Chicago Cubs second baseman Nico Hoerner is in the midst of another extremely Nico-Hoerner-like season, which is to say, a very good one.
Almost exactly mirroring that of his average season, Hoerner is hitting .291/.340/.388/106 wRC+, is running the bases well, and is playing superlative defense. He’s been worth 4.0 WAR at FanGraphs, and will be right there at his average mark or better by the end of this month.
That is to say Nico Hoerner has certainly pulled his weight this season, and if there is any position player whose thoughts I’d like to hear about the final stretch of the season, his would be at or near the top of the list.
So, uh, Nico, what’s up with the deep, long offensive struggles for the Cubs?
“There’s no doubt that we have the pieces and talent and guys in the room to put up a lot of runs on any given night and that consistency, it doesn’t come from a team meeting and the whole team committing to one thing,” Hoerner said, per the Tribune. “We do have different skill sets, but there is an intensity and competitiveness that we all feed off each other when it’s rolling and we have a chance to do that tomorrow.”
And what about the pressure that could build as the season draws near a close and the playoff race tightens up?
“I think a healthy amount of pressure can be a good thing too,” Hoerner said, again per the Tribune. “I mean, we do have a lot at stake, and that’s part of what makes this game so exciting when things are going well as it is really hard, and we all benefit from each other playing well. I don’t think pushing off pressure is necessarily the best way to handle things. I think it’s a chance to embrace it and play our best ball down the stretch here, wherever that puts us playoff-picture-wise. There’s no switch you can turn on for the postseason.”
That last point is one that really stuck with me.
We talk all the time about teams getting hot going into the playoffs being the ones that seem to really succeed in October. I think some of that is narrative-building and myth-making after the fact, but it’s not like it’s difficult to imagine – at least at an individual player level – guys being in a good place with their mechanics, feeling physically healthy, seeing the ball well, unlocking great grips, etc./whatever.
And if it’s true that guys can be, at times, in a better place to produce results for real, underlying physical reasons, then yes, you better hope a large portion of your players are in that place by the end of this month. Because, as Hoerner correctly noted, there’s no flipping a switch from “kinda playing meh because it’s only the regular season” to “now I’m really trying because it’s October.” The players will just keep on playing as they’ve been playing, and you want the odds of good results to be as high as possible when those big moments arrive.
So it’s not as if being hot late in September causes a good October. It’s just that a team full of players who are in a good place will probably have a good late-September, and then they will probably also have a good October.
It also helps to have guys like Nico Hoerner, who don’t seem to flip many switches in the first place. He’s just steadily good the whole time.
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