Edward Cabrera Is A Curveball Away From Brilliance

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Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images

Much was said over the offseason about the Chicago Cubs adding more strikeouts to their pitching staff. A lot of this even came from president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer himself:

“I felt like we had a very contact oriented pitching staff. Our defense helps that, but, you know, we don’t have that kind of stuff in our rotation other than Cade Horton,” Hoyer said on The Show podcast about the acquisition of Edward Cabrera.

We’re now officially about one month into the season, and I hate to tell you this, but the pitching staff is the same as it ever was.

Year	ERA	FIP	K%
2025	3.81	4.16	21.4%
2026	3.79	4.16	21.8%

I promise, I quadruple-checked those numbers to make sure I wasn’t mixing my years up when creating that table, because having the same FIP seems like an astronomically crazy coincidence. What’s the difference between those two pitching staffs? Nothing. As Pam Beesly says in The Office, they’re the same picture. Or, in our case, they’re the same pitchers. 

The thing is, they’re not the same pitchers. Matthew Boyd and Shota Imanaga are both, suddenly, strikeout machines. Some of that is probably offset by the loss of Cade Horton, Daniel Palencia, Hunter Harvey, and Phil Maton to injury, though the latter three will be back eventually.

The team’s biggest addition, Cabrera, has certainly contributed to the respectable ERA and FIP that the pitching staff is posting. Despite this, his strikeout numbers are down, and they are down considerably. After striking out 25.8 percent of hitters last year, the righty is now striking out just 18.5 percent of hitters. He has gone from the 74th percentile to the 28th. 

Last season, Cabrera struck out 24.4 percent of left-handed hitters, and 27.5 percent of right-handed hitters. This season, he is still striking out righties at an elite rate of 28.6 percent. It’s his strikeout rate against lefties that has really plummeted, all the way down to a paltry 11.4 percent. 

The Dominican pitcher attacks lefties with, primarily, his changeup, while also sprinkling in a healthy bit of his four-seam fastball, sinker, and curveball. He likes to get outs with the curve, and typically, he is very successful in doing so. Per Baseball Savant, 90 pitchers threw at least 100 curveballs to left-handed hitters last season. Hitters swung and missed with 48.5 percent of their swings against Cabrera’s curveball, which was seventh among that group of pitchers. 

This year, though, the story is different. In 2026, 74 pitchers have thrown at least 25 curveballs to lefties. Cabrera now has the third-lowest whiff rate on those pitchers at 11.8 percent. 

To begin to understand what is wrong with the curveball, let’s take a look at where Cabrera is throwing the pitch. The chart on the left is a heat map for all of his curveballs thrown to lefties last year, while the one on the right is all of them thrown to lefties this season. Charts are courtesy of FanGraphs Labs:

Cabrera is suddenly burying a whole lot of curveballs down near the back foot of left-handed hitters. In fact, he has thrown 22 two-strike curveballs to lefties in 2026. Six of them have been thrown to the back foot of the hitter. He only did that 10 times all of last season. 

For better context: Last season, 8.8 percent of his two-strike curves to lefties were thrown that far low and in. In 2026, he is doing it 27.3 percent of the time, or about three times more often. That is a really difficult place to get swings and misses. 

Perhaps one reason for the struggle in commanding the curveball; the former Marlin is seeing a pretty significant change in movement on a lot of his pitches to this point in 2026, namely his four-seam fastball and his curve. Between those two pitches, though, the breaking ball really stands out considering its drop in performance.

Year	Curveball Vertical Drop	Curveball Horizontal Break
2025	50.0”	10.9” to the glove-side
2026	45.9”	7.1” to the glove-side

This might not seem like a big difference, however, it is the difference between this pitch to Nolan Schanuel from a month ago that started at his knees and inside and only broke further down and more inside:

... and this pitch to Yoan Moncada last May in a game in which he struck out 10 Angels and allowed no runs in 5.2 innings:

By starting the pitch that much higher and that much more over the plate, it looks like a strike for longer, and thus, Cabrera is much more likely to get those whiffs that Jed Hoyer so covets. Also note where the pitch to Moncada finishes relative to where the pitch to Schanuel finished. The pitch to Moncada, while very much out of the strike zone, was at least in the same zip code. The pitch to Schanuel almost hit him in the foot, and you don’t often induce swings that way, no matter how nasty the pitch is.

It’s important to note that the sky is not falling here. Cabrera has a 2.73 ERA and a 3.66 FIP to this point. He’s just getting there in a radically different way than we all imagined, and if it continues, we’re probably about a month or so away from teams stacking their lineup with left-handed hitters when he takes the bump.

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