Cade Horton, the Most Complete Cubs Pitching Prospect in 15 Years, Set for Big-League Debut

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Cody Scanlan/The Register / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

It's unfair and inaccurate to suggest that the Cubs have been totally incapable of developing starting pitchers over the last decade and a half. They can point proudly to the big wins of Kyle Hendricks and Justin Steele, and to smaller ones like Javier Assad. They're also good at the reclamation project, which is a form of development, too. Still, they've always ended up with players who had to succeed in non-traditional ways, or who took non-traditional paths to success. Steele was a very late bloomer, and has had to navigate the league as (basically) a two-pitch starter. When he first showed up, he did at least have plus velocity, but even that has been gone for two years now.

Cade Horton is different. He had better be, I suppose, since unlike Steele or Hendricks or any other Cubs hurler in recent memory, he was a high first-round draft pick. He'll join the parent club in Queens this weekend when the Cubs take on the Mets, according to multiple reports, and when he does, he'll bring an unusually complete checklist of the stuff you look for with him.

The funny thing is, in one crucial way, Horton is still very much the modern Cubs pitching prospect. Look at that fastball shape! He briefly got away from cutting it so much earlier this spring, but he's back to what is very much a Steele- or Porter Hodge-like cut-ride heater. His sinker is something much closer to what a hitter would expect his four-seamer to look like, but since he's likely to be throwing that new inclusion in his arsenal only as the occasional lane-changer, hitters aren't going to like seeing it, anyway.

The breaking balls, here, are labeled as sweeper and slider. In truth, it's more of a slider and curve mix; the pitch-classification system is getting fooled a bit by the same dynamics of Horton's style that beget that cutting heater. Whatever you call them, though, the sweepier breaker is an immediate plus offering, especially paired with a fastball in the mid-90s (touching 97) that already has cut to it.

At this stage, it's fair to call Horton a five-pitch guy, with a modicum of confidence in all those offerings. He's not going to throw the fastball and slider a combined 90% of the time, the way Steele does. He has several ways to get hitters out, even beyond a unique (and very lively) heater. The last Cubs pitching prospect with all this going for him was Jeff Samardzija.

Like Horton, Samardzija came up to a Cubs team expecting to not only make the playoffs, but stay in them for a while. He didn't get his call until July, though, and then only as a reliever. In fact, Samardzija spent parts of four seasons in the bullpen, before an adjustment to when he broke his hands during his delivery and a refinement of his splitter turned him into a frontline starter with the team for two and a half years and made him about $100 million.

That won't be Horton's journey. This version of the Cubs needs him to be a starter, or at least a scheduled long man fitting in with the starting rotation, so his stuff has to be ready much sooner than Samardzija's was. It sure looks like it will be, though. Unlike Adbert Alzolay (never healthy enough) or Caleb Kilian (never with enough depth in the skill set or enough good stuff between the ears), Horton has made it to the majors with a near-ace upside intact. He has his own significant health concerns, but the Cubs can't worry about that right now. We'll see the first 70 or 80 pitches of Horton's career this weekend. If he's the same guy in New York that he's been in Iowa, they'll be awfully impressive pitches, even to Francisco Lindor, Juan Soto and Pete Alonso.

 

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