The cadence of the long baseball season lends itself to lots of streaks. Nobody in a Cubs uniform understands that better this year than Nico Hoerner. The Cubs second baseman has had an unusually streaky season that saw a red hot April fade into a soul-crushing slump beginning in May that had fans wondering if perhaps there were lingering effect from the ball that hit him in the helmet on April 29. Whether there were lingering effects of that or not, Nico’s been on another torrid tear since the All-Star
break so today I wanted to take a closer look Nico’s 2026 season and what fans can expect going forward.
An MVP April
Hoerner signed his six-year, $141 million extension in March, and instead of the predictable post-deal letdown, he came out of the gate playing like a top-five player in the National League. Through the season’s first month, he was doing everything, slashing .291/.370/.449 while striking out just 9.6 percent of the time with an uncharacteristic four home runs on top of his normal elite defense. His wRC+ of 129 indicated he was 29 percent better than league average at creating runs for a Cubs team that looked like they might just steamroll the division. That extension was looking like a bargain for a player who might be leveling up on the power front, like this leadoff home run in Tampa Bay in early April [VIDEO].
The slump
Baseball is nothing if not capricious, however, and one of the worst stretches of Nico’s career followed his hot start to the 2026 season. From May 1 until the All-Star break Hoerner slashed .202/270/.263. He lowered his strikeout rate to 6.9 percent, but nothing else was really going right. What’s pretty strange about the whole affair is nothing in the numbers really looked off. His hard hit rate was about 4 percent higher in April, but a 29.6 percent hard hit rate vs. a 25.1% hard hit rate shouldn’t really be the difference between hitting .300 and hitting at the Mendoza line. Similarly, he pulled the ball slightly more in April (38.3 percent) v. 33.3 percent in the months that followed. But again, nothing that screamed a change in approach that should cause the type of fall off the Cubs were seeing from Hoerner.
In fact, the one stat that looks like an outlier during this 63-game stretch was an uncharacteristically low .216 BABIP. That mark is .081 off the .297 BABIP Nico put up in March and April, and .084 off his career mark of .300. I’ll spare you every set of permutations I ran at FanGraphs looking for correlations, only to land on “this really looks like bad BABIP luck,” as you can see below:
A resurgence since the All-Star break
The good news about slumps that are luck-based rather than skill-based is that they almost always tend to regress to the mean. While it may seem counterintuitive, regression can be good or bad depending on the direction of the outlier. In Nico’s case, that could mean the hot streak he’s had since the All Star Break may be the start of his season returning to his career norms.
Since the All-Star break Nico’s hitting .407/.407/.481. with a slightly elevated 11.1% strikeout rate and an uncharacteristic stretch of not talking a walk. Admittedly, a six-game, 27 plate appearance sample size is minuscule, but if Nico’s struggles over the last two-plus months are truly the result of batted-ball luck, as I suspect they might be, this hot start since the break is possibly the beginning of another hot streak. That would be good news for a Cubs team fighting to stay at the top of the National League Wild Card standings with 60 regular season games left to play.
