Cade Horton Finding Ways to Improve in Game of Inches for Chicago Cubs

[Jason Ross]

I have probably not been as excited for a Cubs pitching prospect's debut as I was for Cade Horton's in a long time. The Cubs have had other pitching prospects make their debuts between Mark Prior and Horton, including some very recently (such as Adbert Alzolay and Justin Steele), but none have captured me in the same way, and I doubt many have captured Cubs fans' imaginations the same way, in general. After the initial excitement has worn off, and we're three starts into his career, we can begin to take stock of what the rookie has been able to do well, and where he can continue to refine his game.

The thing Horton has done best so far is limit walks, which is great for a young pitcher. Horton has walked just three hitters so far in his big-league career. This is awesome, but not entirely unexpected; I've written in the past about how Horton attacks hitters, often by pumping strikes early, and often within the zone. This has generally carried over to the highest level. Horton has thrown a first-pitch strike to 61.9% of hitters, which puts him in decent company league-wide. He gets to strike one more often than Max Fried, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Jordan Hicks, and Garrett Crochet. This allows Horton to command early count leverage, which has helped to keep his walk total low. His focus is keeping guys off the bases.

A counterpoint to this, however, is that Horton's still struggling with both control and command. For our purposes today, I'm going to define control as a pitcher's general ability to throw strikes, and command as their ability to locate strikes within the zone. You may have your own definitions of these terms, but it's how I'm going to use them, and I think it's important I lay that out. 

First, while Horton's getting strike one well, he's struggling to throw strikes thereafter—specifically, with his slider. He's thrown under 50% of all of his pitches in the zone, with his slider being the biggest culprit. There's no question, his slider is his best pitch, but right now, he's not really controlling that pitch well. Here are two charts. The first is where his pitches are located in general, and the second shows where Horton generates whiffs. That box at the bottom right is where the slider tends to be thrown. It's also where he's thrown the most pitches overall.

It's not shocking that Horton is generating a lot of whiffs in the zone he's pitching the most often in. But he's leaving a lot of meat on the bone with where he's throwing his slider, because while he generates a good amount of whiff in that zone, that number is likely held back by how many wasteful pitches (or pitches so far off the zone one cannot expect a hitter to realistically swing at them) he has. The next two images help to highlight this issue. The chart on the left shows his general swing rate, and on the right is a breakdown of pitches from his most recent start against Miami. Pay attention to the dots in gold, as these represent the slider, and note how many are very far outside of the strike zone. Non-competitive pitches allow hitters to stay in the at-bat; they're easy takes.

I'll use an example from his start against the Chicago White Sox. Horton was up in the count 1-2 against White Sox hitter Brooks Baldwin. He had Baldwin on the ropes, having gone fastball-fastball-fastball to start, with the second strike being a 95-mph heater at the knees. If Horton buried the slider below the zone, but in an area that forced a swing, it would have been an easy punchout for the rookie. Instead, Horton overthrew the breaking ball (Savant has it as a curveball, but I think it's a slider that it's confusing based on the movement profile). Baldwin easily spat on the pitch. This would eventually not be an issue, as the White Sox hitter grounded out one pitch later, but these types of things highlight what's holding Horton back. With better control of the slider, he gets a punchout here.

Horton hasn't just struggled with put-away pitches, but also with commanding his fastball in the zone. I've written how Horton tends to bully hitters in the zone, but one thing he's probably gotten away with too long is just bullying hitters with mediocre fastball placement. In Triple A, his unique heater can dominate. Against the best of the best, you have to demonstrate finer execution.

Here's another mistake from Horton, a center-cut fastball to Miguel Vargas. This is just not where that fastball needs to be, particularly given how Horton's fastball works, and Vargas did what big-league hitters do to badly located fastballs: he hit it a long way. This is fixable, and a point of polish that needs to be addressed at some point. For Horton, the natural movement of his fastball should help inform him how to make that happen.

Horton's fastball shape is unusual, in that it has a lot of cutting action. His pitch naturally moves to the glove side, or in a right-handed hitter's case away from them. To a lefty, Horton's heater hums toward their hands. In the above video, Horton's movement was working against him. Notice where Miguel Amaya wanted it, and where it actually went. As Horton missed by a matter of inches, his fastball cut into the middle of the zone, and Vargas was able to crush it. It's an issue. but fixable—and using that shape is the answer.

The fix is to start by moving that location away from a righty, and inside to a LHH. By starting that pitch on the outer third to a hitter like Vargas, two things would happen:

1. It's going to help set up his slider, by creating a stronger connection between fastball location and slider location and forcing a later decision point for a hitter.
2. More importantly, however, it's going to create a situation where if Horton misses by two inches, it rides out of the zone, harmlessly, for a ball, instead of into the middle of the plate (like the example in the video above). The same will happen for a lefty batter; he'll be able to crash the hands of the hitter and miss inside, as opposed to leaking back over the middle. 

A great place to look how to do this is Justin Steele, who uses a cut fastball himself. Steele doesn't have a third pitch, which I'll get to in a moment, but is able to use this same philosophy to his advantage. Below, you'll see Horton's cut-fastball location against both righties and lefties, with Steele's cut-fastball placement superimposed on them (these have been mirrored across the axis to account for the handedness of each pitcher). Against same-handed batters (the lefthand image), the heat maps are basically the same shape and in the same place. Against opposite-handed ones, though, Horton is working away, whereas Steele's approach is to use the glove side of the plate even when that means coming inside.

The veteran lefty is great at getting that cut fastball to miss the middle of the plate, and he's been adept at limiting hard contact and home runs because of it. So what if the rookie emulated this—just at 95-97 mph, as opposed to 91-93? That would be a pretty devastating change, and that's before we add in a third pitch that Steele doesn't have in his arsenal. It's inches, but they're meaningful inches.

I don't want to make it sound all doom-and-gloom. Horton is a rookie, and rookies are imperfect beings who need to learn. The positive is that Horton clearly wants to learn, and is willing to make changes. I harped a bit on Horton's slider placement during his last start, but I want to instead heap praise in another way during that same appearance: his changeup was lovely. This is an important pitch for a heavy fastball-slider pitcher, as it will allow him to control left-handed hitters in a way that other fastball-slider types (such as Alzolay or Hayden Wesneski) were unable to do. It's even a pitch Steele doesn't really have, because if you supinate (turn the forearm and hand inward) as Steele and Horton do to generate their cutting heaters and their sliders, it can be hard to pronate (turning the hand outward) enough to create a usable cambio.

Horton threw the changeup a whopping 18 times on Wednesday (17 against aforementioned left-handed hitters), generating 11 swings and eight whiffs. For Horton to lean on the changeup on a day his slider wasn't useful and his fastball placement was mediocre was great to see. This is especially important against a lineup with a lot of left-handed hitters, and a team in the Marlins who is a pretty good team against fastballs (13th in baseball in Batter Run Value/100 on the pitch). It was a good game plan from the rookie, especially because it seemed to require an adjustment after he got hit hard in the first inning.

This is a big step up from just a few starts ago. Horton's debut saw him throw just one changeup, to Juan Soto in a 3-2 count (resulting in a strikeout), despite the Mets having a handful of lefties: Soto, but also Francisco Lindor and Brett Baty (who homered off of him, on a hagning slider). This is awesome development and trust in a newer pitch.

I'm going to leave everyone with what I think is the best version of a Cade Horton slider, and what I think he can become if he dials in just a little more. Horton was facing Luis Robert Jr early in the game against the White Sox. He'd hang a pitch to Vargas one hitter later, but don't let that cloud your vision on the pitch I'm about to show. The Cubs rookie had the White Sox center fielder in a 2-2 count. He'd just missed on a slider that was one of those "waste" pitches I showed earlier; it was too far off the corner. Horton came back with the same pitch, but this time, it was just a bit better. It was an inch or so higher, and more centered over the plate. Robert swung over it, and the rookie got a well-deserved punchout. That's the pitch Horton had hoped to throw to Baldwin in the example I had above, and he got it here. That's the best version of the Horton slider.

If Horton can find that pitch just a little more often, adapt his fastball location, and continue to trust the changeup like he did on Wednesday, the Cubs have a star on their hands. That pitch against Robert was unhittable, and it looked just enough like a Horton fastball that he'll consistently generate chase on that pitch. I'll harken back to something I talked about with Matt Shaw: this is literally a game of inches. Horton isn't miles off from being the pitcher we want him to be; he's just inches off. He's just inches from finding his fastball command, and just inches from finding the right control with his slider. He's believing in the changeup more and more. Once he finds those inches, Horton has everything he needs to be an anchor in the rotation. With Shota Imanaga out "well into June", as Counsell put it, Horton will have a few more starts to find those inches with the Cubs—and if he does, a few hundred more starts after that.

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What have you thought about Cade Horton's starts so far? Are you encouraged? Impressed? Do you think these changes would make a difference? Let us know in the comments below.

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