side usually requires your bat to move forward in its swing path, forward, at contact. That gives the bat more time to accelerate. If you want an example, take Alex Bregman. His pulled contact comes from a swing that is 1.5 mph faster on average than his opposite-field contact. He also gets the ball out of the air very effectively on the pull side – hitting it at dangerous angles, basically. That’s how he squeezes a lot of juice from his throbbing balls.
Kurtz faces the same tradeoff, at least on the surface. He also records high speed when he catches the ball. But when you hit the ball as hard as he does, that’s not a problem. Kurtz “gives up” two ticks of bat speed, just like Bregman, but Kurtz’s mark of 77.3 mph to another pitch is impressive nonetheless. He hits balls to the opposite field more than Bregman hits balls to the pull side.
You can imagine Kurtz swinging as he was driven to this frequency. When commentators talk about sitting back and hitting the ball in the other field power alley, this is what they mean. Here’s a chart from Baseball Savant showing the launch angle and exit velocity of pitch contact against Kurtz:
This year, Kurtz hasn’t kept up that great poppo pop. In fact, he hasn’t hit a single home run yet:
This year’s radio chart shows where it went wrong. Too many fly balls, basically, and not enough pure contact:
Here’s how I think about it: 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 contact in the opposite direction last year. That’s good; basically the perfect home run angle. When you look at how hard you swing, you can do the math. But this year, he’s hitting the ball with a 41-degree launch angle to another field, and that’s terrible. 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 of Kurtz’s connections move front to center. He draws the ball perfectly when he uses center field, with an average exit velocity over 97 mph, but most of the field catches a lot of balls. That also explains why his Statcast x stats have stagnated as his results have declined; he hits more balls to center, where his wOBA often doesn’t perform as well as xwOBA expectations, and fewer to the corners, where balls don’t travel far enough to get out of the park.
This problem is seen most often on fastballs, pitches Kurtz’s swing is designed to take another direction with authority. He’s batting just .618 against four-seamers this year, down from .776 last year, and just .304 (vs. .623) against sinkers. He gets the ball in the air less against them, and still swings and doesn’t miss often. After all, his swing is brutal. It’s not just paying the same dividends it did in 2025.
Against sinkers, cutters, and four seamers combined, Kurtz has added nearly half of the offensive value per 100 fastballs seen this year. He averaged 2.5 runs per 100 pitches last year, which was third in baseball, behind only Kyle Schwarber and Judge. This year, he ranks next to Kyle Karros and Justin Crawford, 75th out of 217. That’s a bit of a letdown.
This may sound like a disaster situation for Kurtz, but I see it differently. Let’s put it this way: Kurtz can’t crush fastballs right now. He hit 33% of the time. His biggest strength from last year, the ability to take the ball the other way to get extra bases, completely disappeared. His contact rate is one of the lowest in baseball. Oh yeah, and he was 30% above average offensively while all that happened.
Do you think Kurtz will continue to play helpless against fastballs? That doesn’t sound like a smart bet to me. He’s a 6-foot-5 powerhouse with the most aggressive, over-the-top base-hunting throw in baseball. Likewise, do you think he’s going to continue to swing under balls and get them high in the air to the other field? Probably not. That kind of time comes and goes – everyone has hot and cold streaks, after all. I can’t tell you exactly what is wrong mechanically, if anything is something it’s wrong with the machine. Sometimes hitters don’t have their timing right for a while, and despite scrutinizing Kurtz’s swing, I haven’t seen much of a difference.
That’s my take. Kurtz is off a cliff right now. When one of the best fastball hitters in baseball does this badly 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 hitting streak, because even though he’s not shutout yet, hitters are still too scared to give him anything to hit. I’m not sure when he’ll come out of his recent bout of poor contact results. But even though his hitting streak has been terrible this year, and even though he’s hitting enough to make me uncomfortable, I’m very encouraged by what Kurtz is doing this year. If he hits like this without crushing fastballs, consider moving up here.
All stats for games as of May 4, 2026.
