Major League Baseball

Mookie Betts is probably not the next Andrew McCutchen

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 1:42 p.m. ET

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"€œI call him '€˜Little Cutch,'"€ Victorino said, referring to Pirates center fielder Andrew McCutchen, the reigning NL MVP. "€œWatch him out there. His movements, everything, he'€™s like a little McCutchen."

Shane Victorino on Mookie Betts, spoken in an interview last July.

Mookie-mania has taken over the Grapefruit League, as the Red Sox new centerfielder ranks in the top three among all hitters this spring in batting average (.467), on-base percentage (.500) and slugging percentage (.867), causing others to see Victorino's comparison as a lot less crazy than it sounded last summer.

On Monday, Ken Rosenthal asked a number of evaluators and many of Betts' teammates about the comparison, and no one really pushed back too hard; David Ortiz even pushed the comparison further.

"€œI'€™d even go further,"€ Ortiz said. "€œHe'€™s better than McCutchen at that time in McCutchen's career. Go and double-check that."

Ortiz isn't wrong.

Last year, Betts dominated at every stop during his age-21 season, posting a wRC+ of 177 in Double-A, 158 in Triple-A, and 130 in the majors. wRC+ is scaled so that every point above 100 is representative of a percentage point above league average, so relative to his peers at each stop, Betts was somewhere between 30 and 80 percent better than the average hitter last year. At the same point in his career, McCutchen spent the entire year in Triple-A and posted a 115 wRC+, even worse than the mark Mookie put up in the big leagues, and far less than the monster numbers he posted against minor-league pitching.

So, yes, from a performance standpoint, Betts does compare favorably to McCutchen at this same point in their careers. But what about going forward? Is McCutchen's level of performance from age 22 on really a realistic career path for Betts? Even if he's ahead of McCutchen's curve right now, that doesn't necessarily mean he's going to follow McCutchen's career path.

While McCutchen was an excellent player from day one, he's not the same kind of excellent player he was during his first three years in the majors. Specifically, McCutchen has traded in part of his contact rate in order to hit for more power. From 2009 to 2011, McCutchen had an 82% contact rate and a .182 Isolated Slugging mark, both of which rated a bit above the league average. From 2012 to 2014, his contact rate dropped to 79% but his ISO jumped to .215, so he transitioned into a league-average contact guy who hits for power like a slugging first baseman.

Remarkably, McCutchen was able to make this trade without actually upping his strikeout rate, so the extra power took him from a very good hitter to one of the game's elite offensive weapons. And it also took him pretty far away from what Betts is right now, as McCutchen's contact rate was already significantly lower than the 88% contact rate that Betts put up in his debut last summer, and is now nearly 10 percentage points below what Betts did in his first taste against MLB pitching.

Of course, it is possible that Betts could follow a similar path, swinging more often in an attempt to hit for more power. McCutchen showed it is possible, after all, but what he did is actually pretty rare. I asked FanGraphs resident data-wizard Jeff Zimmerman to give me a full list of players who had made similar contact-for-power trades as McCutchen in their 20s. Excluding a small handful of catchers -- who follow a different development path and seem to learn how to hit for power later in their careers -- the only regular players since 2002 (the first year we have contact rate data) who had increased their ISO by 40 points while seeing a three percentage point reduction in their contact rates were McCutchen, Robinson Cano and Carlos Gomez.

This is not a common occurrence. Guys don't usually move from high-contact, line-drive hitters into power-hitting sluggers, or perhaps more accurately, they don't usually make that transition once they reach the big leagues. There's room for Betts' power to grow and develop, but McCutchen is at the far right tail of the curve of what is possible.

When I last wrote about Mookie's future here at JABO back in September, McCutchen's name never appeared in the article. By looking at players who have demonstrated a similar approach to what Mookie showed in his big league debut, I ended up comparing him to Ben Zobrist, himself a fantastic player, but a different kind of star than McCutchen.

The list of comparisons generated based on Betts' swing and contact rates were mostly slap-hitting middle infielders, with Matt Carpenter and Joe Mauer standing out as the best versions of that kind of hitter. Betts is openly talking about developing a more aggressive approach at the plate. As he told Alex Speier:

Betts is right that he did get more aggressive the longer he was in the big leagues. If you break his final 39 games from the time of his permanent recall in half, he swung at just 33% of the pitches he saw from Aug. 18 to Sept. 7, then swung at 39% of the pitches he saw from Sept. 8 to Sept. 28. But even a 39% swing rate is still well below the league average, and Betts would have a long way to travel before he got up McCutchen's current 45% swing rate. And increasing one's swing rate isn't a guarantee that you're going to hit for more power, so the transition isn't as simple as swing more to get better.

The McCutchen comparison actually does kind of work if you look at the early-career version of McCutchen. His first three years in the majors, he hit .275/.365/.458, good for a 126 wRC+. Last year, Betts hit .291/.368/.444, good for a 130 wRC+. So there is a version of Andrew McCutchen that Mookie Betts does profile somewhat like from a statistical perspective, but it's not the Andrew McCutchen we see today. That version of McCutchen -- the best non-Trout position player in baseball -- is an unrealistic expectation to put on anyone, the kind of best-case outcome you can only dream of getting in a prospect once in a while. That doesn't mean that Mookie Betts can't become the current version of Andrew McCutchen, but it's unreasonable to think that he will make the same contact-for-power trade, all without increasing his own strikeout rate in the process.

Early-career Andrew McCutchen was still an outstanding player, and the Red Sox should be thrilled if Betts produces at that level. To expect him to be the MVP candidate that we've seen McCutchen be the past few years, though? That would require Betts developing in a way that very few players do. It's possible, as McCutchen showed, but just like every 28-year-old lefty with an 84-mph fastball isn't the next Jamie Moyer, Mookie Betts probably isn't the next Andrew McCutchen. Not the recent vintage, anyway. 

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