You can’t undersell how important of a season 2022 is going to be for Cole Tucker. When spring training finally gets underway, he’ll be in the mix for a middle infield competition for either the second base or shortstop job.
He’ll also be on the hot seat for the 2022 season. Top prospect Oneil Cruz is major-league ready. Nick Gonzales and Liover Peguero should both be ready for the majors in 2023. If Tucker doesn’t produce, there are plenty of top 100 prospects who could take his spot, not to mention other highly rated prospects like Rodolfo Castro and Tucupita Marcano.
This will technically be year four in the majors for Tucker, but he’s never gotten a full season in any of those seasons. Tucker’s struggles in 2019 were excusable. He was 22 and was called up with barely any reps for Class AAA Indianapolis. He was learning on the fly and there were some growing pains. In 2020, he was asked to learn the outfield shortly before the season started and then couldn’t find his footing in the abbreviated campaign. Those poor results shouldn’t be brushed off, but he deserved some leniency.
There were no excuses for how his 2021 season started. Tucker went into camp with every opportunity to win the starting shortstop job and just didn’t leave an impact at all. The Pirates opted to keep him in Bradenton to focus on just his offense while they started an alternate training camp back in Pittsburgh.
When he did finally get promoted back to the majors in late May, the swing was still a work in progress:
That’s a hack against a middle-middle fastball where his timing was off and he swung on top of it. Everyone’s going to miss some meatballs, but when you’re trying to earn playing time, mistakes like that hurt.
It hurts someone like Tucker more because there aren’t any questions about his glove, arm, speed or base running ability. He grades out well in all of those areas. It’s the bat that’s held him back and what will ultimately determine his future with the Pirates.
Despite some poor results in his young major-league career, Tucker showed some positive signs at the dish in 2021 that should carry over.
The first, and perhaps most important, are the mechanical changes he’s made to that swing. Compare that first swing to another belt-high, center-cut meatball he got in the final series of the season. In the second swing, he clocked a triple-digit exit velocity and put it in the gap for a triple:
In that first swing, there are a lot of moving parts. The most notable cues are a big leg kick, the hands going higher before they move towards the load position and starting on his toes on his front foot. In the new swing, he’s more crouched, he is on his heel, the leg kick is much smaller and he is moving his hands more directly into the load. These changes were gradual over the course of the season, but it’s a very different swing.
His changes as a right-handed hitter weren’t as pronounced as his lefty tweaks, but the same lower half and hand cues are visible:
Is this enough? Perhaps. Tucker is 6’3” and skinny, so body movement is so important to this swing. If he doesn’t repeat his mechanics, different parts can come out of sync and lead to some ugly swings. If what he showed in late September and October is repeatable, that would go a long way for him.
That’s important because Tucker has a skill that not enough people give him credit for: He makes good swing decisions. Baseball Savant tracks how often a player swings based on different parts of the zone: The heart, the shadow (along the edges), the chase zone (pitches designed to look like strikes only to fall out of the zone) and waste. The two that matter the most are swings over the heart of the plate and chase pitches. Are you swinging at good pitches and laying off bad ones?
Despite bouncing between the majors and minors last year, Tucker was one of the best on the team at identifying good pitches to swing at:
Heart: Tucker 81% swing rate, league average 74%
Chase: Tucker 17% swing rate, league average 22%
Swinging at the right pitches with reworked mechanics to help better leverage his body is a good combination. It’s why he finished the year on a strong note, slashing .308/.373/.519 with five extra-base hits and a healthy .344 xwOBA over his last 16 games. You have to be mindful of small sample sizes, but it was a good way to wrap up a year of trials and changes.
This season is going to tell us a lot about Tucker and what his future with the Pirates is. Can he do enough to force Cruz to the outfield and hold off this wave of prospects that’s set to come up in a few years? Is he a utilityman, leaning into his ability to play middle infield and outfield? Is he even a Pirate in 2023? The more he hits, the better his situation will be.
