Under Cubs' Stewardship, Edward Cabrera Has Simply Gotten Much Worse

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Ron Chenoy-Imagn Images

The good news, according to Baseball Prospectus's StuffPro metric, is that Edward Cabrera's slider hasn't gotten any worse this year. It's still a plus pitch, when he can locate it anywhere near the zone. In fact, that pitch should have more utility this year, in theory, because he's throwing from a lower arm angle and the top of the zone has been lopped off by the advent of the ABS system; his ability to use the slider to go from east to west is vital. 

The bad news, according not just to StuffPro but to Stuff+ and also your eyes and the surface-level numbers, too, is everything else. Cabrera's whole arsenal has gotten worse in his first season with the Cubs. Whether the team asked him to further lower his arm slot after he significantly lowered it last year or whether (as he said happened in 2025) it's just gotten lower as a result of his efforts to be more natural and athletic on the mound, the results have been calamitous.

After 13 starts, Cabrera's ERA stands at 5.21. He's limiting walks better than he did in the past, keeping up the trend that seemed like the key to his breakout in 2025. However, his strikeout rate is way down, from 25.8% to 21.3%, and worse, he's giving up one home run for every 20 batters he faces. His Cubs debut was electric, and he worked a second straight scoreless outing after that, but since then, the ERA is 6.31. Even in that scoreless appearance against the Guardians, he walked five and struck out just four. 

The biggest problem seems to be that arm slot. Coming down a little last year was good, insofar as it loosened Cabrera up, kept him healthier and let him find the strike zone. Coming down more this year has been catastrophic, for two reasons:

1. He can't find the zone as well anymore; and
2. His key pitch shapes have become too similar.

Last year, Cabrera's sinker was less a sinker than a running two-seamer, often thrown to the up-and-in quadrant against right-handed batters. It was a viciously difficult pitch to square up, at roughly 98 miles per hour with so much tailing action, but it also kept righty batters honest. If they sat on a changeup, they were likely to swing underneath the sinker, just as if it were a rising four-seam heater. At best, they might fight it off the handle of their bat and produce weak contact. Here's where his sinkers were located last season.

When you lower your arm slot, you're likely to see any sinker become more of a true sinker, with depth. That can be a good thing, if you play the pitch mostly off a slider or a four-seamer. It produces more grounders and even more whiffs that way than if it's a two-seamer like last year's version of Cabrera threw. And sure enough, that's been the small but real change in movement for Cabrera this year. He's had a little more depth on the pitch, though it's still a two-seamer at heart. He's had a little less run on it.

Playing as the partner to a changeup that's meant to be the centerpiece of an arsenal, though, that's nothing but bad news. Cabrera has never gotten many whiffs with the sinker, but he's all the way down to 6.8% whiffs on swings with it now. He can't get to that up-and-in spot with it; the pitch ends up down and in the zone much more often this year. When he tries to force the location where he lived with it last year, he mostly misses, for balls.

But that's not Cabrera's biggest problem. The biggest problem is that signature changeup. Last year, opponents had a .226 weighted on-base average (wOBA) against that pitch. This year, it's .304. A good wOBA (for a batter) is something more like .350, so at a glance, that's not a disaster, but Cabrera has always had hittable fastballs, and he doesn't have good enough command of his curveball or slider to throw those all day. The changeup is his out pitch and his centerpiece. For such a nerve center of an offering, a .304 wOBA isn't good enough.

Cabrera is missing with the change more often, not just in the sense that he's throwing fewer strikes with it, but in the sense that more of his strikes are mistakes. The lower slot isn't helping. Here's a good cambio he threw to Fernando Tatis Jr. last July.

Here's him trying to pull a string on Luis Arraez this season.

The locations for which he was aiming aren't quite identical, but they're not as far apart as the two pitches' actual landing spots. The difference lies in his delivery. Last season, he was able to pronate better, getting inside and on top of the ball at release:

This season, he's stuck behind the ball more. There's just no way to avoid that, with the lower arm slot, without totally changing the shape of the pitch and trading some depth for some run to the arm side.

As small as the difference might look, the effect is big. Cabrera has been in the zone lass this year (partially because the zone itself is smaller), and when he is, it's more often a mistake with a lot of the plate. Hitters are swinging more often at his strikes and hitting it harder when they do. They're pulling it in the air much more often than they have in the past. He's just not the same uncomfortable at-bat he's been for most of his career.

Unfortunately, much of this might be tough to fix this year. Some mechanical fix needs to be accomplished, and that's hard to do when one is also nursing a blister and/or a nebulous forearm issue. Things could always click back into place—maybe he just needs a different stride pattern, or to get past that blister problem and feel more conviction in his arsenal. Right now, though, he's a guy who has always depended on a changeup, whose changeup doesn't move much off his fastball when it's a strike. He's a guy who can still touch 100 MPH but is sitting a tick lower than in the past. He's a guy who's always needed the zone to flex for him, because his pitch shapes already limited his movement differentials, for whom the zone no longer flexes.

It's been a brutal start to what the Cubs hope will be a multi-year partnership, and so far, Cabrera looks like the latest in a string of high-profile pitching acquisitions (going back to Yu Darvish and Tyler Chatwood) whom the Cubs have made worse, instead of better. Given what they surrendered to get him and how badly they need him right now, that's very, very bad news.

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[Big Ran]

Even if the Cubs have lousy coaches when it comes to pitching, Cabrera is not even half the pitcher he was at Miami. He has been a total bust. Instead of blaming coaching why not put most of the blame on Jed and the scouting department. This trade at the end of five years will be a huge win for the Marlins.

[Matthew Trueblood]

51 minutes ago, Big Ran said:

Even if the Cubs have lousy coaches when it comes to pitching, Cabrera is not even half the pitcher he was at Miami. He has been a total bust. Instead of blaming coaching why not put most of the blame on Jed and the scouting department. This trade at the end of five years will be a huge win for the Marlins.

Well, I'm not sure about that. Owen Caissie isn't exactly carving things up. I think Cabrera's failure to come as advertised clearly lands at Hoyer's feet, but also at Tommy Hottovy's, and of course at Cabrera's, himself. I do think there's a decent chance he turns this around. He just needs to make some pretty big changes, so it might take another stint on the IL or an offseason to see him get back to where he can dominate. The only way I'll end up as down on the trade itself as you are is if the elbow thing that ended his last start turns out to have been a lingering issue and gets worse from here—which, unfortunately, I could certainly imagine. That would explain some of what we've seen this year. It would also indict the team's judgment of injury risk; there were known issues around Cabrera when they got him.

[Patrick88]

It’s not like it’s been 15 years since they have developed any kind of pitching.  Another reason why this is about to be rebuild #3. Cabrera will turn it around, but on another team.  Wouldn’t be shocked if it’s on the Cardinals or Brewers.