There are cold streaks, and then there is what Nico Hoerner is going through right now.
For most of his career, Hoerner has been one of the most reliable contact hitters in baseball. A two-time Gold Glove winner at second base. A guy who finished last season with the second-highest batting average in the National League at .297. Someone with the third-best strikeout rate among active players heading into 2026. Not a home run hitter, not a slugger, just an elite bat-to-ball player who consistently puts the ball in play.
And he was doing exactly that in April. Hoerner opened 2026 slashing .300/.376/.464 with four home runs and 24 RBI. He earned NL Player of the Week honors on April 20. The Cubs were 17-9 and their offense ranked first in all of baseball by fWAR. Everything was clicking.
Then came April 29 in San Diego.
Hoerner took a 90-mph fastball to the front of his helmet. He shook it off, smiled at the Cubs' dugout, and stayed in the game and kept playing. No one made a huge deal of it. But the numbers since that at-bat tell a different story entirely.
Entering this week, Hoerner had slashed .206/.292/.250 with zero home runs and just seven RBI in the games following that hit-by-pitch. The Cubs, after racing out to 27-12 and a division lead, went 13-21 over that span. Sports Illustrated called it one of the worst slumps of Hoerner's career.
The last 10 games tell the starkest version of the story. Hoerner's season average sits at 0.9 hits per game. Over his last 10, that number has dropped to 0.4, less than half his normal rate. He is hitless in each of his last four outings and 0-for-9 against Colorado in this week's series alone. His OBP over the last 10 games is .100. His slugging is .100. His OPS is .300. Every offensive category is trending in the same direction at the same time.
What makes this more than a bad-luck stretch is the underlying contact data. Rithmm's models are flagging a genuine contact problem, not just a cold run. Hoerner's hits with runners in scoring position have collapsed alongside his OBP, slugging, and overall OPS, meaning this is not a case of hard-hit balls finding gloves. His swing-and-miss tendencies have increased, and his at-bats per hit have spiked sharply over this stretch.
Tonight's matchup looks like a potential lifeline on paper. Colorado ranks 25th in the league in strikeouts with an 8.95 K/9 rate, which sounds like a favorable environment for a contact hitter to bounce back. But that is exactly the nuance here. Hoerner's contact struggles have been happening against every kind of pitching during this stretch, and a soft strikeout rate does not fix a swing that is generating less contact than at any point in recent memory.
Rithmm's models are projecting 1.3 hits for Hoerner tonight, which lands comfortably under the 1.5 line. The win probability sits at 69.1%, and the app has flagged this as a Parlay Piece.
That Parlay Piece tag matters here. At -189, this is a heavy line to take on its own. You are laying a lot of juice on a single prop, and that is where the math starts working against you on a standalone basis. The smarter play is using this as an anchor leg in a parlay, letting the strong win probability carry its weight while you pair it with other high-confidence plays to bring your overall payout to a number that makes sense.
If you want to see what the models are flagging as the right legs to build around it tonight, that is exactly what Rithmm is built for. The full slate is live in the app, and the models have already done the work.
One of baseball's best contact hitters is averaging less than half a hit per game over his last ten. The models see more of the same tonight. The data is pointing in one direction.
