Chicago Cubs Pitchers of the Month: May 2026

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Image courtesy of © Jeff Le-Imagn Images

Believe it or not, there were some bright spots in what was a really ugly month of May for the Chicago Cubs. A 13-16 record yielded a lot of questions about the offense, and it was that offensive underperformance that perhaps allowed the pitching to slip under the radar a little bit. To be clear, the offense wasn’t great, but a 4.42 ERA for the team sure didn’t help matters either. With that out of the way, though, let’s revel in those aforementioned bright spots for a bit and take a look at the pitchers of the month for May of 2026. 

3. Ethan Roberts: 9 G, 2.03 ERA, 13.1 IP, 7 BB, 10 K
I love any baseball player that is a little bit different. At 5-foot-10 and 180 pounds, Roberts doesn't look like a typical professional pitcher. The 19.6% strikeout rate in the month of May would support that he simply is not the typical professional pitcher. 

Roberts has always walked a tightrope from atop the rubber. Not striking a lot of guys out means that you have to manage contact really well. After having been a fly ball pitcher for most of his first few brief seasons in the majors, Roberts has suddenly turned into a ground-ball machine, with a ground-ball rate of 64.7% in May, according to FanGraphs. This is after never posting a ground-ball rate above 36.4% in any full season in his career. 

He won’t maintain a .235 batting average on balls in play. Nobody does. We already saw some of that come back to earth in his outing Sunday against the Cardinals, when a bloop double found grass and denied him what could have been a big escape from a jam. But if the ground-ball rate remains that high, he just might be able to remain a viable option in the bullpen. The Cubs really need it. 

2. Jacob Webb: 12 G, 0.64 ERA, 14 IP, 3 BB, 19 K
Matthew Trueblood wrote about Webb here at Northside Baseball just last week. He concluded that Webb has dialed in the location on his changeup, which has unlocked him as a relief ace for the Cubs. 

Webb’s numbers in May certainly support this. According to Baseball Savant, hitters slugged .611 against his changeup in March and April. They had a 30% hard hit rate (a ball hit with an exit velocity of 95 mph or higher), and they whiffed on 42.9% of their swings. In May, hitters slugged just .167 to go along with a hard hit rate of 15.4%, and a whiff rate of 52.7%. That’ll certainly contribute to a month where a pitcher strikes out 19 guys and walks only three. 

1. Ben Brown: 7 G, 1.86 ERA, 29 IP, 8 BB, 31 K
A lot has been written about Brown at Northside Baseball as well, and for good reason: he is one of the only good things going for the Cubs at the moment. He was inserted into the rotation out of necessity on May 8, and has responded by being the team’s best starting pitcher for the month ,by a mile. 

Jeremy Tecktiel recently wrote about how Brown’s new sinker has turned him into a ground ball pitcher. Similar to Roberts, that is a huge development for Brown, especially given he has managed to continue to strike hitters out at an above average rate. 

Since we’ve written about the sinker, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge Brown’s changeup, which was thrown 4% of the time in March and April, and increased to 8.8% in May, per Baseball Savant. Hitters hit just .111 and slugged .222 against the pitch in May, while whiffing on 46.7% of swings. It’s been more than just a “third time through the order pitch,” too. Here he is fooling Brandon Nimmo with a perfect changeup on just the second pitch of a start in Texas:

It’s been a long time coming for Brown, and it finally seems to be coming together. With all of the injuries the pitching staff has dealt with so far this year, the timing couldn’t have been better for the Cubs. Congrats to Ben Brown on being the Cubs’ pitcher of the month for May. They might need him to win this quasi-award again in June.

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