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

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.