What's Eating Phil Maton?

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Dale Zanine-Imagn Images

There are little things. The cutter that the team loved is coming in a tick slower this year, putting more pressure on every other facet of his game. It also has a bit less ride than it did last year, which gives it less separation from his sweeper. The curveball has a bit less of the extreme horizontal movement it's showed in the past. But mostly, Phil Maton looks like himself. That's what's worrying everyone.

When the Cubs signed Maton to a two-year deal worth $14.5 million this winter, many lamented that the team was investing in yet another reliever who doesn't throw hard. That was unfair, though. What teams should really prioritize isn't velocity itself, but the two things that tend to correlate with velocity when it comes to results: whiffs, and weak contact. Maton was excellent in both regards in 2025. He's spent a long career consistently inducing weak contact because of a deceptive delivery and that peculiar cutter, and last season, he also sported an excellent strikeout rate.

So far, though, his Cubs tenure has been an unmitigated disaster. He's struggled mightily on both sides of a three-week stint on the injured list, and it just doesn't look like he's fully healthy, even now that he's back on the mound. Already, he's put up a Win Probability Added of -0.288 or worse in three games for the Cubs. He cost them 29.7% of a win in their 4-1 loss to the team from suburban Atlanta Wednesday, and 40.8% of one on the South Side on Sunday. He's killing the team, especially because they need him even more than they'd planned to, with Hunter Harvey (unsurprisingly) sidelined for the long haul by arm trouble; Daniel Palencia being used carefully after his own stint on the IL; and Ben Brown dragooned into starting again because of injuries to the team's top two starters.

Here's the thing: Maton can still miss bats. His whiff rate is down, but still above average, and when he executes properly, you can see how he keeps hitters so defensive. Unfortunately, he's not executing with any consistency—and, in particular, he's leaving a lot of balls in the fat part of the strike zone.

Here are Maton's heatmaps for location by pitch type for 2025.

This is what an elite contact manager-slash-whiff guy looks like. His curveball consistently hit the edge on the glove side; his cutter stayed at the top of the zone, tending toward the arm side to tunnel with his breaking stuff; and his sweeper was used to generate chases and the poor results that come with them. His sinker tucked into the one quadrant of the zone untouched by his other pitches, forcing righty batters to defend a big zone and inviting more weak contact.

Here's the same visual for 2026.

Wwwh, uh-oh. Everything is missing arm-side, with predictable results. The cutter has gone for a ball way too often, putting him behind in counts. You can (sort of) live with that, though. If the main problem were that the cutter is getting lost off the arm-side edge, we'd expect Maton's problems to be taking the shape of lots and lots of walks. That's not what's happening. Maton only has one walk in his last six appearances, but in the aforementioned pair of clunkers last week, he gave up two homers and a double. That's because of what's happening to the two breaking balls. Missing arm-side with the cutter has put him behind in counts; missing arm-side with the curveball and sweeper have brought those pitches right into the middle of the zone to be hammered. That's what happened on Mike Yastrzemski's double and Mauricio Dubón's home run in the armpit of the Atlanta interstate nexus. It's what happened when Tristan Peters took him deep for a three-run gut punch on Sunday. 

Patterned misses like this tell a story. In Maton's case, it's one of lost athleticism, either due to injury or due to age. Maton is only 33, though, and he's tall and thickly built. It looks like he's nursing an injury, be it the tendinitis in his right knee that shelved him earlier this season or something in his lower back. Either way, he's not getting through his front side as well when he delivers; he looks creakier and stiffer. It's not surprising, then, that he's missing in the same direction over and over. The question is whether he can fix that.

If so, he'll go right back to being a good reliever, and the Cubs' most important setup man. The stuff, as we said, is essentially intact. If player and team can't find a way to get him moving better down the mound again, though, that won't matter. Right now, Craig Counsell can't trust Maton, which is a huge problem for a team that doesn't enjoy a big margin for error.

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