Cubs leadoff hitter Mike Tauchman: We’re Tauch-ing about on-base percentage here

It’s undeniable that one of the key components of the recent turnaround in the fortunes has been the plate presence of Mike Tauchman at top of the Cubs lineup against right-handed pitchers. One of the things I find myself minorly obsessed with every time Tauchman comes to the plate is the fact that his on-base percentage is consistently higher than his slugging. It’s an anomaly, but one I have never really dug into — before today.

As of yesterday morning there were 329 players with at least 120 plate appearances this season, of those hitters only 27 have a higher on-base percentage than slugging percentage. That’s approximately 8.2 percent of the league who get on-base at a rate higher than they slug. It’s an interesting collection of players, as you’ll see below. Frankly, a lot of these players are struggling, but there are exceptions — like Mike Tauchman.

Of those 27 batters, only 14 have put up a higher on-base percentage than slugging while maintaining a positive FanGraphs WAR. I’ve bolded those players in the above chart, because while it’s imperfect, it’s a pretty good representation of the difference between guys who are truly struggling with subpar OBP and SLG vs. guys who are contributing, but doing so in a more walk/soft contact driven way. You’ll see at least one other familiar name in bold above, Nick Madrigal has just gotten his OBP higher than his SLG this season.

I then further differentiated this to look only at players who had an OBP above .340. Why .340? I admit, it’s a bit arbitrary, but the league-wide OBP is .320 as of today. The Rays lead baseball with a league best OBP of .341 and the Rangers are close behind with an OBP of .340. I figured two of the best offenses in baseball were a good proxy baseline for establishing whether a guy’s OBP was above average in a meaningful way relative to the rest of the league. Cross-checking that with FanGraphs’ glossary of sabermetric terms confirmed that .340 was a pretty good standard for an above average OBP.

That limited me down to eight players who both have an above average OBP, positive WAR value and relatively low slugging. I’m titling this group High OBP, low SLG producers, because they are contributing quite a bit to their teams, although admittedly in different ways:

By definition there aren’t a lot of home runs in this group, but it’s a group of players who all contribute in different ways. Almost everyone has a walk rate above 10 percent (the exception is Jeff McNeil at 7.7 percent). Mike Tauchman leads this group with a 15.7 percent walk rate. Incidentally, that is the eighth-best walk rate in MLB for all players with at least 120 plate appearances. There are a handful of stolen bases here with José Caballero leading the way at 11 stolen bags over 154 plate appearances.

Interestingly, this isn’t some anomalous year for Tauchman — he’s run a higher OBP than SLG in every season he’s played except the 2019 season when he hit 13 home runs in just 260 at-bats. Of this group of players the others who consistently run a higher OBP than SLG include Rob Refsnyder, Josh Smith (who only has parts of two seasons under his belt) and Travis Jankowski.

While only a handful of players seem to be making this profile work in modern day MLB — it certainly can be very useful to have a plus OBP guy near the top of the lineup regardless of whether that contact results in a ton of extra bases. We’ve seen the Cubs thrive against RHP since Tauchman took over that position on June 10 — the team is 10-3 in that time period with Tauchman starting in all but three of those games.

A few other fun notes in the data — a handful of hitters are just over the line, Akil Baddoo and Jace Peterson just missed the cut and would likely make an appearance on this leaderboard depending on the day it was run.

If you’re looking for the anti-Tauchman, he also happens to play for the Cubs. The player in MLB with the largest negative gap between his OBP and SLG as of June 26 is none other than Christopher Morel who leads the majors with a -.297 differential because his slugging is so high. The next closest is Aaron Judge at -.270, flat. Pretty good company for Morel.

The best teams have a combination of ways to score runs, and I don’t think it’s an accident that the juggernaut Rangers offense has two guys on this OBP leaderboard. While this data seems a bit fluky to me at the moment, it was still interesting to dig into the small sample size and take a closer look at the tiny number of players who are zigging while the rest of the league zags.