How the Cubs Could Help Brad Keller Help the Cubs in 2025

[Matthew Trueblood]

The erstwhile Royals starter has become a fringe journeyman in his late 20s. After the Cubs scooped him up, though, there's some reason to believe his future is brightening.

Image courtesy of © Dan Hamilton-Imagn Images

It will be an uphill climb for Brad Keller to make the Cubs this spring. He became a minor-league free agent after being outrighted by the Red Sox at the end of 2024, on the heels of an ugly campaign in which he had a 5.44 ERA with the White Sox and Boston—and spent just as much time at Triple A for those teams' affiliates in Charlotte and Worcester, respectively. The Cubs agreed to a minor-league deal with him on Jan. 31, including an invite to big-league spring training, but in front of him in line for potential starts with the team stand Justin Steele, Shota Imanaga, Jameson Taillon, Matthew Boyd, Colin Rea, Javier Assad, Ben Brown and Cody Poteet, all of whom are already on the 40-man roster.

Keller could slide to the bullpen, where he's spent about half his time since the start of 2022, but there's no easier a path to big-league contributions for him there. In his first three MLB seasons, all with the Royals, he had a solid 3.50 ERA across 360 innings, and the latter number could well have been bigger; his third campaign was the COVID-shortened 2020. Since then, though, it's been an inexorable downward trend for him. That's why the Cubs didn't even have to guarantee him a roster spot to bring him to camp.

Yet, there's undeniably something here—and specifically, something the Cubs have had lots of success working with. Keller has six pitches, and his four-seam fastball sits right around 94 miles per hour. That forms the loose framework of a big-league profile, even if a couple of those pitches aren't actually good and the league has gotten so saturated with good pitching that 94 miles per hour is just enough to get a conversation started. Once that conversation starts, the interesting details come into focus. Here's one of them. This is a list of the seven big-league pitchers whose four-seamers had the greatest release height-adjusted horizontal approach angle above average—in short, the hurlers whose fastballs created the sharpest lateral angles as they entered the hitting zone, relative to the angles hitters would tend to expect based on those pitchers' arm slots.

Player	HAA AA
Brent Suter	1.34°
Porter Hodge	0.92°
Colin Poche	0.79°
Tyson Miller	0.75°
Andre Pallante	0.74°
Brad Keller	0.73°
Justin Steele	0.69°

This data comes courtesy of Alex Chamberlain's invaluable Pitch Leaderboard, and as you can see, I put the Cubs on the list in italics. It's not a coincidence that the Cubs dominate the list, either. This is a direct reflection of the preferences around fastball shape that dominate the Cubs' pitching philosophy. I used the absolute value of these guys' horizontal approach angles above average, so a fastball with lots of run could look the same here as one with lots of cut, but in practice, all of these guys throw cutting heaters. In fact, some of their fastballs are even classified not as four-seamers, but as cutters, in some algorithms.

The Cubs love the cut-ride fastball, even if it leans far toward cut and much of the ride is lost in the exchange. They believe it's a reliable way to limit damage on contact, so much so that it makes up for whatever value is lost by the fact that such fastballs tend to miss fewer bats than those with more velocity and vertical movement. There's no question that this is a key reason why Keller was a target for the team; it's why he was one of the minor-league free agents I touted as targets for this team nearly three full months ago.

There are multiple paths back to solid performance for Keller. In relief, his fastball sometimes works up to 97 miles per hour, which tells us how much whip there really is in his arm. His unique shapes—especially the way his split-change and his gyro slider play off the fastball—made him effective against lefties last year, which is always a welcome starting point for a right-handed pitcher. Lefty batters hit just .255/.318/.370 against him, including both MLB and Triple-A time, fueled mostly by a lack of hard contact. Righties, though, hit .246/.311/.421. He had better strikeout and walk rates against same-handed batters, but they were much more able to square up that fastball, which tended to end up in areas of the zone they could get their barrels to.

The good news, on that front, is that after Keller went from the White Sox to the Red Sox during the season, he swapped out a mostly ineffective curveball for a sweeper that was superb against righties. It's becoming pretty easy to envision a mix of that cutting four-seamer, the sweeper and the slider against righties, and the four-seamer, the slider, and the changeup against lefties. He hasn't yet embraced the level of usage you'd like to see for the sweeper against righties, so it might not be fair to judge his numbers against them as though they reflect his static talent level.

Scaling back the sinker has been the right call; Keller just doesn't have a good one. That could change with a bit of a shift in its targeting, to attack the upper arm-side quadrant of the strike zone, but as he's used it throughout his career to this point, the sinker isn't helpful. He's already coming to the organization with some burgeoning adjustments that could get him back to the levels he attained at the start of his career; he just needs to continue leaning into those changes.

Honing pitch mix will be important, but the Cubs might also have some mechanical recommendations for Keller. He's a candidate to create more deception with a bit of a crossfire element added to his delivery. He's a candidate to slide over to the third-base side of the rubber, changing some angles and making him more similar to Tyson Miller. He's also a candidate for a slightly lower arm slot, which would make it easier to leverage that sweeper and to find run on his sinker. In whatever fashion they choose, the Cubs are well-equipped to help Keller unlock the full value of the unique traits he's carried through an often mediocre big-league career.

That doesn't mean Keller will or should make even 15 starts for the Cubs this year. If they like what they see from him in spring training, though, it's not impossible that he'll pair up with someone like Jordan Wicks or Boyd to give teams an impossible matchup problem to solve across the first seven innings of games every week or so during a given period in the middle of the season—or that he would come up and have an impact as a multi-inning relief option during the campaign, that long relief role being the clearest weak link in the Cubs' pitching chain right now.

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[Development DL]

 Been a month for myself and my wife health wise . Your writing always peaks my interests and perks me up .  Good call initially and even stronger analysis in this piece . 

As you surmised , this acquisition fits the orgs value based , and infrastructure backed ( Trombo and company ) typology .