How moving to a new home park could unleash Tucker

The reason the Dodgers gave Kyle Tucker a massive contract – and the Mets tried to do the same, and the Blue Jays too – is pretty obvious. Their outfield was a relatively poor unit, and Tucker is a star, ranking as a top-10 position player in the sport over the last five seasons. Sometimes, it really is that simple: Team with need fills that need.

But not everything here is simple, and it starts with looking at what happened in Tucker's lone year with the Cubs, when his splits broke down like this:

• 2025 home: .747 OPS
• 2025 road: .923 OPS

Well, isn’t that interesting? It’s a massive difference, really. Among players with 200 plate appearances in their home park, Tucker was 120th. He was Lenyn Sosa, or Jake Mangum. Yet among players with 200 plate appearances on the road, Tucker was eighth, and this is a list where the top six read “Judge, Ohtani, Raleigh, Marte, Kurtz and Soto.”

It makes it easy to dream about what's next, now that he’s out of Wrigley, the once “Friendly Confines,” which has now become one of the harder places in the Majors to hit, ranking as the 26th-best hitter’s park over the last two years. (Cubs rookie pitcher Cade Horton had a 1.63 ERA at Wrigley, yet a 3.59 ERA on the road, for example. Veteran Matthew Boyd was 2.51 at home and 3.90 on the road.)

That’s especially so given how batter-friendly Dodger Stadium is now – sixth-best in 2024-25 – and that Tucker had essentially zero home/road splits in his seven years as an Astro. While it’s important to note that “how did a batter perform in the park he signed to go to?” carries approximately zero predictive value, it’s also at least entertaining to note that in 58 plate appearances at Dodger Stadium, playoffs included, he’s hit .340/.421/.540 in 58 PA with two homers – which is one of the 10 best lines in that park in the last six seasons.

So: Full speed ahead for Tucker as a Dodger, marrying that elite road line with a newly improved home line to become a top-five hitter in the sport? Sure, maybe. But not until we look a little into the why of what happened in Wrigley, above and beyond whatever impact came from playing through a fractured hand as he fell into a summer slump.

As it turns out, Wrigley did affect him … but maybe not in the way you might think. A few things can all be true at the same time.

1) Yes, Wrigley did seemingly rob him of some production.

An easy way to do this is simply to look at the "expected" stats, which take into account both quantity and quality of contact to get to what a player might have been expected to produce independent of ballpark, defense, and luck. (One easy to explain this: When Pete Crow-Armstrong made a nice leaping catch at the wall to take a hit away from Aaron Judge, it gave Judge a .000 [0-1] in the box score, yet he got a +.930 in his expected average to reflect the skill it took to crush a ball like that.)

On the road, Tucker got basically exactly what was expected: His expected batting average (xBA) was 8 points lower than his actual average, and his expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) was 9 points lower. That’s all close enough to say “it’s a wash,” and that what Tucker produced is what you’d expect. That’s good news, anyway, if you were wondering if the road numbers were just small-sample good luck ( doesn’t seem so).

At home, though, Wrigley really did take away production. His actual batting average was 18 points less than expected; his actual wOBA was 27 points lower than expected, and most of that was in slugging, where he underperformed expected by 54 points. If that 27-point wOBA deficit had been his full-season mark, it’d have been one of the largest in baseball, and No. 1 on that list is a guy who plays for a team who just decided it was time to pull in the fences.

It’s not hard to see why. As we wrote early last year, no park in baseball was affected by wind more than Wrigley, and befitting the city’s name, it really wasn’t even close.

If you want to really see what that looks like, just listen to broadcaster Jon Sciambi describe the “welcome to Wrigley moment” on this early-season ball that Tucker seemingly smashed … right into a warning track flyout.

So, sure. Wrigley hurt him, in exactly the way you’d expect. There’s just more to it than that.

2) But also, he was simply a lesser hitter in Wrigley.

Yet if it was just the wind, then we’d expect to see the underlying expected stats to be identical home vs. road, with only the actual production changing, and that’s not what happened. Can we interest you in “and also, he just made worse contact there?”

It’s not a hard sell. It’s actually really, really clear. If the wind affected him after the ball left the bat, then something else was happening to make the bat just be less impressive in the home pinstripes. In the chart here, xBA and xwOBA are the two metrics we discussed above, and a barrel is the perfect combination of exit velocity and launch angle. Short version: "more" is good in all of these things.

Another way to say it is that among players with 200 plate appearances both home and road, Tucker was the 10th-best hitter away from Wrigley yet tied for 53rd-best at home. This is before the wind comes into play. This is all about what happens at the plate, in terms of strikeouts, walks, and quality of contact. If he hit worse at home, it’s at least a little because he earned less there – before the “but also, the wind got him” then also took effect.

3) Yet also, none of this really popped up until the fractured hand did.

When we shared his home/road splits above, we were being honest, but an interesting story was buried within, which is this: None of this was really an issue in the first half. Tucker hit just fine at home, until he didn’t.

So, what might have caused his home performance to collapse while his road work did not? It’s partially a small sample thing; a late season calf injury meant that Tucker barely played at all in September. But it’s also very much about the unraveling of a skill that had clearly been propelling Tucker and several of his teammates earlier in the year, as MLB.com’s David Adler wrote just after the All-Star Break: pulling the ball in the air, which is of course the best way to do damage.

Consider this: In the first half, Tucker had a 26% pulled-air rate both home and on the road. In the second half, that crept up slightly to 29% on the road… and collapsed entirely to 13% at home. Another way of saying that is of the 55 batted balls he hit at Wrigley in the second half, just seven were put in the air to the pull side. This, from a hitter who, earlier in the season, had multiple games where he’d do it three times in an evening.

Getting to the why of that gets trickier. One might say that having lost a few too many runs to the Wrigley wind, he stopped trying to beat it, which is why there was no such change on the road -- though that's not obvious, given that he did perform well overall at home earlier in the year. You could go the other direction and say that the hand injury prevented him from making the same kind of contact in the air -- except that didn't happen on the road.

It is, probably, a combination of all of it, of the hand, the Wrigley wind, and again that his second half was mostly about six weeks long. But either way, this much is clear: For all of 2024 and the first half of 2025, he was the fifth-best hitter in the game, behind only Judge, Ohtani, Soto, and Yordan Alvarez.

If it really does turn out that playing through the hand injury is what caused his second half to slide, then it might not matter where calls home. After all: Tucker has been an elite star for more than a few years now.