Cubs Free-Agent Reliever Targets: 5 Strong Changeup Specialists

[Matthew Trueblood]

As Chicago sets out to build a better full-season bullpen for 2025, they have a plethora of free-agent options before them. Plunging a hand into that bargain bin is a risk, though, so it's best to cast a discerning eye over the selection first.

Image courtesy of © Brad Penner-Imagn Images

As happens almost every year, the Cubs found their way to an effective mix of relief arms in the second half in 2024. By then, though, that unit had cost the team several games, and they were unable to make up the gap down the stretch. Next season, they'll try to carry a deeper, more stable bullpen from Opening Day through the end of the regular season--and on into October. That means amassing ample depth, which (in turn) means signing at least one or two highly qualified free agents this winter.

Last winter, though, the team tried to do that very thing, and they failed. Trade acquisition Yency Almonte was thwarted by injury trouble, but free-agent signee Héctor Neris stayed healthy--only to fail miserably. He was a longtime big-leaguer with a fine track record, but the wheels came off for him almost at the moment he donned a Cubs uniform. For that matter, there were red flags even in 2023, when Neris's velocity and bat-missing abilities began to erode.

As the Cubs look to bolster their relief corps in the same way this winter, they have to be more successful, which means being a bit more careful and a bit more willing to spend. There are several tiers of potentially valuable relievers on the market, and we'll explore them all over the next few weeks, but for now, let's zero in on some pitchers somewhat similar to Neris--but who stand apart from him in important ways.

There are two truly vital skills to being a consistently successful reliever. They're very hard to find together, because the hurlers who possess them tend either not to make it to free agency; to be successful starters who never move to the pen; or both. However, at the very least, you want to seek out pitchers who do both at an average level. The skills are:

1. Filling up the strike zone, rather than nibbling constantly or missing wildly and thus putting runners on base at an untenable rate; and
2. Missing bats within the zone, so as not to be overly reliant on getting batters to expand the zone.

These are far from the only important skills, of course, but a pitcher who can both consistently throw strikes and induce whiffs when they do has a big leg up on being effective even in high-leverage situations. Ideally, such a pitcher should also throw hard, because that both augments their ability to miss bats in the zone and makes it harder for hitters to square them up and hit for power.

Here's a plot of all pitchers who faced at least 250 batters as relievers last year, on the axes of these two core competencies.

I've highlighted some notable free-agent relievers who will hit the market a few days after the end of the World Series. It's far from being the full list of such pitchers, but this selection helps us visualize who's good at what, within the set. We won't talk about all of them today, though.

In fact, let's hone in on the top left quadrant of the chart, which isn't quite where pitchers want to be. These are the guys who miss more bats than most of their cohort in the zone, but throw fewer strikes than most other arms. This is where Neris lived in 2023, but his numbers slumped badly even in the second half of that campaign, and he was a right-handed hurler who average just 93 miles per hour with his fastball.

Neris's defining characteristic, from an arsenal perspective, is his splitter. It's the pitch with which he tries to keep hitters off his underwhelming fastball and so-so slider. It's also why he sometimes has walk problems, especially when he's not throwing his hardest: the pitch is rarely in the zone. Not coincidentally, the five pitchers we'll tackle right now also have great changeups or splitters. That's the pitch type that gets its greatest relative share of utility from deception, and therefore from being outside the zone. Well-executed changeups and splitters often aren't strikes. The name of the game for pitchers who rely on it is inducing chase with that pitch, and getting enough velocity or movement differential to generate whiffs when they do.

As compensation for the risk of extra walks that comes from not filling up the zone, these pitchers offer some special utility: most of them have small platoon splits, or are significantly better against opposite-handed batters. That's part of what appealed to the Cubs about Neris, and it makes a team tougher on opposing offenses by giving the manager more ways to create advantageous matchups late in the game. So, let's take a closer look at the five guys with exceptional changeups or splitters who are hitting the market soon and could be sound targets for Jed Hoyer and company.

Tommy Kahnle, RHP
How good is Kahnle's changeup? He's thrown it 46 times in a row, and 81 times out of his last 85 pitches. Of the 116 pitches he's thrown in the postseason for the Yankees, 104 have been changeups. That shouldn't work, but he hasn't allowed a run all month. In this cadre of plausible targets, he is by far the most prone to wildness. However, when he does throw fastballs, they sit 94 and touch 97. He can sneak a slider past hitters who try to sit on his fastball and change. And taking all swings, rather than just those in the zone, he gets a higher whiff rate than anyone else on this list.

Kahnle is 35 years old, and the walk rate has to give buyers some pause, but he's a remarkable pitcher who has carved out a long career already--and he might have the highest ceiling in this group.

José Leclerc, RHP
His numbers weren't especially pretty this year, and walks are an issue for Leclerc, too. However, when he's on, he's even nastier than Kahnle, thanks to a fastball that plays better at the top of the zone and a livelier set of alternative offerings. He became famous a few years ago for throwing the slambio, a hybrid of the slider and changeup that uses a high spin rate but an unreliable axis of movement. His change is more about run to the arm side than about massive depth, so it misses fewer bats than Kahnle's, but it's also capable of inducing a lot of weak contact on the ground.

Crucially, Leclerc is also going to turn 31 this December. In a market awash in superannuated relievers, his relative youth will increase demand for him, but the Cubs should join the queue. He's a hard thrower with multiple ways to attack hitters of either handedness.

Matt Moore, LHP
Lefties need a good changeup worse than righties, on average, but most lefties who come up with a really good one stick as starters. Moore did so for a while, but he's now been a successful reliever for two seasons--and an unexpectedly, disastrously unsuccessful one for one, this season with the Angels.

Moore has made plenty of money in a long career, and he's now in his late 30s. A forearm strain ended his season in August, and he might not want the labor and the risk of trying to come back from this latest setback, If he does, though, the Cubs should be one of the suitors. Most hurlers have either a lateral or a vertical change, but Moore's is a two-plane pitch, both fading and diving relative to his 93-MPH fastball from the left side. That makes it versatile and highly effective, when he's healthy enough to make the rest of his mix work. He's well worth what should be a flier, as opposed to the substantial price tags attached to pitchers like Kahnle.

Ryne Stanek, RHP
One thing the Cubs have consistently lacked in recent years is a reliable bully--a pitcher who can come in and threaten 100 miles per hour, without feeling like every outing is a tightrope walk. When they have tried to emphasize velocity, they've often done so by handing the ball to players who had no idea where it was going, or no idea how to throw anything other than straight heaters--guys like Daniel Palencia, Dillon Maples, and so on. Julian Merryweather was a briefly dominant exception, but his velocity didn't come back after his injury early in 2024.

Stanek is heading into his mid-30s, but he still throws 98 miles per hour, touching higher. He also has a devastating splitter, and a slider with tight spin and significant depth. He misses bats with both of those offerings, and can do so with his heater when hitters try to sit on either offspeed pitch. He also throws more strikes than any of the other pitchers we're evaluating today. Despite some uneven surface-level numbers, he has the makings of a level-raising middle reliever. His career and 2024 playoff numbers both attest to his appetite for big moments.

Kirby Yates, RHP
Pushing 40 and the softest right-handed tosser on this list, Yates should be the least exciting of these options. Instead, he might be the most enticing. A late bloomer who made it back from a Tommy John surgery that begat some unexpected complications, Yates has now put in more than a decade in the big leagues, but he's only pitched a little over 400 career innings. It shouldn't be a compelling profile, but again, it is.

He just keeps throwing a fastball that only comes in around 93 miles per hour, with a nasty splitter that could not come out of a more perfectly matched release point. It has about seven miles per hour of separation from the heater, and as much as a foot and a half of extra vertical depth, but both pitches come from the same slot and hold the same line, horizontally. It's viciously difficult to tell one pitch from the other, and hitters have been failing his stern test for years.

---

For reasons we'll get into in another post, I think it's a near-imperative that the Cubs sign two solid, trustworthy, high-end relievers this winter. These are five candidates for the secondary signing in that set. Their profiles verge on being too similar to Neris's for comfort, but they're better than Neris was when the Cubs inked him, and some of them will be considerably cheaper than he was, leaving the team with more resources to allocate elsewhere. They all throw good enough offspeed pitches to permit Craig Counsell flexible usage. Somewhere in this group is a pitcher who can help Hoyer make good on his pledge to reconsider his method of bullpen-building.

View full article