Article: What Kyle Hendricks Worked On On Tuesday Night, and Where He Stands for 2024

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Chicago Cubs' beloved, longest-tenured veteran sailed through the first four innings of his penultimate preseason start Tuesday night, but ran into some telling trouble in the fifth.

Image courtesy of © Matt Kartozian-USA TODAY Sports

It was pretty clear that Kyle Hendricks's priority Tuesday night was sharpening certain pitches and experimenting with some uncomfortable sequences, rather than getting out the Arizona Diamondbacks. Still, he looked terrific over the first four innings. Using his curveball much more often than he does during the regular season, he sliced through the visitors' lineup the first one and a half times, stealing strikes with the hook and inducing plenty of weak contact with his more traditional sinker and changeups.

In the fifth inning, though, the wheels came off entirely. Hendricks gave up four runs and didn't get out of the frame, as Arizona made solid contact on a handful of his mistakes and found the lines and gaps for multiple extra-base hits. The results don't matter, but the process within that inning reflected some important truths about Hendricks at this stage of his career--ones that are becoming inescapable and less easily mitigated than they used to be.

Watching Hendricks (especially as a seasoned Cubs fan) is a joy, because you can really think along with him from pitch to pitch. By now, his arsenal and the way it works are intimately familiar, and it's possible to get inside his head as he stares in at the batter and calls his own game. That also makes it uniquely obvious when something isn't quite working right, though, and it can add a bit of anxiety and frustration when he comes off the rails, because the reasons for that are plain but not necessarily fixable.

On Tuesday night, Hendricks started running into trouble in the fifth because he lost command of his sinker to the glove side. That's a tough pitch to execute, even for a control artist like Hendricks, and he had a couple of those offerings leak right over the middle of the plate after he tried to target the upper, first-base side quadrant of the zone with them. Seeing him for a second and third time in the contest, the Diamondbacks didn't miss those mistakes.

That's a tough problem to work around, because Hendricks's four-seamer is a pitch with limited and situational utility. He needs the sinker to be consistent, and times when his command of it has gotten loose have grown steadily more frequent over the last four or five years. Most of his problems have come to the arm side, and late in his outing, he did also start missing when he targeted that side of the plate, but it can be especially easy for lefties to tee off on him when he struggles to work the hard stuff across to the inner edge against them. 

Despite his changeup-forward repertoire, Hendricks hasn't generally been a reverse-split guy during his career. He was in 2023, though, as he neutralized lefties by staying away, away, away from them, enticing and teasing them with stuff they couldn't hit with any real authority. He showed that deft touch until the fifth inning Tuesday night, too, but got whacked around by lefties in the unfortunate frame. His ability to command the sinker deeper into games will be crucial this year. Over the last three years, when the fatigue has tended to loosen up his command a bit earlier than in the past, opponents have hit Hendricks hard the third time through the order.

As has been discussed over the last few years (and as I documented neatly last summer), Hendricks's changeup is really two different pitches, and that was another thing that gave him trouble in the troublesome fifth Tuesday night. His nickel-curve style changeup to righties--one that behaves like a low-intensity, dipping cutter--continued to work throughout the game. It moved the way he wants it to, and he basically put it right where he wanted to put it. His more traditional, tumble-and-fade lefty changeup, however, was on the fritz, even before the fifth.

It looked like it might have been intentional. Hendricks threw a couple of changeups to lefties that had the shape of the one he usually throws to righties, tacking gently toward their back foot instead of running off the plate away from them. It makes some sense if he wants to gain a feel for using both flavors of the cambio against lefties; it does set up and play off of some locations where he'd like to throw his sinker against them. Still, in the fifth inning, the Diamondbacks took advantage of it. They started sitting on the pitch, and whereas it found the ends of their bats for lazy outs in the early going, they got the barrel to it late. If Hendricks was doing an experiment, he gained valuable data, but if he wants to be able to use that version of his change to opposite-handed batters, he'll need to sequence and locate differently to get less confident swings.

At the very end of the long fifth frame, two more good Arizona swings drew my attention. Hendricks left a curveball up in the meat of the zone, spinning lazily, and gave up a single through the left side. That was the first time he'd executed the pitch so poorly all night. No pitcher stays perfectly sharp and fresh throughout a full-length start, so mistakes like those are inevitable, but maybe that's another important datum. Hendricks might not be able to count on the curve later in a game, because his misses with it have always tended to be high and arm-side, which is the much more dangerous way to miss with a slow hook like that one. He doesn't bury it in the dirt, so he needs to know he's going to hit his mark with it or catch a hitter totally off-guard before committing to it.

The other pitch of note was one Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. smacked down the right-field line for a double, chasing Hendricks. It came on a first-pitch changeup, with that signature dip and slide away from him, but Gurriel had been sitting on it and was thinking about the opposite field with it. That's another thing worth watching with him, and might be a reason why Craig Counsell will simply have to be proactive about taking him out the third time through an opposing lineup all year. The first couple times a hitter sees Hendricks within a game, he's likely to struggle, because while Hendricks's stuff isn't overpowering, he's too good at locating and tunneling his stuff for the hitter to put him on a particular pitch. Guys do their best to be ready for both the sinker and the changeup (whichever shape), but their inability to feel conviction about one or the other is key to the soft contact they tend to make.

Gurriel went to the plate that third time confident that he could spot and attack Hendricks on the first pitch, believing he knew which pitch he would see and in what spot, as well as where he could best redirect it. That's been a sticky problem for Hendricks lately, because the arsenal is really relatively thin, and because he's had to bust out the curve earlier than he'd like in most of his starts since 2020, leaving little left with which to surprise a hitter late in a start.

Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA projection system pegs Hendricks for an uninspiring 4.61 ERA this year, even after his resurgent 2023. Things like the above are why. It's not destiny, but it is reality. If the Cubs want to get anything close to the 3.74 ERA he gave them last year, Counsell needs to be more aggressive about pulling Hendricks than David Ross tended to be. Mostly, though, whether Hendricks can continue to be a solid starter depends on how well he makes some of the adjustments outlined above, after using this start to tune himself up and discover some of what will work (and what won't) in the coming campaign.

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