Article: Ben Brown is a Potential Ace. He's Also a Ticking Time Bomb That's Already Blown Once.

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Chicago Cubs announced Sunday that Ben Brown will make his second career start Monday night in Arizona. Brown has been a revelation for the starter-needy Cubs this April, but can he hold up?

Image courtesy of © Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports

 

Although Jameson Taillon is right on the cusp of a return to the Cubs' starting rotation, the team won't turn to their veteran workhorse during their visit to the Arizona Diamondbacks to close out a nine-game road trip. Instead, they'll maintain the rotation established at the start of the West Coast swing, with Ben Brown, Kyle Hendricks, and Jordan Wicks working in the same sequence in which they appeared in San Diego and (in Wicks's case) Seattle last week.

#Cubs probables in Arizona:

Monday - Ben Brown
Tuesday - Kyle Hendricks
Wednesday - Jordan Wicks

— Andy Martínez (@amartinez_11) April 14, 2024

That delays any answer as to whether Brown will stay in the rotation after Taillon is reinstated on a full-time basis. The Cubs could go to a six-man rotation, to maximize the likelihood of keeping their mix of veterans without premium arm strength and youngsters in need of some protection healthy. Alternatively, they could slide Javier Assad to the bullpen, given the versatility he's shown during his brief career and his capacity to give them multiple innings in a contest in relief. Brown is the other candidate for demotion, either to the pen or back to Triple-A Iowa. After what he showed Tuesday, though, another strong start Monday would make that an awfully tough call.

In a start confined to just 77 total offerings by the team's knowledge that Brown wasn't fully stretched out to pitch in a traditional version of that role, Brown threw 37 pitches in excess of 96 miles per hour, and 27 north of 97 MPH. He's also a pitcher who achieves above-average extension, covering just under 7 feet of the 60 feet, six inches between mound and plate before releasing the ball, on average. That's a rare and dazzling combination of sheer power and the ability to sustain it throughout an appearance.

How rare? Over the last six-plus seasons (the ones for which we have reliable data on exactly where a hurler released the ball), only 32 pitchers have met one of the thresholds set by those velocity standards: 35 or more heaters at 96+, or 20 or more at 97+, all with at least 6.7 feet of extension. It's a list populated densely by stars and award winners. The four pitchers who have done it most often during that period are Zack Wheeler, Spencer Strider, Jacob deGrom, and Tyler Glasnow. That indicates the level of intensity of stuff we're talking about, and the astronomical contracts each of them have signed reflect the value the game places on this kind of skill set. As I wrote last week, too, Brown's curveball is no minor secondary weapon. His upside is impossible to ignore.

I bet you also can't bring yourself to ignore something else, though--something all four of the names above have in common, and many more members of that fraternity of 32, besides. Strider had Tommy John surgery late last week, leaving a second scar on his elbow after he got the same procedure in college in 2019. He's one of 17 on this list of 32 who have had that procedure--including Brown, who had it in 2019, too, after he'd already signed with the Phillies and turned pro.

 

Pitcher	TJS Year	TJS Age
Zack Wheeler	2015	24
Spencer Strider	2019	20*
Jacob deGrom	2011	23
Tyler Glasnow	2021	27
Bobby Miller	-	-
Grayson Rodriguez	-	-
Logan Gilbert	-	-
Shohei Ohtani	2018	24*
Blake Snell	-	-
Eury Pérez	2024	20
MacKenzie Gore	-	-
Johan Oviedo	2024	25
Gavin Williams	-	-
Shane McClanahan	2015	18*
Michael Kopech	2018	22
Carlos Hernández	-	-
Gerrit Cole	-	-
Alex Meyer	-	-
Garrett Crochet	2022	23
Luis L. Ortiz	-	-
Mason Miller	-	-
Brandon Woodruff	-	-
Luis Gil	2022	24
Drew Rasmussen	2016	20*
Nathan Eovaldi	2007	17*
Jared Jones	-	-
Joe Boyle	-	-
Jordan Hicks	2019	22
Tylor Megill	-	-
Dustin May	2021	23*
Noah Syndergaard	2020	27
Ben Brown	2019	19

Over the last few years, the share of all MLB pitchers who have undergone Tommy John surgery at least once has crept from just under one-third to just over that mark. That's alarming enough, but the rate in this subset of power arms is north of 50 percent. More concerning, still, is the fact that it's easy to imagine the number rising from here. Brandon Woodruff, Gerrit Cole, and Blake Snell head a group of veterans who appear to have come through this much flamethrowing intact, and who are relatively unlikely to succumb now, but there are a number of young hurlers here who are still very much in the injury nexus: they're throwing hard, they've done it a large number of times even within individual games, and their elbow ligaments are (in all likelihood, based on everything we know about the anatomy of that part of the body) not yet fully developed. This list could be pushing twice the global injury rate, within a year.

One more piece of bad news, before we take a step back to examine this through less alarmist lenses: Six of the 17 players listed here who have had the surgery once needed it again, later in their careers. Brown, who (like Strider, Drew Rasmussen, Nathan Eovaldi, Shane McClanahan, and Eury Perez) had the surgery at a very young age, is hardly out of the woods. Of the other five guys who throw this hard and had surgery at or before age 20, the only ones who haven't required a revision are Pérez (the inclusion of whom is almost black humor, because he just had the surgery this month) and Brown.

Ok, now for that promised wider angle. Obviously, throwing the way Brown does--with all that extension, straining his limbs to their utmost, and with such explosive (both in performance terms and, alas, in terms of health risk) speed--comes with enormous risk. At the same time, it's almost a surefire way to be successful in the modern game, and there's almost no other surefire way. The Cubs have, for much of the last decade, been less exposed to the Tommy John epidemic than most of the rest of the league, but that's been largely because they don't throw hard, don't miss bats, and lean on amalgamating traits to prevent enough runs to win. They've needed great defense, great depth, and great pitch framing to win games ever since Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer pulled into town.

For the first time, there are some signs that that might not be true anymore. Brown is the tip of the spear, but they've also had some very hard throwers in the bullpen recently, and they're developing a pipeline of pitchers who look more like Brown than (for instance) Kyle Hendricks, who has had some injury issues of his own but was never in much danger of shredding his UCL, including top prospect Cade Horton. They've tried to resist the pull toward dangerous velocity for years, while still assembling competitive pitching staffs. It's proved impossible, or at least prohibitively difficult, and they're now embracing a bit more risk. 

Where do they now draw the line? Can they coach the likes of Brown, Horton, and other electric arms up so well that they can dominate opponents without tendon-shearing violence? Can they balance investment in that kind of pitcher with commitment to the kind of touch of which Hendricks, Jon Lester, Justin Steele and others have proved some efficacy? Or do they have no choice, if they want to get back over the hump and into World Series consideration, but to risk running through pitchers with the cold purposefulness of a surgeon's scalpel, the way the Astros and Dodgers (among others) have been doing for a decade? 

If there were easy answers to these questions, we'd already have them. These types of conversations are happening in dugouts, front offices, and agents' offices throughout the baseball world right now, but the right answer for each team is not a destination at which to arrive; it's just a checkpoint. By the time you slide into one base, safe and sure enough of your approach to dust yourself off and look around, the ball is in play again, and you have to be running. The Marlins tried desperately to shield Pérez from the buzzsaw inside his own arm, with radical limitations on his workload. It didn't work. The A's have moved Mason Miller to the bullpen, where they hope all that velocity won't have the same cumulative impact. Soon, that will become a viable choice for the Cubs, though it'd be a tough one to make.

The Cubs face a dilemma with Brown, because his elbow is a bomb that has gone off once before, and it could well explode again. They have a responsibility to him, to protect his arm as best they can as he nears the point where he can make real money in the game, but they have one to themselves and their fans, too. It's an agonizing set of discussions, but one we can no longer avoid, even between surgery announcements.

 

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[Guest234]

Are you an orthopedist, can you cite data that ligaments develop strength as a pitcher ages?

[CubinNY]

It looks like Brown has changed and simplified his wind-up, but I'm not an expert. If he has it may help with control and arm stress. 

[Outshined_One]

It's not just TJS with Brown, though, because he puts a ton of strain on the rest of his body. He didn't look anywhere close to being the same guy last year after he went down with an oblique strain and struggled in his comeback.

If they can get 100+ IP out of him as an SP this season, awesome, but I've always had him earmarked as a dynamite closer for this reason.