In his last 21 games, Cubs star Kyle Tucker has looked a lot less like Kyle Tucker than Cubs fans have come to expect in his brief tenure with the team. Tucker was at .286 with an OPS of .906 back on July 8, but he has been in a steady fall since, unable to hit for power the way he had to open the year.
Tucker has batted .205 with a .643 OPS in those 21 games, covering 92 plate appearances. He has hit three doubles and just one home run in that span.
What’s been frustrating is that Tucker has no idea what’s gone wrong lately.
“I feel fine. I don’t really know, mechanically, what potentially could be the issue,” Tucker said. “I feel like I’m still swinging at pitches I want and taking ones I don’t want to swing at. Pitches over the plate, I just end up fouling off, or might swing and miss at times. Then I just end up getting worse counts.”
Kyle Tucker Suffered Finger Injury
Some have pointed to the finger injury Tucker suffered in early June as a reason behind his struggles. He does not see it that way–he sees it as mostly bad luck.
“I normally hit the ball in the air a lot, and I hit it pretty hard when I do,” Tucker said. “Obviously haven’t been doing that a lot. I have a handful of extra-base hits the last month-and-a-half or whatever. Some of those at-bats, I’ve hit some hard singles just right at the center fielder, right at the right fielder. Didn’t get in the gap or down the line.”
Cubs Slumping Since June
Meanwhile, the Cubs as a whole have been on the downswing. both in the standings and on the stat sheet. Back on June 6, the team was hitting .262 collectively, with an OPS of .780. Those numbers have both plummeted. They’re hitting .243 with a .741 OPS in that span.
The Cubs have gone 27-24 during that time, well off the 40-24 record they boasted to start the year.
Tucker said it is up to him and the team to endure this part of the year and let the bats reawaken.
“Just doing the best I can. Gotta grind through it,” Tucker said. “Try and figure it out and turn it around.
“That’s just kind of how baseball goes sometimes, just kind of trying to ride the wave as best you can and try and figure it out and turn around as fast as possible.”
Cubs GM: ‘It’s Baseball’
GM Jed Hoyer, like Tucker, says there is an element of luck to consider.
“It’s baseball,” Hoyer said this week. “What we were doing for the first two months — while unbelievably fun — I think at some level, you kind of knew that wasn’t sustainable. I mean, you look at all the underlying numbers, we were gonna have some regression.
“I actually think now we’re due for the opposite. When you look at our numbers over the last like nine weeks or so, I think we’re due for some of these guys to come out of their slumps. So I try to be pretty balanced about it.”
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