Chicago Cubs’ one-time offensive dynamo has lost his way, big-time

The Chicago Cubs had real problems at catcher as the 2024 season ended.

The 25-year-old Miguel Amaya had been thrust into the full-time starting catcher role early in that season when flat-lining veteran Yan Gomes was released. None of the team’s backstop replacements would really pan out.

So, Amaya got a real baptism by fire. To his credit, though, he came through some very rough patches and began to find his game by the end of the season.

Still, the Cubs front office wanted to grab a dependable co-starting catcher to pair with Amaya as a mentor-type influence ahead of 2025.

Enter Carson Kelly

Chicago Cubs’ New Catcher

The 30-year-old free agent veteran catcher, who had spent time with the St. Louis Cardinals, Arizona Diamondbacks, Detroit Tigers, and Texas Rangers over the course of his career, was signed to a 2-year, $11.5 million contract.

Kelly was regarded as a glove-first catcher who, aside from a little pop, wouldn’t contribute all that much offensively.

Fine. Many experts feel that catcher is the one position where a team would be fine sacrificing offense for defense.

Except…Kelly started the 2025 season with crazy offensive output.

The Rise And The Fall Of Carson Kelly

In his first 20 games, he befuddled the baseball world, slashing .361/.500/.820 and posting a 252 wRC+. He would become, alongside legend Gabby Hartnett, one of two Cubs catchers in modern baseball history to hit at least 8 homers in the first 20 games of a season.

A little over a month into the season, his stats were ranking him among the very best hitters in all of baseball and pundits were cranking out content, wondering aloud how he came to all of this from where he was.

Now, though, the Kelly talk isn’t so loud.

The 10-year veteran, who was once knocking on the door of a .400 batting average, is hitting just .195 in the month of May and a feeble .147 if you take away his first two games of the month. He’s also hit just 1 home run in 41 May at bats.

If not for the brilliance of Pete Crow-Armstrong and the steady excellence of Kyle Tucker, Kelly’s fall from grace would be a bigger story.

What Happened?

Randy Holt of North Side Baseball recently crunched the numbers and came up with an explanation for the catcher’s slump. In Holt’s estimation, the lack of production comes entirely from poor decisions Kelly has started making at the plate.

Per Holt:

“Worse yet is that at least some of these struggles are due to Kelly’s own lapse in the approach. His chase rate has more than doubled (26.1 percent) despite almost no movement in his overall Swing%, which means that he’s exchanged a disciplined, in-zone approach for a useless expansion of the zone. He’s making contact at a rate six percent lower than he did last month, and even that’s with only a two percent dip in the rate at which opposing pitchers come into the strike zone.

As it would turn out, it’s harder to generate quality contact when you’re not concentrating your swings within the strike zone. Or at least it is when you’re a hitter without elite upside that has a delicate balance to maintain in order to find offensive success. Instead, you make softer contact. Softer contact means less batted ball luck and less elevation…His GB%…has spiked from 40.0 percent in April to over 60 percent halfway through May. It’s not a difficult mystery to solve. Kelly’s inability to drive the ball is derived largely from a ballooning of the zone in which he’s willing to swing.”

This regression falls in line with Kelly’s own assessment of the hitter he used to be before tweaking his approach.

“I shifted the weight to hold all the energy in the back,” Kelly told The Athletic back at the beginning of May. “When I get set, I have a lot of weight in that back leg and I’m trying to stay grounded.

“I got to a place where I’m hitting in the air, more hard contact, more consistent, less chasing. It was trial and error and sticking to what I wanted to do.”

Obviously, he’s deviated from that fine-tuning, especially in the area of chasing pitches.

Nobody expected him to continue hitting at an all-time legend’s pace, but some of that offense would be welcomed back by the Cubs with open arms, especially after seeing how much it helped them get off to such a successful start to the season.

A Kelly hitting comeback could happen. After all, his slump seems more about falling back into old habits than anything opposing pitchers are doing different against him.

Time will tell how/when/if he can get back to making headlines with his bat.

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