Nico Hoerner’s season has been a strange one, but the latest stretch at least gave the Cubs something they haven’t had in a while: a real reason to believe the slump might be loosening its grip.
Chicago and Hoerner agreed to a six-year contract extension at the start of the 2026 season, and for a month it looked like the Cubs might have landed themselves an early MVP candidate. Then the offense fell off a cliff. Hoerner’s numbers have been stuck in neutral for months, and the odd part is that the underlying profile hasn’t changed all that much.
A look at his Baseball Savant page shows most of the same indicators he’s carried in previous seasons. In other words, the process hasn’t been wildly different. The results just stopped showing up.
One theory that’s floated around this year is that Hoerner has been pulling the ball more, supposedly at the Cubs’ urging, and that the change in approach has affected him. That idea mostly took hold because he hit four home runs in April.
But the numbers don’t support it. Hoerner is pulling the ball 34.7% of the time this season, down from 37.9% last season, and that 34.7% figure also matches his career pull rate.
The bigger issue has been the kind of frustrating drought that keeps making a hitter look worse than he actually is. Hoerner kept running into dead ends, and even when it seemed like he was starting to break out, the production disappeared again. He went hitless against the Cincinnati Reds before the All-Star break, which only reinforced how much he can swing a game when he’s locked in.
Then came the Cubs’ series against the Minnesota Twins over the weekend, and Hoerner finally put together the kind of run that changes the conversation. He went 8-for-13 over the three days, drove in five runs, and posted a wRC+ of 290. His BABIP for the series was .727, a huge number that at least suggests the ball started finding grass instead of gloves.
Contact has never been the problem. Even through the rough patch, Hoerner was still striking out just 8.1% of the time.
The issue was the lack of hits falling in. His BABIP on the season sits at .258, nearly 40 points below his career average.
If this is the start of Hoerner climbing out of a slump that has dragged on for nearly three months, it matters for more than just his own line. The Cubs need a steadier offense in the second half of the 2026 season, and Hoerner being back in the middle of that equation would be a major step. There are still other pieces needed, including Alex Bregman continuing to raise his slug, but Hoerner finding his rhythm again would give Chicago a much better chance to score runs with consistency.
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