What Happened to Daniel Palencia, and Whether It's Fixable

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of Jeff Le-Imagn Images

The biggest problem—the only problem, in one sense, but more on that in a bit—is that Daniel Palencia hasn't been healthy this year. Here we stand on the edge of September, and he's yet to crack 20 innings pitched. In a season that has seen winter investments in Phil Maton and Hunter Harvey go for naught and injuries to Cade Horton, Edward Cabrera and Ben Brown cannibalize the bullpen, the Cubs have needed their relief ace, and he hasn't been available for much of the campaign. If he still looked like himself when he was on the mound, though, we could have a different conversation. In fact, since he's now healthy(ish) again, we could have a downright sunny one.

Unfortunately, that's not the way things are. Palencia has a 4.19 ERA this season, and a 1.40 WHIP. He's still struck out over 28% of opposing batters, and his walk rate is better than the league average again, but the results when opponents put the ball in play haven't been nearly as good as they were last year. You can call that bad luck; you can observe that he also had some "good luck" last season. But the truth is that luck has nothing (or very little; luck is always a factor in baseball, but it's usually overstated) to do with it.

If you want to know what's wrong with Palencia, start right here. This is his average horizontal movement by pitch type for each season of his career.

Last May, I wrote about Palencia's unique fastball shape, and how it worked in concert with his sheer velocity and high-energy delivery to flummox opposing batters. I dubbed that shape "run-ride", in contrast with the more often-discussed "cut-ride" heater. The Cubs usually seek and develop cut-ride fastballs, which are pitches with (depending on the hurler and on how you prefer to look at it) more glove-side movement than you'd expect given their induced vertical break or more vertical ride than you'd expect based on their cutting action.

Palencia's fastball went from good to great last year when he achieved a flipped version of that. Based on his arm action and his vertical ride, you'd expect less arm-side run than the pitch actually showed—or, if you thought of the pitch as a two-seam runner and were expecting that movement, you'd be surprised by the hop on it. That shape is a bit less unorthodox than a cut-ride one, but most of the pitchers who throw run-ride heaters sit in the low or mid-90s. Palencia's unique formula was throwing exceptionally hard—that's always been his specialty—while also achieving that two-dimensional movement.

As you can see in that chart, though, that magic is gone. Palencia's fastball still steams in at 99 MPH or so most of the time, though it's down a half-tick in average velocity and has particularly lost its top register. (The percentage of his heaters that hit 101.0 MPH was 14.8 last season; it's just 7.6 in 2026.) It still has good carry for a pitch thrown so hard. The horizontal movement, however, is gone; his heater has gotten arrow-straight.

You can see the effect of that on pitches like the one on which he allowed a back-breaking home run to TJ Friedl on Friday. 

Admittedly, one problem here is that this heater was only 97.6 MPH. For reasons we'll touch on shortly, Palencia really needs to operate up at 99-101 to be his superb self. But the bigger issue is that this pitch doesn't have that run toward the outside part of the plate. Even with Friedl swinging flat at the top of the zone, if this offering runs those extra 3-4 inches, it's a routine flyout. Right now, though, Palencia can't consistently produce that run, so pitches aren't getting off hitter's barrels as well as they did in the past. That doesn't show up solely in exit velocity (he's actually allowing less hard contact this season than last), but also in launch angle. Again, the horizontal movement difference on this particular pitch meant the difference between a line-drive homer (launch angle: 26°) and a high, lazy fly ball. This is one reason why Palencia is seeing hitters hit balls in the launch-angle sweet spot at a hugely increased rate this year, which has led to all that damage on balls in play.

Hopefully, that sells you on the fact that Palencia needs that extra bit of run to make his fastball work the way it needs to. Now, let's talk about what's led to the loss of movement, so we can get a sense of how likely he is to get it back. For the first insight on that front, check out his arm angle by pitch type and month, throughout his career.

Last season, Palencia kept his arm angle on the fastball just over 35°, pretty consistently. This year, it's up to 37°. That difference sounds infinitesimal, right? You can barely even see it on video. Here he is at release, last season and this season.

This is a good lesson, though, in how small a thing it can be from which big things come. First, you need to know that Palencia is a pronator. That means that as he releases the ball, he slightly turns his forearm and hand outward. That's where that arm-side run comes from, for most pitchers. Therefore, that slight change in arm angle means Palencia's fingers are slightly more behind the ball as he release it; the pitch has slightly more backspin and slightly less freedom to run off the fingertips and off to the side, despite that turn of the arm.

You can see this (although, again, we're talking about small margins) in Palencia's spin axis data. Here's a visualization of the spin and movement directions of his pitches in 2025.

Here's the same one for 2026.

The difference is almost imperceptible, but it's there, and it's wreaking havoc for Palencia, because he so badly needs those extra few inches of wiggle—especially with anything less than his A+ fastball. That's because he doesn't have a true out pitch other than the fastball; his slider has just never been an exceptionally good pitch. He's never found command or comfort with the splitter. He needs the fastball to work at peak effectiveness; it's not doing so.

The slider is a separate but equally salient problem. Just when Palencia could have used a boost from that pitch, it's gotten worse this year, rather than better. He's been unable to find any lateral bite at all with it, and even the depth he achieved fairly often in 2025 is absent this year.

That goes back, again, to the arm angle, and to Palencia's motor preference. He's not a guy who can "snap off" a slider in the traditional sense, with a late, powerful and deft inward turn of the wrist. He presets the slider grip and his wrist to produce the movement he wants. That works less well from a higher arm slot, though—and if he's releasing the ball later in his arm action.

We've thoroughly diagnosed him, now. Palencia is extremely reliant on his fastball, and right now, that fastball isn't moving the way it needs to, because his arm angle is a touch too high. Ditto for his slider. Time to finally, truly attack the big issue: Can this be fixed? Can it be done quickly? To answer that, let's talk about his recent injury history, in the context of his impressively explosive delivery.

Palencia is not a big guy. He's very, very powerfully built, but he's a gas can; the levers are short. All of bhis power has to come from the ground, and from the energy he can create within his frame. The fluidity of people like Chris Sale, Josh Hader or Jacob Misiorowski is not available to Palencia, if he wants to throw hard. He's adapted well to that; he's trained his body to generate enormous torque. For that reason, though, he's always been vulnerable to injuries involving the big muscles that do that power production. In both 2024 and 2025, he was sidelined by shoulder strains, but the shoulder is a big place. Specifically, Palencia was dealing with injuries to the muscles that can almost as easily be called the back as the shoulder—including the lat. Earlier this year, he suffered what was initially diagnosed as an oblique strain, which turned out to be another lat strain. Finally, this summer, the stress of the delivery traveled down the kinetic chain a bit, to his forearm.

Palencia is trying to manage the stress that his delivery puts on his body. Unfortunately, some of it is unavoidable, and unfortunately, it's pretty clear that he's still not 100% able to push though and produce power the same way, even as he works through whatever's lingering there. In both pairs of screenshots above, there's a postu ral difference that's actually more evident than the relationship between hand and shoulder. That's Palencia trying to get down the mound more aggressively, getting more power from his legs to take some of the strain off his core and his arm. However, the higher arm slot is an inevitable product of that change to how the rest of his body is moving—and right now, as he protects that arm and tries to avoid blowing it out altogether, going back to moving the way he did in 2025 doesn't seem to be an option.

I don't think Palencia is capable of returning to the level at which he pitched for much of 2025, at least until 2027. If he can get through the stretch run healthy and rest over the offseason, he might be in position to return next year at full strength, but it's just not possible without a few months off for the elbow and the forearm. That's bad news for the Cubs, and for Palencia, of course, but the baseball gods don't always give you the break you need.

Track Palencia's horizontal fastball movement, vertical slider movement, arm angle, and fastball velocity, in that order. If they each trend in the right direction over the final few weeks of the season, he might be rounding into form just in time to dominate in October. Don't count on it, though. The Cubs will (probably) have to cling to leads as best they can with a patchwork bullpen the rest of the way. The only good news is that that's what they've done all season, anyway.

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