Drew Smyly and Luke Little are the Lefty Relievers You've Been Waiting For

Last year at this time, the Chicago Cubs had one left-handed reliever projected to make the Opening Day roster: Brandon Hughes. When he was sidelined with an injury in spring training, the Cubs elected to open the season with no lefties in their bullpen. They did have Mark Leiter Jr., who has had noticeable reverse-splits in his career thanks to his dominant splitter, but for most of 2023, former manager David Ross had no southpaws to deploy (outside of a few cameos from Anthony Kay). 

By the end of the 2023 season, that finally changed, thanks to Drew Smyly’s move out of the rotation and Luke Little’s ascension through the minor-league ranks. The two lefties are quite different in their styles. Little is a 6’8” behemoth with a rocket fastball. Smyly is a crafty veteran with a hammer curve. They both saw success in the Chicago bullpen late last year. Craig Counsell, long known for his brilliant bullpen usage in Milwaukee, will have to get creative in his utilization of the two lefties, but they will give the Cubs a luxury they’ve rarely had in recent years. 

Little’s calling card ability is his proclivity for strikeouts; in his professional career, he’s never dipped below 13.8 strikeouts per nine innings (K/9), which includes a 14.8 K/9 in 63 2/3 innings in the minors and a 16.2 K/9 in 6 2/3 innings in the Major League last year. The profundity he’s shown for missing bats has, in turn, also made him incredibly difficult to hit, as he has never allowed more than 5.9 hits per nine innings in any of his three professional seasons to date. 

The massive southpaw has proven preternatural at leveraging his frame and extending towards home plate. Little’s height naturally means his pitched will travel downward more than most, but his throwing platform is what makes him so difficult to hit. With his velocity and frame, the ball “spikes” into the ground out of his hand, the same way it does for elite servers in tennis. It’s the biggest reason why Little has been nearly impossible to square up: in 147 professional innings between the majors and minors, Little has allowed just two home runs. 

Contrast that with Smyly, who’s been more of a finesse pitcher in recent years and has always conceded more fly balls than most (43.9% fly ball percentage last season). At this point in his career, Smyly is a three-pitch pitcher, primarily using a fastball (38.7% usage last season) and curveball (49.4%), while mixing in a cutter (12.0%). However, Smyly is attempting to expand his arsenal, adding a slider and “splutter” to his pitch mix in an attempt to compete for the fifth starter gig in spring training this year. 

Should Smyly lose that competition, he should seamlessly slot back into the bullpen, where he pitched to a 2.81 ERA in 16 innings in September.  Following an ugly start against the Detroit Tigers on August 22, he was moved to the ’pen for the rest of the season. His starting prospects aren’t completely dead. He posted a 3.27 ERA through his first 13 starts last season. Then everything started to unravel in mid-June. Over his final 10 starts, Smyly was tagged for an unsightly 7.83 ERA.

Now, something peculiar about Smyly in 2023 was that he had reverse splits that were rather pronounced. He held righties to a .241/.312/.446 slash line (better than the league average .253/.328/.428 when the hitter had the platoon advantage), but opposing lefties hit him at a clip nearly equivalent to Mike Trout’s career OPS: .338/.405/.576. Smyly’s new pitches should help alleviate some of that lefty-on-lefty crime, but if he remains a reliever, the Cubs can play a little match-up protection game as Smyly hones his repertoire. 

Little’s splits exist in a very small sample at the major-league level, but they track with his career minor league performance: in 11 batters faced, Little held lefties to a .111/.182/.222 batting line with four strikeouts. Against 19 opposing righties, Little surrendered a .267/.421/.333 line with eight strikeouts. As a fastball-slider only pitcher, Little will always have a more difficult time beating righties (neither of his pitches moves away from them), but he has shown unusual maturity for challenging them on the inside third of the plate that bodes well for his future success.

Cubs fans should feel confident that Counsell will get the best out of his relievers this year after making such a habit of it with the Brewers. If Smyly handle his platoon advantage, and Little learns to beat righties away, then both pitchers (and the Cubs bullpen) will be better for it. Just simply having both players available, though, is a nice change of pace after years of lacking a quality southpaw reliever.