How Cubs Ace Justin Steele is Weathering a Storm Within His Pitch Mix

[Matthew Trueblood]

After a few tough starts coming out of the All-Star break, the left-handed workhorse looked much better Sunday night against the Cardinals. Notably, though, he still didn't look like last year's version of himself.

Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports

It might be time to fully kill the notion that Justin Steele is a two-pitch pitcher. From the midpoint of 2022 through the end of last season, that was essentially the case, and Steele was one of the best pitchers in baseball, anyway. His cutter (or four-seamer; we can wade back into that in a moment) and slider combined to comprise 95.9% of all the pitches he threw over that period. He made a case for himself as a Cy Young Award candidate in 2023, based almost completely on those two offerings.

As everyone said all along, though, it's very hard to succeed as a starting pitcher in MLB with just two pitches powering everything, for two reasons. One is obvious and intuitive: hitters learn how to spot and sit on one pitch or the other. When there are only two options on the menu, it's much easier to distinguish them. Three-, four-, and five-pitch arsenals are increasingly common, because pitchers want to be unpredictable and inscrutable to an opposing batter.

The other reason is the one driving the intriguing metamorphosis gripping Steele right now, though. It's equally simple, but we think about it much less: Throwing a pitch consistently, across not just days or weeks or months but years, is very hard. Steele's two best pitches aren't as good right now as they were a year ago.

As Steele evolved from a hurler with several pitches but no clear plan of attack into the cutter-slider monster he became in 2022, his fastball was the embodiment of the growth and change. It was classified as a four-seamer by most algorithms, and in most quarters, it has continued to be, but in the second half of that season and throughout 2023, it was much more like a cutter. With significant gloveside movement and a lack of rising, riding action relative to almost any four-seamer in the game, it was hard to label it any other way. This year, that's not so.

Seeing the whole scatterplot of movement for the pitch in each span helps contextualize the change, but if you want to zoom in and consider a single datum, each of the more prominent blue dots in the center of the clusters represents the average movement of the pitches in that sample. Steele's heater (whatever you call it) has lost about an inch and a half of cutting action and gained about two and a half inches of ride. It's very much what it was early in 2022, again: a cut-ride four-seamer. The thing is, that wasn't the best version of Steele's fastball. That's why he changed it in the first place.

With more backspin and less cut on the pitch, Steele is throwing more heaters in the strike zone, and particularly in the meat of the zone. 

As you would guess, this change has made the results on the pitch worse, though not disastrous. Steele has seen a major degradation in his ground-ball rate, and the fastball movement and location is a major culprit there. Batters are whiffing at the heater at about the same rate, and they still don't often blast it, but they make solid contact with it far more often than in the past.

His slider has eroded a bit, too. Without a big alteration in velocity or spin rate, he's lost a few inches of sweep and a couple of inches of drop. It's still a fine seam-shifted wake-fueled slider, but it's a bit less special than it was at many points over the two previous campaigns.

Steele has lost ground balls he was getting with the slider, too, and unlike the fastball's regression toward something normal, the slider's loss of movement has cost him some whiffs. However, he's made it come out as a wash, for the most part, by landing the pitch in the zone more often.

Obviously, there's risk in throwing more breaking balls with a bigger piece of the strike zone, as Steele is now doing. Yet, he hasn't paid for it much, yet. He's only given up three homers on the slider this season, and opponents have just a .428 OPS against the offering. He's getting substantially more called strikes with the pitch, making up for some lost whiffs and balancing out hard contact allowed when hitters do swing.

Despite materially worse movement and questionable location on each of his two pitches, Steele has gutted his way to a 3.33 ERA and peripherals that match that number. How? Well, if you were a two-pitch pitcher and your two pitches each got worse, what would you do about it?

Here's Steele's whole pitch break chart for 2023:

And here's the same chart for this year:

You can see the same changes to the blue and green clusters we already reviewed in close-up fashion, but zoomed out this way, you can also see something else: more of the other colors, in the second image. Steele has thrown each of his sinker, his changeup, and his curveball more times than he did all last year, in 12 fewer starts and 65 fewer innings.

None of the three is about to supplant the two offerings that still dominate his approach. Remember that 95.9% number from the previous season and a half? Steele still uses the fastball and slider 89.4% of the time, combined. Yet, each pitch has made just enough progress to have an impact, when he utilizes it properly. The sinker has considerably more arm-side run than it did in the past, so he's still getting ground balls with it but isn't risking a meatball every time he tries to do so. He's killing spin better with the changeup, so it runs a hair more and retains the heavy action he found with it last year.

He still can't throw the change in the zone often enough for it to be more than a surprise attack, but he has started landing the curve in the zone, with tighter spin and a bit less loop, such that he's able to steal more strikes when batters can't pull the trigger and still gets grounders when they do. Again, he won't push his way to another season of Cy Young votes with any of these three pitches, but there's no guarantee that the previous versions of his fastball/cutter and slider are ever coming back. For now, at least, he needs to find ways to get outs and keep hitters on the defensive with pitches other than those two, and he's doing it this year. It might be under duress, and he might still be a worse pitcher than he was before 2024, but Steele is a more well-rounded and creative moundsman today than he was then. Sunday night was a good example of how it can all come together.

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