It’s worth a look, anyway.
Carson Kelly is off to a fantastic — and wholly unexpected — start for the Chicago Cubs in 2025.
In 20 games, with 80 plate appearances, Kelly is batting .361/.500/.820 with eight home runs, 23 RBI, 16 runs scored, 17 walks and only seven strikeouts.
He remains, as of Tuesday morning, the only MLB player with at least eight home runs and fewer strikeouts than homers, which is just wild. In case you were wondering:
Carson Kelly has 8 HR, 7 K this season.
Last 3 players to finish a season with 8+ HR and more homers than strikeouts?@baseball_ref @Stathead pic.twitter.com/gpmAuHkCB9
— Christopher Kamka (@ckamka) May 6, 2025
The 1.320 OPS would lead MLB — yes, even better than Aaron Judge’s 1.238 — if Kelly had enough plate appearances to qualify, and he’s a lot short of that. Through Tuesday, a Cubs hitter would need 112 PA to qualify, and as noted, Kelly has just 80.
While Craig Counsell has split the catching duties almost evenly between Kelly and Miguel Amaya, he does seem to want to ride Kelly’s hot bat, at least for now. Kelly has started five of the last seven games, and in those five games he’s hit .400/.455/.750 (8-for-20, two home runs) — and his OPS has actually gone down, from 1.371 to 1.320.
I thought it would be worth taking a look at Cubs catcher hitting seasons, since there have been just a small handful of Cubs catchers who have had good-to-outstanding such years.
The only Cubs catchers who have hit 30 or more home runs in a season are Gabby Hartnett (37 in 1930) and Rick Wilkins (30 in 1993). Both of those years were flukish. 1930 was a huge offensive year across baseball — the entire National League hit .303! Hartnett’s second-highest home run year was 24 in 1925, and he hit 20 or more only one other time (22 in 1934). Wilkins might have had one of the flukiest 30-homer seasons ever — his next-best was 14 in 1996, split between the Astros and Giants.
There have been 23 seasons in Cubs history in which a catcher has had an OPS over .800 with at least 300 plate appearances — and that seems about what Kelly might get in terms of PA, as he’s maxed out at 365 (in 2019, where he also had his season-best OPS of .826). Of those 23 seasons, 13 were posted by Gabby Hartnett, three by Michael Barrett, two each by Willson Contreras, Geovany Soto and Bob O’Farrell, and one by Wilkins (that 1993 season).
Hartnett, obviously, is a Hall of Famer and no one’s expecting Kelly to do anything close to what Hartnett did. Among the others listed, the top OPS is .890, by Soto in 2010, and next-best is .888, by Contreras in 2019. Barrett’s .885 in 2006 comes closest to that.
Could Kelly ride his great start to an OPS around .850 to .900 in 300 plate appearances? He’s never done it before in a full season, though he did have 20-game stretches above 1.100 with the Diamondbacks both in 2019 and 2021.
Perhaps Kelly’s workload can be managed to the point where he could put up an OPS around .850 to .900 for the 2025 season. His best year by bWAR was 2021, when he posted 2.1 for the D-backs. That year, he hit 13 home runs and had an OPS of .746, with much of the WAR value coming from defense. Kelly has positive defensive bWAR so far this year, and overall he’s already at 1.7 bWAR overall, which would be his second-best for a full season — in only 20 games!
Whatever happens the rest of the year, and Kelly’s year is likely to come up somewhat short of “best hitting season ever for a Cubs catcher,” the Cubs should surely ride Kelly’s hot bat for as long as it lasts.