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There was a movement, perhaps 20 or 30 years ago, to banish the notion of players being 'injury-prone' from discourse around baseball. It emanated, at least in part, from an admirable desire to thwart owners and front offices who sought to deflate players' earning power by slapping that label on them. There was also some reasonably well-founded doubt about where the lines are between actual trends and perceived ones, and about how well we can really know whether a given injury is part of a wider pattern or just a freak accident. The movement has actually been fairly successful. Everyone knows that certain pitchers will get hurt repeatedly, but when it comes to position players, most injuries now get treated as isolated incidents of bad luck.
I wish that were true, but it isn't. Health is a skill. That's one of the more important truths about baseball, and about sport more specifically. Because it's a truth convenient only to trolls and billionaires, we've all tried to ignore or deny it. Nonetheless, it's so. Specifically, in fact, there are three aspects or elements of the skill of health:
- The ability to avoid major acute injuries (or mitigate them) with last-second adjustments ahead of collisions or smoother-than-average changes of speed or direction;
- The absence of an underlying physical limitation or a bad habit that will beget chronic/overuse injuries; and
- The ability to play well at less than 100%, and even considerably less than 100%.
You don't want players trying to play through significant injuries, but it's utterly unrealistic—disconnected from the reality of playing high-level professional sports, and reflective of a failure to understand the demands thereof—to hope that a player will feel their best all year. Guys will pick up sore obliques, bruised kneecaps, and stiffness in their back. Most players play with some degree of meaningful discomfort for at least a third of the season, and playing your best baseball when your body is at far less than its best is an indispensable skill.
Of the elements of baseball health I laid out there, you have to be good at at least two to be a championship-caliber player over the long haul—especially in your 30s. Even if you'renotgood at two of them, you can emerge as a superstar for a short time, because there are astoundingly talented players who can do extraordinary things at their very best. In your early and mid-20s, you're at your very best. Maybe you have a mechanical habit that will eventually lead to trouble, and maybe you're not as good at avoiding damaging collisions as would be ideal, but your body recovers exceptionally well and your physical talent is at its peak. You can work around things on one side of (say) 26 or 27, when most players have their peak seasons, that you can't work around in your late 20s or throughout your 30s.
That's important to know, because Kyle Tucker has shown the talent to be a great player, but he'll turn 29 years old this offseason—and he doesn't pass the test laid out above. He doesn't have an obviously deleterious limitation or habit in the way he plays (aspect No. 2), so although his overall athleticism is a bit less than you might prefer, he clears the bar there. However, he doesn't avoid or mitigate acute injuries well, and he doesn't play nearly as well when he's carrying even a slight injury as other players do. Cubs fans have watched that all unfold this year, and surely, they're feeling a great deal of frustration—especially because it's a familiar issue. Tucker has what one might call the Kris Bryant Problem.
Bryant was a great player, too, with the same uniquely thrilling combination of smooth swing, great baseball skill, and gawky athleticism Tucker has displayed throughout his career to date. Through the typical ballplayer's peak, both Tucker and Bryant were phenomenal players. Over time, though, each of them also started to show the cracks in their health skill profile.
Bryant had one that Tucker doesn't, because he also didn't clear the second standard; his unique swing put tremendous strain on his front shoulder. That started to erode his performance especially quickly, as he tried to navigate the other injuries that crept in. Tucker doesn't do anything on the field that would eventually cause problems even if there were no one and nothing to run into on the field, the way Bryant's does. Still, he has plenty of trouble to deal with in items 1 and 3 on the above list. Awkward slides are commonplace; he doesn't move well in the small spaces around bases or when going into the wall to play fly balls in the outfield. Part of it is that he's so big (not just in terms of sheer size, but proportionally; he has long limbs and big hands and feet), in a way that makes one a good general athlete but not always a well-suitedbaseballathlete. Still, it's true.
Tucker also made a significant change in swing plane and approach in 2024, which helped him unlock a great deal of power. However, it also led directly to the injury that ruined his final season in Houston. He swung faster and flatter than in the past and went after more pitches down and in. Foranyplayer, that leads to an increased likelihood of a hard foul ball off one's own leg. That very thing led to a fracture in his shin and sidelined him for half of last season. We've also seen him pick up bad bruises on similar foul balls this season.
If Tucker were good at playing through dings of various kinds, that would be ok. Such players exist. In fact, there are lots of them. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that the players you think stay healthy every year are really just the ones who play best when hurt. Plenty of players would have avoided whatever damage Tucker did to his hand on that slide into second on June 1 (and on a couple of similar slides since), but more of them would simply be less diminished by that injury than he was. The calf strain that currently has him on the injured list is not fake or unimportant, but plenty of players throughout the league have strains in their calf, hamstring, quad, hip, oblique, shoulder or elsewhere right now, and are on the field, playing fine.
This isn't about a lack of toughness or work ethic. It's not a moral failing. It might be more precise to say that health is an aspect of talent, rather than a skill; it takes some of the sting of implied criticism of players who lack it out of the air. Still, this is a hugely important variable for a team to consider, when building a roster each year but (even more so) when deciding how much they're willing to invest in a player for the long term.
We've all seen how things have gone for Bryant since his late 20s. Starting at age 28, in 2020, he went into a steep decline. He had a good year in 2021, though even that one was down from his previous heights, but he has a 99 OPS+ over the last six seasons—during which time he's played in well under half of his teams' games. Tucker is likely to age better than that, but probably not all that much better. Despite the overheated talk in the spring, he was never in line for a payday akin to those of Juan Soto and Shohei Ohtani. He's not a unicorn, like Ohtani, and he's not 26, like Soto. He's not an especially multidimensional player, although he's certainly good enough to have a positive impact in each facet of the game when he is healthy. Soto's youth helped set him apart, but so did his durability. Ohtani has gotten hurt repeatedly while pitching, but when he's available, he can affect the game in a wider spectrum of ways than anyone in the history of the game. Tucker isn't like those two.
After this compromised season, Tucker isn't even all that likely to make $400 million this winter. He could sign a deal with an exceptionally high annual value over a short term, with an opt-out after 2026, but the possibility of a lockout will make that harder for him and his agency to accept. He's more likely to go for the biggest long-term guarantee he can get, and that's likely to be something like 10 years and $360 million. That's not an unimaginable expenditure, in the modern game, even for the Ricketts family. The Cubs, though, should steer clear.
Some guys have the knack for staying healthy or playing effectively when they're not; some don't. The world is cruel that way. We can wish Tucker belonged to the first group all we want, but he doesn't. Chicago can get a useful extra draft pick by letting him sign elsewhere, and the money some other team spends on him will turn out to be better spent in other ways. Jed Hoyer needs to be aggressive this winter, but it shouldn't take the form of locking up Tucker for the long term. That would be a more expensive version of the mistake the Rockies made when they signed Bryant after 2021.
