Nick Kurtz is off to a special start to his MLB career

The Athletics phenom is following up his Rookie of the Year campaign with an even more impressive season thus far.

Taking the franchise’s ridiculous and controversial planned move to Las Vegas aside, it seemed like it would be a long time until A’s baseball was worth watching again after the franchise slumped to a 50-102 record in 2023, just one year before bidding the Oakland Coliseum farewell for good.

Yet even then, some of the pieces of the team we see this year in West Sacramento started to come together. Shea Langeliers, Lawrence Butler and Tyler Soderstrom all saw playing time, with Langeliers serving as an everyday player for the first time in his career. The following season saw a marked 19-game improvement along with the debut of shortstop Jacob Wilson as the team played its final games in the coliseum.

The biggest addition of young talent the franchise had during this time was made in the MLB Draft however, with first baseman Nick Kurtz being selected as the fourth overall pick in 2024, emerging as a seasoned left-handed power bat out of Wake Forest University.

Kurtz took very little time adjusting to big-league pitching, and ultimately put up one of the best rookie seasons in recent memory. In his age-22 season, Kurtz hit 26 doubles and 36 home runs, including four in one game, while posting an OPS of 1.002 with a .290 batting average and .619 slugging percentage.

In addition to winning the AL Rookie of the Year award, Kurtz also finished 12th in AL MVP voting and took home the Silver Slugger Award for AL first basemen – a lofty achievement not often reached by a rookie.

Though some rookies follow up their incredible freshman efforts with a sophomore slump, that has not at all been the case for Nick Kurtz, who has injected himself into the AL MVP conversation with an incredible start to his 2026 campaign.

After a 5.0 bWAR season in 2025, Kurtz has already accumulated 3.8 WAR this season, leading the AL with 54 runs while currently leading all of MLB in RBI, walks and on-base percentage, with marks of 58, 71 and .437, respectively.

While Kurtz’s astronomical 7.4% home run rate has dropped to a more sustainable 5.2% this season, it has come with significant improvements in other aspects of the average plate appearance. Although still a frequent strikeout candidate, Kurtz has trimmed his K rate from 30.9% to 29.6% while dramatically increasing his walk rate from 12.9% to a Joey Votto-esque 20.4%, making Kurtz one of the toughest outs in MLB this year.

Now I just mentioned Joey Votto, a future Hall of Fame first baseman who built his career off of being perhaps the toughest out in all of baseball. With unmatched knowledge of the strike zone and elite contact and power ability, there was simply no room to make a mistake with Votto, who retired with 1,365 walks, ranking him 34th all-time.

Although Votto never struck out as much as Kurtz is right now, his walk rate also never exceeded 20.6% in a single season, meaning that Kurtz’s current walk rate only trails one Joey Votto season in what was a Cooperstown-bound 17-year MLB career.

Some may think it’s too early to compare Kurtz to Joey Votto, but it’s impossible to ignore both the results and the similar tools. Beyond both of them being left-handed hitting first basemen who have a penchant for drawing walks, both also come off as incredibly intimidating in the batter’s box, with aggressive stances and plate coverage that often leaves opposing pitchers desperate to paint a corner.

Of course, Kurtz is still striking out more than most hitters in The Show, with only Kyle Schwarber, Zach Neto and James Wood having struck out more than Kurtz as of June 21 – though it’s yet to truly come to his detriment.

While striking out 200 times in a season is never going to a prerequisite to success, Kurtz’s tools are of a caliber that can overcome this weakness – if it even got to a point where it was significantly detracting from his performance, which it currently is not.

What’s an even scarier thought for the average big-league pitcher is thinking of what happens if Kurtz does eliminate this one weakness he has as a hitter. The average strikeout rate across MLB this season lies at 22%, a high mark that is still over seven points below what Kurtz is putting up this year. In a world where Kurtz cuts his strikeout rate to around 25% or even gets closer to league-average, we are likely looking at a player with an on-base percentage approaching the upper .400s.

There’s plenty of competition to Kurtz in the American League this year when it comes to seeking out the MVP award, but it’s fair to think that a healthy finish to the season will earn him an improvement over his 12th-place finish in 2025. Bobby Witt Jr. currently leads all AL position players in WAR, while Yordan Alvarez, Cody Bellinger and Detroit Tigers rookie Kevin McGonigle all within the top 8 in WAR among all MLB position players.

Kurtz is at a slight disadvantage when it comes to racking up WAR simply due to him being a first baseman, one of the more low-leverage defensive positions in baseball that is never known to accumulate much value for a team.

With that said, Kurtz can certainly improve defensively. While he’s been worth 0.1 dWAR this season so far, he also ranks in the 19th percentile for Outs Above Average across all of baseball, with a fielding run value in the 29th percentile.

Elite defense for Kurtz would never result in racking up 2 or 3 defensive WAR in a single season, but it would help complete the package for Kurtz being an all-around perennial MVP candidate, something a player of his caliber has all the potential in the world to do.

There’s no telling how Nick Kurtz’s career will go, especially knowing that at any time for any player, an injury can completely change the future trajectory. There’s especially no telling what this core of A’s players is capable of, an extremely well-constructed lineup of young talent that remains in dire need of help to the pitching staff.

What is clear to any fans, players and media members that have paid attention is that Nick Kurtz is no joke, and the results we have seen so far are no fluke. Just how far he can carry this team remains to be seen.