How to Build a 200-Game Bullpen, Starring the 2025 Chicago Cubs

[Matthew Trueblood]

We all watched, in mixtures of horror and ecstasy, as elite closers folded under the accumulate workloads of their long seasons this October. As the Cubs try to get into that circumstance next year, they need to build a bullpen immune to that problem.

Image courtesy of © Bob Kupbens-Imagn Images

There are 162 games in a regular MLB season. As the playoffs expand, it has become possible for a team to play as many as 22 gmaes in the postseason. Add in the bloated but certainly necessary spring training schedule, and teams have to play more than 200 games to get from one end of a championship year to the other. It's a daunting proposition, especially in an era that has seen starting pitchers take on ever-smaller shares of the workload.

Simply giving those innings back to the rotation is impractical, because of the stady rise in injury rates throughout the league over the last two decades. Going to a six-man rotation is a modification worth consideration, but as the schedule has been slightly lengthened to add more days off, it's become less necessary to consider that relatively extreme stratagem. Besides, in addition to needing to find six competent starters at a time when many teams in the league are scrambling to find four or five, that plan doesn't guarantee health.

It's possible to end up needing to dip into your seventh, eighth, and ninth starters even when starting with six and pacing everyone carefully, and that usually means shorter starts—negating the hypothetical advantage conferred by giving everyone more rest. To make six starters work as a means of lightening the bullpen's load, you have to get an extra inning per start from each of those guys, and that notion directly contravenes the modern paradigm of the starter: get them out of there before undue damage can be done. Avoid having them face the opposing lineup a third time, at almost all costs.

The only way to get through a season with an intact pitching staff capable of dominating enough to achieve the postseason, and then of maintaining their success throughout it, is to pursue unprecedented levels of depth. That's the lesson we should take from the teams who had success in this year's postseason, even as we survey the wreckage of the Mets and Guardians and note the thinness of the remaining staffs for the Yankees and Dodgers. New York already had Gerrit Cole and Nester Cortes (and remained very focused on a high-volume internal pipeline) when they went out and signed Carlos Rodón and Marcus Stroman as depth options in successive offseasons. They amassed lots of bullpen depth, often trading for and stockpiling pitchers who tended to get hurt, but who could be counted on for good innings whenever healthy.

The Dodgers have gone the same route, and perhaps at an even greater extreme. They re-signed Clayton Kershaw, traded for Tyler Glasnow (and then extended him on a lavish deal), and signed Yoshinobu Yamamoto last winter, but they also signed James Paxton to a one-year deal, knowing full well it might create a logjam for their bevy of talented younger arms. When none of those hurlers could stay healthy and contribute much into the second half, the team traded for Jack Flaherty. In the meantime, they assiduously added veteran relievers, squeezing them in unapologetically: Daniel Hudson, Evan Phillips, Blake Treinen, Joe Kelly, and more. They targeted fireballer Michael Kopech as a midseason pickup, even though they knew he would be a bit of a project at the back end of the pen.

That's the approach the Cubs need to take into the coming winter. They have Shota Imanaga, Justin Steele, Jameson Taillon, Javier Assad, and Jordan Wicks penciled in as starters for next year, with Brandon Birdsell and Cade Horton in the wings. Since neither Birdsell nor Horton has to be added to the 40-man roster yet, though, they have some flexibility to add starters at the big-league level, knowing they'll be able to use the injured list to make room for promotions next spring and summer if needed. 

Thus, Jed Hoyer should be plotting an addition along the lines of Rodón, Yamamoto, or Glasnow—someone in the Corbin Burnes-Max Fried bracket of free agency, or on a similar tier in trades—and one like Paxton, with some upside but enough question marks attached to keep their price tag reasonable and short-term. That's just on the starting side of things.

When it comes to relievers, there's even heavier lifting to do, because the Cubs should be thinking creatively and trying something new. We've seen rotations of teams' best starting pitchers for six or seven decades now, but never has a team undertaken a serious, dedicated rotation of its relief aces. Few teams in any given season even have the reliever depth to consider that.

If the Guardians had used Emmanuel Clasé, Cade Smith, and Hunter Gaddis on a three-day rotation all year, each of them would have thrown about 15 fewer innings over 15 or 20 fewer appearances. Given the relative weakness of Cleveland's lineup and starting rotation, they might not have won the AL Central under that usage pattern; they needed to lean on those three and on Tim Herrin in an extraordinarily heavy way.

Once they got to the playoffs, though, that caught up to them. Gaddis and Clasé, especially, took their lumps, and it was the reason why a team good enough to win the pennant fell short. Part of it is a trickle-down effect from their understaffed starting rotation, but part of it is that their formula for winning fell apart under the pressure of the playoffs, due both to the better competition and the workloads that wore them down as the season progressed past its usual finish line.

What if Porter Hodge and two other top-flight Cubs relievers worked on a three-day rotation in 2025? They'd pitch something like 55 or 60 regular-season innings, leaving more to be covered by second-tier relievers than most teams prefer. Working that way would probably augment their effectiveness, though. One of the principal difficulties of being a relief pitcher is the absence of routine or predictability. For a subset of Cubs relievers, that hurdle would be cleared under this system.

Right now, the roster doesn't have a clear lieutenant to Hodge for the role. To pursue this course, the team would need to sign at least one stud reliever in free agency, which is often a fraught, risky thing. Hoyer has never preferred to operate that way, and he'd be stepping out of character by signing Tanner Scott or Jeff Hoffman to high-dollar deals. Trading for Clasé, Mason Miller, or some other elite, team-controlled relief ace would be fascinating, but no less expensive, except monetarily.

One way or another, to do this, the Cubs would need to get a Scott-caliber pitcher to work in rotation with Hodge. The third rotated relief ace could emerge during spring training, though, from a large group of pitchers with obvious upside but less consistent track records. Tyson Miller pitched like that type of guy for most of 2024. If he can sustain it, he could earn a spot in the relief rotation for 2025. Nate Pearson and Luke Little have that kind of upside, but haven't yet demonstrated their durability or consistency to the required level. That could change in a hurry.

Below that group is a much richer, wilder set of wild cards. Hayden Wesneski should be past any dreams of starting and ready to commit to the bullpen; he has a chance to be great there. Julian Merryweather's stuff absolutely cratered after his injury last year, but if he makes it through the winter on the 40-man, he should get a chance to show whether it has recovered next spring. Daniel Palencia, Jack Neely, and Gavin Hollowell all have plenty of upside to be worth keeping around.

Those last three share a vital edge over others, too, because the Cubs will have to add a bunch of players via free agency, trades, and the protection process ahead of the Rule 5 Draft this winter, and that will cause a roster crunch—first on the 40-man, then on the active roster within the season. Palencia, Neely, Hollowell, Pearson, Little, and Hodge are all optionable, meaning they could be sent to the minors when needed next season. Whether the team uses five starters or six, if they do employ a three-man relief ace rotation, they'll need to be able to option pitchers fairly often, which means having more guys with that kind of flexibility.

A relief ace rotation is wildly unorthodox, and it will draw fire the same way the Red Sox's 2003 closer by committee experiment did—that is, it will be torched in the media, if the team isn't great. In order to try something so unusual, they need the rest of the roster to be rock-solid. That's why their projects of upgrading the rotation and the lineup will be so important. If they can give themselves the breathing room to try it, though, a relief rotation might be the creative solution so many teams have needed for years, but never found.

Using a relief ace rotation throughout the regular season wouldn't preclude Craig Counsell from ratcheting up the usage of his best hurlers if and when the team made the postseason. It would just keep them fresher when they got there. It would also eliminate the reliever familiarity effect, which has become headline news this fall and last, in any regular-season series shorter than four games, and maybe even soften it in the postseason.

Massive depth. That has to be the goal of every team looking to win anything important in baseball's new, extremely long season. The Dodgers, Yankees, and Mets have it, though they each acquired it at huge cost. The Cubs will have to spend a lot of money and trade from their positional depth on the farm to get there, but they should be trying to build up that same level of depth. It should be an ambitious, massive project, and they should already be hard at work on its planning stages.

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[Bertz]

It wasn't a rotation per se, but it does feel like Craig ended up doing something like this late in the year when Pearson had built up sufficient trust.

Rather than a rotation, it felt almost like Craig had an A team, a B team, and a C team.  A team led by Hodge, and used for tight high leverage games.  B team led by Pearson for less tight games (up 3-4 runs), or when Hodge had already worked two days in a row, and then a C led by Thompson/Smyly for when the team was behind.

You could probably fiddle with the rules for who gets what days, but this feels like a happy medium between what you're proposing and the current nature of pens.  Something like this:

A Team: TBD Free Agent closer, Nate Pearson, and Luke Little

B Team: Porter Hodge, Julian Merryweather, Tyson Miller

C Team: Keegan Thompson and Hayden Wesneski

It'd be more dynamic than a strict rotation, but it should still help with the overall goal of increasing rest and having fewer back to backs.