Neither of the two player segments on the Chicago Cubs that have garnered the most attention this spring — namely, the young, under-25 foursome of offensive weapons (Bryant, Russell, Soler, Baez), and, then, this past season’s offseason acquisitions — do not include arguably the club’s best player: Anthony Rizzo.
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Indeed, Rizzo is one of the few current members of the Cubs who remembers when they were really, really bad. As in, 100+ losses-in-a-season bad (see: 2012). It’s a testament to the hype machine that has beset the North Siders that the term ‘overlooked’ could even remotely apply to a player like Rizzo.
Media narratives are one thing; Rizzo’s actual value to the team is another. Surely, opposing pitchers don’t overlook him.
As for those bad memories of losing seasons past? The baseball season is long, and full of losses. Even the best teams will lose close to 40 percent of their games. Injuries are a given. But Rizzo’s been there, done that. How the Cubs respond to those tough stretches will ultimately determine their success. Rizzo, along with veterans Jason Heyward, Ben Zobrist, and certainly manager Joe Maddon, will not be counted on not only to perform, but also to instill temperance amidst the vagaries of a 162-game season.
Those are tall orders for a 26-year old. Then again, most 26-year old’s don’t collect 100 home runs and a career wRC+ of 127 by that age either.
Player Outlook: All Systems Go
As if there were any doubt, Rizzo proved his breakout performance in 2014 (32 home runs, wRC+ of 155, or 55 percent better than the league-average hitter) was no one-time windfall. Last year Rizzo swatted 31 home runs in 2015, just one fewer than the year before, while collecting 38 doubles and putting up a career high .387 on-base percentage.
His wRC+ (Weighted Runs Created Plus, a metric used to determine overall offensive performance) number dipped only modestly from 155 to 144, and his WAR remained consistent at 5.5 from 5.7, good for a top-five ranking among first basemen and making him a top-20 overall position player.
Most surprising in an otherwise mostly stable set of metrics? Rizzo was set loose on the basepaths, when he stole 17 bases in 23 attempts, eclipsing his cumulative stolen base total from his first four seasons. Or it might have been the Major League-leading 30 times he was hit by a pitch, which helped increase Rizzo’s on-base percentage by one basis point, year-over-year, despite a lower batting average and walk rate.
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Rizzo was invaluable as a fixture in the three-hole of manager Joe Maddon’s lineups, manning the on-deck circle in support of rookie Kris Bryant and forcing pitchers to go right after the young star. To wit: Bryant had zero intentional walks last year.
As we talked about over in our infield preview, Rizzo’s swing rate spiked in last year’s summer months, after a spectacular April and May, in which he hit .318 and reached base in 44 percent of plate appearances. We speculated that the Cubs’ offensive woes during the summer time frame — Bryant, Castro, and Soler logged wRC+ figures for July of 73, -1, and 68, respectively — may have caused Rizzo to become more aggressive in trying to provide an offensive spark.
Instead of having the intended result, Rizzo’s on-base percentage dipped, to .360 for the months of June, July, and August before the Cubs’ kids caught fire in the last two months of the season.
Despite the midseason dip, Rizzo’s wRC+ splits never dipped below 100 (the proxy for an average Major League hitter). While some of the drop-off can be explained, analyzing month-to-month splits is an inherently noisy exercise, where the result of five at-bats can make the difference between a stellar and a mediocre month.
If pressing were a concern last year, we aren’t expecting much in the way of spillover this season. With a stacked Cubs lineup, Rizzo should be able to focus solely on his own continued development at the plate, and not on trying to carry the entire load. The influx of both young and experienced talent since Rizzo’s arrival in Chicago may tempt fans to overlook Rizzo’s value, but he is still arguably the best hitter on the team.
Even scarier, there’s reason to believe he hasn’t reached his ceiling.
Deep Dive: Patience, You Must Have
Still, Rizzo’s post-May dip, relative to the high standard he set early in 2015, dangles curiously going into 2016, and speculation has varied as to the cause of the swoon.
Was Rizzo trying too hard to kickstart a wobbly early-season Cubs offense (as previously referenced)? Was he overcompensating for contact in two-strike counts? Maybe Rizzo was simply fatigued, having played in all but two of the Cubs’ games.
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Of greatest import: had pitchers found a new hole in Rizzo’s approach or swing, that could potentially be exploited going forward?
Rizzo posted wRC+ numbers of 142, 116, 142, and 127 the last four-plus months of the season, truly elite marks with the exception of July (116), but that coincided with a batting average on balls in play (BABIP) of .264, well below the league average, and Rizzo’s career mark of .285. So, basically Rizzo didn’t hit the ball hard in July. Mike Trout, Joey Votto, Miguel Cabrera, and Paul Goldschmidt — four-fifths of the top-five hitters by wRC+ in 2015 — each had at least one offensive month that rated statistically weaker than Rizzo’s weakest month (The exception was Bryce Harper). In this context, speculation about Rizzo’s long-term offensive value seem almost silly.
But something interesting did appear in Rizzo’s advanced metrics after that world-beating month of May: he started to chase more bad pitches.
Interestingly, the trend doesn’t appear to be something pitchers deliberately induced, either. They continued to attack Rizzo down and away with a medley of offspeed pitches, as they have done in past years. In 2015, Rizzo received 27.5 percent of all pitches at or below the belt and away, per Brooks Baseball, compared to 25 percent in April/May, and 23 percent the previous season.
Also nothing new: Rizzo saw between five to 10 percent fewer strikes than the Major League average across all intra-season periods. Pitchers also continued to work him with a consistent mix of pitches relative to past seasons, with a weight toward the low-and-away soft stuff that Rizzo has had a tendency to roll over in his career. Point being, pitchers were treating Rizzo basically the same way they had in previous seasons.
The difference? As the below chart shows, Rizzo himself became less disciplined as the season wore on. 
The trend was particularly noticeable on pitches below the zone and off the plate away from Rizzo.
Among pitches in the four lower left-hand sections outside the hitting zone, Rizzo swung at only 31 percent during April and May. After May, he offered at 43 percent. These figures compare to 35 percent from a year ago.
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This effect was especially pronounced against left-handed pitchers, whose low-and-away offerings cross a lefty hitter’s field of vision and appear like incoming strikes. In April and May, Rizzo managed to resist temptation, swinging at only 18 percent of pitches in the ‘yellow zone’ against lefties. After May, that jumped to 37 percent. His batting average against lefties dipped from an unrealistic .438 through May to a more pedestrian .274.
The same held true for breaking and offspeed pitches: In April and May, Rizzo attempted at 30 percent of pitches low and away from the zone, but that spiked to almost 50 percent from June on.
The good news? Plate discipline generally improves over time, as we expect it will with Rizzo as he enters his statistical prime.
We also note that Rizzo’s offer rate at pitches in the strike zone jumped from 62 percent in 2014 to 68 percent in 2015. That’s partially a function of Rizzo’s two-strike approach, where he shortens his swing and stride in down counts. It worked in terms of minimizing strikeouts (His strikeout percentage dipped from 19 percent to 15 percent.), but didn’t necessarily translate to a higher rate of getting on base: Rizzo reached on 29 percent and 21 percent in 1-and-2 and 0-and-2 counts two years ago, compared to 22 percent and 23 percent last season.
Rizzo’s challenge, then, is to apply the physical aspects of that two-strike approach — the compact swing, the shortened stride — without selling out on bad pitches. Easy for us to say. But just look what Rizzo can do with a protect swing in a two-strike count when he applies it towards hittable pitches.
In the baseball information age, it’s tempting to over-analyze noisy intra-season splits and to focus on nadirs in a player’s resume rather than his overall performance over time. In Rizzo’s case, his elite power on pitches almost anywhere in the zone is obvious. He’s figured out how to run opposing pitchers mad by crowding the plate while still managing to smack inside pitches.
Still, improved plate discipline is a transformative variable at the upper end of the offensive value spectrum. Joey Votto, another NL Central-based first baseman to whom Rizzo is sometimes compared, is elite in this respect. Last year, Votto reached based in nearly 46 percent of his plate appearances (admittedly pitchers had little cause to go after him). But Votto only swung at 19 percent of pitches outside the strike zone, lower than that of even Mr. Plate Discipline himself, Ben Zobrist, who attempted at 23 percent.
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There’s almost no scenario in which Rizzo doesn’t continue to perform at the level of a top-ten offensive weapon, even in a league loaded with young offensive talent.
But if it’s MVP awards, and not just votes, that Rizzo’s after, it would behoove the slugger to heed the wisdom of the old Little League adage, and make sure to get his pitch.