With Javier Assad Joining Crowded Cubs Injured List, Who Rounds Out Pitching Staff?

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Chicago Cubs' pitching staff has been depleted by injuries since before Opening Day, but it's getting worse by the day. The group is now a patchwork, and the team will have to scramble to stay afloat in the coming weeks.

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It was bad enough when Jameson Taillon had to open the season on the injured list, and then when he was joined there by Justin Steele after Steele's Opening Day hamstring strain. Barely a week later, Julian Merryweather was down with a serious ribcage injury, and the team has not been full strength since.

Lately, though, things are taking a turn toward the darkly comic. In the last few days, alone, the team has lost their best remaining reliever (Mark Leiter Jr.) and their fifth starter (Javier Assad) to forearm strains. They've gotten Keegan Thompson and Colten Brewer, who are just barely big-league hurlers, back from injuries, and been compelled to thrust them directly into high-leverage work. They picked up reliever Vinny Nittoli while in San Francisco, after Nittoli was designated for assignment by the unfathomably bad Oakland Athletics, cleared waivers, and was released. Nittoli got a big-league deal, and could stick around for a while, because this team is even out of healthy arms to call up from Triple-A Iowa. 

Nittoli throws anywhere from five to seven different pitches, depending on how you interpret his data. Without question, he's a kitchen-sink guy, not unlike Assad, but his primary offering is a cutter that sits at just 90 miles per hour, and it's not clear whether he can throw strikes well enough to get big-leaguers out without living in the heart of the zone, where they will torch his underwhelming stuff.

Nittoli does have a strikeout rate north of 31% for the season, but much of that work was done in Triple-A. In a brief stint with the A's, he had a nice-looking ERA and only walked 6.3% of opposing hitters, but his strikeout rate was also south of 16%. He's a low-slot, funky release point guy with heavy stuff, but he doesn't get as many grounders as that might imply. Little separates Nittoli from José Cuas, with whom the Cubs recently parted ways, other than his deeper repertoire.

Porter Hodge is a very different story, of course. The rookie who (barely) closed out the team's win Thursday looks more like the typical modern high-leverage reliever, with a fastball that sits 95-97 and a sweeper that has fairly extreme movement.

For Hodge, much of the challenge is just in throwing strikes. He comes from a pretty steep horizontal angle and is a big guy, and the movement profiles of his four-seamer and sweeper make filling up the zone difficult. If he can avoid walks, he should be an effective reliever. He might even emerge as the team's closer. Fastballs like his are rare; there are only a dozen pitchers anywhere in the league who have one quite like it.

That chart includes some illustrious names, though of course, many of them (Tyler Glasnow and Dylan Cease, for instance) get a lot of their value from the extra inch or two of ride they get on the pitch, relative to Hodge. Pairing this kind of fastball with a sweeper, rather than a more vertical breaking ball, is especially unusual, and should make Hodge a headache for opposing batters. What it will not do, though, is generate the same kind of swing-and-miss that those overhand curveballs and gyro sliders do. He will therefore be susceptible to a little more fluky batted-ball luck than you'd think, for a pitcher with such a bully of a two-pitch mix.

Nittoli (for however long he or Brewer stick around) and Hodge will be especially important pieces of the bullpen for a while, because Hayden Wesneski has had to be promoted to the starting rotation. The Cubs tried to avoid this, and understandably so. Wesneski just isn't a starter. That was clear by the end of 2023. This season, it's felt increasingly like his vulnerability to home runs will be disqualifying even in a relief role, but at least he has a chance of being good in that capacity. As a starter, he's going to get knocked around, and only because Assad, Jordan Wicks, Ben Brown, and Cade Horton are all hurt at once is he even getting this look again.

No team would envy the position the Cubs are in. They brought some of this on themselves, by stubbornly refusing to spend more over the winter and reinforce themselves better. What they've run into would be hard for any club to overcome, though, so they have to get some grace from fans. They'll get none from opponents, though, so unless they get strong performances in key roles from Nittoli, Hodge, and Wesneski, the team remains very much in peril. They could be 10 games under .500 by the 4th of July, and while they should already be looking at ways to sell and pivot toward the future at the deadline, every loss over the next fortnight will force them further in that direction and damage their leverage in negotiations.

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