Cubs' Avalanche of Pitching Injuries Reaches Insurmountable Status. Are They Stuck?

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images

Both Ben Brown and Edward Cabrera landed on the injured list Wednesday. Brown (ironically, the one Cubs hurler not plagued by the home-run ball and vulnerable to whiplash this year) has a neck strain; Cabrera has injuries to both his hamstring and his adductor. Brown could be back relatively soon, but then again, it could be months. Cabrera is almost certainly out until after the All-Star break. Neither is officially being shelved with a broken back, but that sound you heard was this pair of straws breaking the Cubs'.

Though they began Wednesday's doubleheader in playoff position, the Cubs aren't making it to October. That much should be obvious by now. They're too diminished and depleted by injury, and too few of the hurlers currently on the IL have clear paths to returning to form this year. Of the handful of pitchers who have stayed relatively healthy, too few have any upside beyond what they're already doing, and too many have had major flaws exposed or appear to be pitching through some nagging trouble of their own. This team can't win anything important. They'll have to turn their eyes to next year.

The last sentence should send shrieking alarms into life in your mind, though. That's a catastrophe. That's an unmitigated and massive failure that will haunt this team for years to come. The 2026 Cubs were built to compete for a pennant, and certainly to wrest the NL Central back from the Milwaukee Brewers. That's not happening, and the organization is not nearly ready to thrive in the wake of this misfire. They have a weak farm system. They have a poor track record for player development, and they've ceased to be good even at keeping pitchers relatively healthy, a strength about which they boasted a few years ago.

Technically, the team does have several trade candidates they can move before the trade deadline on August 3. Seiya Suzuki, Ian Happ, Carson Kelly and Shota Imanaga headline that group. If Jameson Taillon can get healthy or if Caleb Thielbar, Phil Maton, Jacob Webb or Michael Conforto can show enough to convince suitors of their utility, they could be dealt, too. For the most part, though, this team is ossified. They intentionally invested in and committed to a long-term core of Dansby Swanson, Nico Hoerner, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Alex Bregman, Cade Horton, Justin Steele, Cabrera, and Daniel Palencia, with Matt Shaw, Moisés Ballesteros and Ben Brown as key supplementary pieces.

Crow-Armstrong looks like the biggest star the Cubs have had since Sammy Sosa, and arguably the best all-around player they've ever had, at least while he's on this scintillating hot streak. The rest of that group, however, is proving either flawed or injury-prone, and because of what the club has already committed to each, they can't quickly shift gears and build around a different core, instead. They don't have the financial flexibility to do that via free agency; they don't have trade assets capable of bringing back that caliber of player; and they certainly don't have either the star power or the depth in their farm system to reload.

In most articles like this one, this would be where I offer a creative solution or a radical possibility. I've done that a lot of times with a lot of different teams, over the years. I can't come up with anything this time. The Cubs have owners with only moderate interest in fielding a competitive team, who have hired and renewed their commitment to a front office with similarly tepid ambitions. That front office sells itself constantly to the media as a competent and nimble outfit, but the reality is that they're a below-average all-around team.

They have above-average talent on the big-league roster, but only because they've concentrated almost all their resources there over the last three years. They've traded first-round picks, spent money to retain former first-round picks, and signed players to massive, long-term free-agent deals. They've swapped prospects for controllable players who could contribute immediately. They've done everything they can do to make themselves a winning major-league team right now, and 2026 was meant to be the high point in their competitive cycle. The results have been two 83-win teams, a 92-win one that lost the division and fell to their biggest rivals in October, and this unit, which will probably finish more like the 2023 and 2024 Cubs than like the 2025 ones. Meanwhile, the cupboard has been left bare in the minor leagues, and even the guys they hoped to convert into homegrown help have faltered badly.

Jed Hoyer should never have gotten the extension he signed last July. That he did was the sign of an unearnedly content ownership group. The Cubs don't draft well, develop well, coach well or make smart enough transactions to make up for those glaring weaknesses. They don't have what they would need to turbo-charge a reload for next season, but this season is circling the drain, due as much to their lack of homegrown depth as to the bad injury luck they courted by leaning so hard on the likes of Horton and Cabrera. A decade after its greatest success, this franchise is right back where it's spent much more of the last 80 years: in a quagmire of its own making, and unlikely to rise from the muck any time soon.

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[PVG]

Hi Matt, 
Regarding the pitching injuries, is it the gods or is it also a combination of the pitchers that they choose and how the Cubs train, develop and what they ask their pitchers to do (spin, velocity, something else? )  which is beyond their physical capabilties that is contributing to this seemingly annual glut of injuries?

[Matthew Trueblood]

2 hours ago, PVG said:

Hi Matt, 
Regarding the pitching injuries, is it the gods or is it also a combination of the pitchers that they choose and how the Cubs train, develop and what they ask their pitchers to do (spin, velocity, something else? )  which is beyond their physical capabilties that is contributing to this seemingly annual glut of injuries?

Well, I don't think they're doing anything that puts their pitchers at greater than their baseline risk of injury, relative to the rest of the league. There are teams who push guys much closer to their redlines in the quest to make their stuff better. But you're absolutely right that they've acquired some guys with a high baseline injury risk, in cases like trading for Cabrera, spending money this winter on Hunter Harvey, and drafting and then centering their plans on Horton.

Now, they assiduously avoided doing that very thing for a few years, and that didn't work, either. They were letting too many chances to acquire pitchers with better stuff pass them by, fearing injury, when the reality of the modern game is that injuries will come. I don't want to unduly criticize them for finally realizing that they needed to accept at least a portion of the risk every other team in the league is taking.

To me, the greater problems are that they're reluctant to invest enough money to amass the kind of depth that would better fortify them against each individual injury, and that they're not scouting or developing well enough to have pitchers available to stop the gaps when a surge of injuries that not even more robust spending would have fixed does happen. 

When I talk about the injury gods, I'm definitely not actually ascribing things to luck or karma. But there is a huge element of luck in injury frequency these days, especially for pitchers. Some years, a lot of your guys are gonna get hurt. You can't reliably stop that. What you can do is be more ready for it than this team has been.

[Patrick88]

This organization needs a rebuild, and it needs it badly.  They are in the same spot they were in 2011.  In fact they were not in that great of a spot with Theo.  I keep telling fans he was Andy McPhail 2.0, but fans don't want to hear it.  

[Patrick88]

Also, the Cubs won't be contending for anything next year either.  They should be focusing on a long rebuild again, and I believe that is what will be happening.  Jed shouldn't be the one leading it, but he will be.