Listed at 6-feet-5 and 240 pounds, there’s already something obvious that Athletics rookie first baseman and current front-runner for the American League Rookie of the Year Nick Kurtz has in common with some of the giants of the sport. He’s big.
Simply being a little taller than Shohei Ohtani and a little shorter than Aaron Judge alone isn’t enough to turn someone into a baseball player of their caliber, of course, and the young lefty has some work to do to establish that he can be this good year in and year out and join the best hitters in the game. If you look closely at how he swings, however, he’s already moving like the greats of the game. His swing, in a few really important ways, is a match for the swings of Judge and Ohtani — the No. 1 and No. 2 hitters in the game currently.
Arguably the two most fundamental aspects of a baseball swing that we can now measure are the speed of the bat and the tilt through the zone. Here’s a handy visualization from Baseball Savant that illustrates what we mean when we talk about the different components of a swing:
What stands out about Kurtz, who leads all rookies in on-base percentage, slugging percentage, homers hit and Wins Above Replacement, is that he swings the bat hard and with more tilt than the average hitter. Kurtz averages 77.5 mph on his swings, and only four qualified hitters in baseball swing the bat faster on average. And with a 39 degree average tilt on his swings, only eight players swing with more loft.
Put them together and you have a powerful, fast, uppercut swing. How good is that sort of swing in today’s game? Just using tilt (38 degrees and up) and bat speed (75 mph and up), you can place Kurtz on a short list of the game’s best hitters. All swings that fall in this grouping have produced a .327 average and a .636 slugging percentage this year. Not surprisingly, if you limit the list to hitters who have 175 swings similar to his average swing this year, this group includes the best hitters in the game.
Players who swing like Nick Kurtz
The list has its under-performers, but as a group there’s a ton of hardware hanging out here. Just behind Judge and Ohtani, Kurtz also looks like he has some similarities to Cal Raleigh, who just set the record for home runs by a catcher.
There are other ways to parse a swing further, though. Kurtz has great opposite field power and he lets the ball travel closer to him. You can see it in his spray chart:
This is very different than Eugenio Suárez, a right-handed hitter who goes and gets the ball a whopping 10 inches closer to the pitcher.
This is notable for a couple of reasons. One is that these just look like fundamentally different approaches and therefore different swings. Put another way, bat speed is measured near contact, and if Suárez is swinging 10 inches further before making contact, he has more of a chance to get that bat up to speed. What makes Kurtz so special is that he has great tilt, swings the bat fast and gets it going that fast much quicker than almost all hitters in baseball.
So let’s now take the average swing for qualified hitters, and compare them by bat speed, swing tilt and now also intercept point. Here are the two players who come within 2 mph of bat speed and 2 degrees of swing tilt when compared to Kurtz’s swing, and also let the ball travel more than league average (30.8 inches):
Nick Kurtz swing comps
| Bat Speed | Swing Tilt | Intercept Point | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Nick Kurtz |
77.5 |
39° |
24.6 |
|
Aaron Judge |
76.9 |
38° |
30.7 |
|
Shohei Ohtani |
76.1 |
37° |
28.0 |
If you relax the bat speed requirements a little bit, you get Mike Trout and his 74 mph bat speed, too, but it’s amazing how well Kurtz’s swing maps to Ohtani’s. Here is Ohtani’s swing mapped on top of the rookie’s, courtesy Baseball Savant:
It’s like the same swing!
Trout, Judge and Ohtani all offer a good visual comparison for the type of approach a high-velocity, high-tilt hitter with a good eye at the plate can take. Hitters like this can let the ball travel a little bit because they have a ferocious bat that can hit the ball out to any field. They don’t depend on getting the ball out in front and pulling it. They rake — with a few swings and misses because their bats are so fast they’ll miss sometimes, and because they have so much tilt that they can sometimes be beat at the top of the zone — but they rake and they rake and they rake.
Kurtz may just be a 22-year-old from Lancaster, Pa., but the Big Amish has a sweet swing, one as good-looking in a few key metrics as a couple of historic talents in today’s game. Let’s see if Kurtz can put together the consistency that will keep him on their paths to greatness.
(Top photo illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Bryce Hemmelgarn, Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)