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Things did not end well between the Tigers and Spencer Turnbull. The 2014 second-rounder out of Alabama climbed through the Detroit farm system over the next few years, and was occasionally impressive for his first few years in MLB. Early in 2021, though, he seemed to have turned a corner. That May, he threw a no-hitter. He was emerging as a star. Then, Tommy John surgery ruined everything.
Turnbull missed the final four months of 2021 and all of 2022. In 2023, he made his return, but he was nowhere near as exciting or even as consistent as he had been before the injury. The team optioned him to the minors even though he claimed to be battling injuries to his neck and foot. After the season, Turnbull was vindicated, as the Tigers agreed to give him a full year of services time for 2023 despite having used the options to send him down.
That was just a parting gift from Detroit, though. They non-tendered Turnbull, who is now a free agent a year (or two, had the service time not been restored to him) earlier than expected. Free agency won't be a lucrative exercise for him, at least this time, but he's on the market. The Cubs could swoop down and scoop him up as a swingman or sixth starter, and give him the season to rehabilitate his value.
Obviously, if his sole interest is rebuilding that value and trying to hit free agency next year as a much-sought-after star with multi-year offers, Turnbull might prefer a team with less pitching depth than the Cubs have. If the Cubs can sell him on the value of their pitching instruction and development group, though, they might gain a leg up. There's plenty with which to work, and Turnbull does have untapped upside if someone can help him sort some things out.
What Turnbull's arsenal looks like depends a little on whom you ask. Both Baseball Savant and Brooks Baseball show him making use of a slider, a sinker, a changeup, and a curveball, but his most-used pitch is listed as a four-seam fastball at Savant and as a cutter at Brooks. That's an important distinction, not only to projecting his performance but to understanding his recent struggles.
Whatever you call that 93-mile-per-hour offering that fronts Turnbull's repertoire, he throws it with extreme cutting action (it would be 96th-percentile cut) and extremely heavy vertical movement (97th percentile) for a four-seamer. For a cutter, though, it's extreme in its lack of glove-side movement, and has more rising action than the average. Here's what his overall movement profile looked like in 2023.
Turnbull's big problem is that, coming from a relatively low arm slot but opening up to an extreme extent with his stride toward the plate, he leaves the ball on the wrong side of the plate for his stuff on far too regular a basis. His primary offering really makes more sense as a cutter, especially in tandem with the rest of his stuff, but it ends up on the arm side of the plate as often as not.
One reading of that location map could be, "Well, that's a four-seamer, then. It's just a four-seamer he throws at the top of the zone to chase whiffs." That almost works, but here are the locations of his slider in 2023.
Again, this is largely a mechanical problem. Turnbull's open stride and arm slot combine to cause a lot of pitches released a hair too soon, missing arm-side. That's true for all his stuff, but especially the stuff that needs to be moving to the glove side instead. At this stage of a player's career, it's not as simple as pointing that out to him and expecting an instantaneous, effective change, but the fix here is not overwhelmingly complex.
If Turnbull does make that fairly major adjustment, everything else might fall into place. If he could command the cutter to the glove side, his heavy sinker would become much more of a weapon, and he'd still be able to change eye levels against right-handed batters thanks to the depth on his slider.
Against lefties, he was very reliant on the cutter/fastball in 2023, because his breaking stuff didn't work at all against them with the locations of his various offerings. A tweak to his delivery or position on the mound could effect a huge change against opposite-handed hitters.
He'd probably only be interested in a one-year deal, because his value is pretty low at the moment. If the Cubs worked out such a pact with him, though, Turnbull could be a compelling complement to Hayden Wesneski and Javier Assad--or, should either of them be traded this winter as the team addresses other needs, a smart replacement for them.
What do you think of Turnbull as an under-the-radar target for the Cubs? Who else are you keeping an eye on as a low-risk, high-reward guy?
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