Jameson Taillon's Unceremonious Dismissal Is A Result of Cubs' Longest Unsolved Problem

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Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images

Four years and $68 million. That is what it took for the Chicago Cubs to sign Jameson Taillon prior to the 2023 season. After more than 3.5 seasons with the club, he has now been designated for assignment. In all likelihood, he has pitched his last game for the North Siders. How did it end up like this?

Taillon signed with the Cubs during an offseason that had a healthy middle tier of starting pitching options: Kodai Senga was coming over to MLB from NPB, and Taijuan Walker, Chris Bassitt, Zach Eflin, and Tyler Anderson all also switched teams via free agency. 

If we compare the results of each of those guys, who all received somewhat similar contracts, since then, it seems that Taillon’s output was about right on the mark.

Player	Innings Pitched	K%	ERA	FIP	FanGraphs WAR	Contract
Bassitt	597 2/3	21.6%	4.02	4.19	7.6	3yr/$63m
Eflin	418	22.0%	3.94	3.77	7.5	3yr/$40m
Senga	325 2/3	26.5%	3.73	4.21	4.3	5yr/$75m
Taillon	525 1/3	19.8%	4.21	4.71	3.9	4yr/$68m
Anderson	456 2/3	18.3%	4.53	5.02	2.7	3yr/$39m
Walker	402 2/3	16.9%	5.13	5.38	1.3	4yr/$72m

Taillon ranks fourth out of six on this list in ERA, FIP, and fWAR, while coming in second in innings pitched. His 525 ⅓ innings pitched by far led the Cubs during this timeframe, and his 3.9 fWAR ranked fifth. The Cubs needed a reliable innings eater, and they got a reliable innings eater. 

Accidentally, I have stated the actual problem at hand here. Make no mistake, the Jameson Taillon contract wasn’t ideal. It never was. But the contract itself wasn’t the issue. The issue was that the Cubs needed to make that deal. The issue was that they needed a reliable innings eater via free agency because they have done such a lackluster job at developing pitching themselves. 

This has been a known issue for the Cubs for some time now. From 2023-2026, 15 pitchers have started at least five games for the Cubs. Only five of them did so on arbitration or pre-arbitration salaries:

Player	Innings Pitched	K%	ERA	FIP	FanGraphs WAR
Justin Steele	330 2/3	24.4%	3.18	3.24	7.9
Javier Assad	277 1/3	18.3%	3.60	4.74	1.8
Ben Brown	157	25.1%	4.30	3.66	3.0
Cade Horton	121 1/3	19.8%	2.52	3.61	2.2
Jordan Wicks	83 2/3	18.4%	5.92	5.08	0.2

Consider what Justin Wrobleski is giving the Dodgers this season. Or what Emmet Sheehan gave them last season. Or what Shane Drohan is giving the Brewers right now. Each of those guys has offered extremely reliable innings at pre-arbitration salaries. 

The Cubs have failed to consistently produce that. Hopes are still high for four of the five guys on the list above; the list simply needs to be longer than four names. In my opinion, the real issue with the pitching development in the organization hasn’t been the lack of top-tier pitching prospects. Those guys are few and far between, and the Cubs have so rarely taken pitching in the first round of the draft over the past decade anyway. Rather, it’s been the complete lack of consistently developing guys that can piece together Jameson Taillon level production at those inexpensive, early-career salaries. This allows you to avoid these types of contracts for mid-tier free agent starting pitchers. 

The past four seasons, the Cubs needed Jameson Taillon to do exactly what he did: prevent runs at a league-average rate, and do so over a lot of innings. If they can start producing more pitchers that are capable of doing that themselves, then hopefully we can stop watching contracts reach unsatisfying conclusions like this one did.

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