Nick Kurtz’s unique approach has made him MLB’s most effective hitter

Very few things are “historically unique” in a sport that was founded the same year as the concept of Germany. But Nick Kurtz in 2026 has a historically unique approach that has turned him into an absolute monster. It’s awesome, singular and also the definition of unsustainable. But I’m going to enjoy it anyway.

Nick Kurtz is much more than a Three True Outcomes hitter

Kurtz looks like he could be a classic Three True Outcomes (TTO) player, meaning that he walks, strikes out or hits a home run greater than 50 percent of the time. And he does do that. But he’s doing it in a way that subverts all my expectations about what a TTO player can be; in short, there’s a chance he’s just Aaron Judge—the TTO GOAT to the point where I can’t even call him a TTO guy—in disguise.

Yeah, we’re coming out swinging with the comps, because I need to underscore just how statistically unsustainable what we’re witnessing is. Players who hit for power like Kurtz often have high strikeout rates, but the best power hitters also figure out how to keep their average up and walk a bunch, basically the Frankenstein of stats that created 10+ WAR Aaron Judge seasons. And while every positive outcome at the plate reduces your K rate, walks and average are contradictory stats—you can’t walk and record a hit on the same at bat. It would, however, appear that Nick Kurtz is trying to.

I took Kurtz and these four name-recognizable power hitters and sorted them by TTO percent, again, how often they walk/strikeout/hit a home run. You’ll see that Kurtz has easily the best batting average and walk rate. In fact, only Mike Trout joins Kurtz with a >20 percent walk rate in 2026, and Trout is batting .222 to Kurtz’s .282. It’s not exactly a shock that Kurtz is leading the majors in on-base percentage. 

Kurtz almost certainly cannot sustain his astronomical walk rate

But something is wrong here. Unless we are declaring that Kurtz is not only Judge in disguise but peak Judge, one of the greatest hitters in history who kept his average above .300, walked almost 20 percent of the time with comparably high strikeout numbers (we’re not), one of these three stats has to be a mirage. Let’s ask the ZiPS projection system, courtesy of Dan Szymborski and FanGraphs … oh, it’s the walks? The walk rate is what’s out of wack? Ah.

Players with Kurtz’s walk and K rates simply cannot have a batting average that high. To prove this point, here are all 18,169 qualified hitters since 1871 plotted by their walk and strikeout numbers. I swear this is not overdoing it:

Obviously, this season is an outlier, and some data points around Kurtz show he’s even more of an outlier than that graph shows. 2021 Joey Gallo and 2008 Jack Cust are two in Kurtz’s quadrant, and those are two sub-.240 hitters. Save for Judge, who, again, is not someone who can be replicated, something has to give eventually. For Kurtz, it’s the walk rate, which has spiked eight whole percent this season over last. ZiPS is not buying it, and probably for good reason, since nothing about Kurtz’s batted-ball metrics or expected batting average suggests he’s getting lucky with his contact; that average will probably stay where it is.

Kurtz’s all-field approach is what makes him so effective

But there’s more to Kurtz than his abnormally high walk rate. The thing I love about his approach, and what makes him so unique, comes out in his spray chart. He doesn’t even attempt to pull the ball, almost tracking like a player who really internalized what his youth baseball coach said about using the whole field and then developed physical tools to obliterate the baseball. It’s enough to bring a tear to the eye of every old-school contact hitter on MLB Network broadcasts.

Using the whole field combined with crazy walk and K rates tells me that Kurtz is still a young hitter trying to figure out how to best impact the game—he just happens to be a one-of-one hitting talent that can do that in a lot of different ways. Maybe he really did develop Juan Soto laser eyes this offseason, and if he did, we will almost certainly see that K rate drop and brace for the Nick Kurtz $1.2 billion contract in 2031. If he, in fact, won’t keep this train rolling—erm, walking—we still have an OPS monster who projects as one of the best power hitters MLB has to offer for the next decade. There’s just so much to like; rather than chart another 18,000 players, I’m just going to enjoy watching it play out.

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