Cubs Pitchers Need to Turn Projection into Production, Starting Now

Image courtesy of Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images

Cubs Video

The three division races in the National League feel as though they're over. The Dodgers will win the NL West; they face no serious competition for their crown. The Brewers have put a comfortable cushion between themselves and the Cubs in the Central, with 6 games in the standings and an edge in the race to claim the head-to-head tiebreaker. The team from Atlanta's most concrete-crusted inner-ring suburb has only three games on the Phillies, after a surge by the second-place Phils, but it still feels like the current leaders will win each sub-pennant. That, in a way, puts the Cubs in an ad hoc division race of a different kind for the final five weeks.

To host the Wild Card Series again this year, Chicago needs to hold off the Phillies, over whom they enjoy a de facto 2.5-game lead. It's only 2.0 games on the standings table, but the Cubs also have the tiebreaker sewn up between the teams. They're another two games ahead of San Diego, and two more ahead of Arizona. Though the Marlins and Cardinals are at least clinging to the periphery, it feels like four teams are vying for three spots—and, with three strong division champions in the league, you really don't want to have either the second or the third Wild Card berth, any more than you want to miss the playoffs altogether. The Cubs should view claiming the top Wild Card spot as a miniature division title to chase, because doing so would mean hosting whoever finishes second for a best-of-three series at Wrigley Field. Right now, by FanGraphs's estimation, they have a narrow lead in that race, in terms of projections.

It's lovely to have that edge, however small, and the team can further stretch it by winning even once in Arizona this week. They swept the Diamondbacks when they visited Wrigley early this season, so a lone victory would mean the Cubs own the tiebreaker in all relevant cases. As you can see, though, the gap isn't wide. The team's margin for error hasn't swelled the way they might have hoped it would.

In fact, Chicago is merely back to the same projected wins total they first reached on May 7, after a long dip in between. They shot up to 92 and 93 projected victories for a few short days at the beginning of this month, for a simple reason: their trade deadline. Adding Kevin Gausman, Clay Holmes, Ryan Zeferjahn, Braxton Garrett and Tyrone Taylor—basically, adding Gausman and Holmes, alone—boosted their projections nicely, because those players all addressed key needs for the team. Unfortunately, since then, the team has realized mixed results. Zeferjahn is struggling to adjust to life in his new environs. In the first six games started by Gausman and Holmes, meanwhile, the team is an underwhelming 3-3. The two have each shown flashes of what the team felt they were trading for, but neither has demonstrated consistent front-line stuff or delivered the hoped-for volume.

That needs to change in the desert. The Cubs need to put together at least one more nice winning streak to reach their destination for the season and host another playoff series on the North Side. That means getting more out of Gausman and Holmes, and figuring out how to get Zeferjahn past the mental block he appears to have hit since coming to town. It doesn't have to mean winning the series against Arizona, though that should be the goal. It does, however, need to mean solid outings and as few setbacks as possible for each of their deadline pickups.

Whatever urgency they already felt on that score, it must have risen Sunday, when Shota Imanaga looked frighteningly like the version of himself who proved unpitchable by the end of the 2025 season. If that start was just a blip, the Cubs can survive it, but if Imanaga is trending downward again, the team will need the boost of Gausman and Holmes pitching to their pedigrees considerably more. Technically, their advantage in projected standings is already smaller than the one they have in the real standings. They need to widen that gap, or start convincing the projections they're for real, with their games against the Diamondbacks and the lowly Reds this week.

Gausman and Holmes stand at the center of that need, but it goes deeper, too. Making the playoffs is no longer the primary objective. At this point, they can almost take that for granted. They need to bear down and plan on winning the first Wild Card seed. That will take some doing, and it has to begin with getting what the numbers expect out of players for whom they gave up a bounty of young talent early this month.