Article: The 3 Key Changes Jordan Wicks Has Made for 2024

Matthew Trueblood · April 7, 2024

Though his final lines have looked underwhelming in each start, the Cubs have an impressive, homegrown mid-rotation rookie at the heart of their rotation. This is the story of how he got there.

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports

It was an awfully tall order, asking Jordan Wicks to go after the lineups of the Texas Rangers and Los Angeles Dodgers in the first two outings of his 2024 season. They were two of the top three teams in baseball in runs last year, and two of the top four in wRC+. That was before the Dodgers added Shohei Ohtani, and before the Rangers fully installed elite prospects Evan Carter and Wyatt Langford in their lineup. It shouldn't come as any kind of shock that he only made it through 8 2/3 total innings, or that he allowed seven runs.

We don't have to make excuses or apologies (like pointing out that three of the runs he's surrendered were technically unearned) for Wicks, though, because despite the surface-level numbers, he's been profoundly impressive. Against two of the toughest offenses in the game, he rarely looked endangered and occasionally looked dominant, striking out 13 and walking just four of the 43 batters he's faced. He's not getting the ball on the ground or minimizing hard contact the way he'll need to do in the future, but that's because he was facing some of the best hitters on Earth.

During spring training, I wrote about the understandable but untenable mess that was Wicks's pitch mix in 2023. His arsenal featured three fastball looks, a changeup, and two breaking pitches, but at least one of the fastballs was redundant, and the slider and curveball seemed to interfere with each other, in terms of execution. At the time, I suggested cutting way back on the sinker and cutter and ditching his curveball.

That's not quite what Wicks has done, but he's certainly made big adjustments. We can confidently distill those changes down to three concepts, each of which responds in some way to what I wrote during camp.

The Four-Seamer is Rising
Wicks already had a bit of the cut-ride (that is, with more movement toward an opposite-handed batter than a typical fastball has and an above-average amount of carry) action that the Cubs prize in their starting pitchers. This year, though, he has more than a bit of it. His heater is both cutting and rising an extra couple of inches, relative to its 2023 averages, which is why you've seen him able to miss bats up in the zone with it in a way that he couldn't last year.

Wicks has worked to the glove side (in on right-handed batters) and up in the zone with his four-seamer often over two starts, setting up the rest of his arsenal beautifully and overpowering hitters, despite less-than-overpowering sheer stuff. It helps that, despite it being early in April and the cold weather in one of his two starts, his velocity itself is also incrementally higher than last year.

The Cutter Is Gone
As I wrote in February, the utility of Wicks's cutter in the context of an arsenal centered around a fastball that already had some cut-ride action on it was limited. It wasn't a hard enough, sharp enough, or distinct enough pitch to do anything for him except make it harder to command the rest of his stuff, and through two starts, he's thrown it exactly once. It feels like he's elected to focus on getting more cut and ride on the four-seamer, and to eschew the cutter itself for the sake of simplicity.

That's the right call, made easier by the change in the fastball's movement. Wicks has an arsenal that can assail right-handed batters at multiple angles without the cutter, with good command of the changeup at the bottom of the zone and the fastball at the top, plus the curve coming in from a different angle to steal called strikes. Here's a chart I originally showed you in February, of Wicks's movement by pitch type in 2023:

Here's the same chart of his pitches so far in 2024.

With the cutter out of the way. his slider has taken on a much more consistent shape, and he's added more sweep to that pitch in some instances. There's a clear set of pitch pairings he can use with this arsenal, much more so than with the six-pitch muddle of 2023.

Two More Distinct Breaking Ball Shapes
More conviction in the four-seamer and sinker, as situation and platoon circumstance dictate, has meant more clarity about which breaking ball to throw when, and eliminating the cutter seems to have eased his effort to keep his hook and slider separate from one another. Let's break him down into two pitchers. Against righties, he's heavily reliant on the four-seamer and changeup, with a few sinkers to stretch the outer edge and set up the high, inside fastball, and a few fairly big, fairly vertical curves.

Against lefties, though, it's a more power-focused array, with the sinker and four-seamer playing off each other differently (the sinker running in on the hitter sets up the slider away; the four-seamer is meant as a surprise attack when the hitter gets used to the heavier action of the sinker) and the slider widening the outside corner.

There's little reason for Wicks to throw his changeup or his curve to lefties, nor his slider to righties. He's clearer on that, now, thanks to a slimmer but more robust repertoire that slots each pitch into a specific role.

Wicks's next two starts figure to be against the Mariners and Diamondbacks. Those two are no picnic, themselves, but they might feel like one, after the Dodgers and Rangers. Wicks will put up better numbers in future starts, if he sticks to the tweaks that made him good enough to fight both of those championship-caliber lineups to a draw.