Edward Cabrera Just Joined Team Called-Strike Curveball

Essentially, Jameson Taillon throws two different curveballs. He rarely uses one of them—the slanting, two-plane breaker that twists away from right-handed batters—and leans much more on the other, but there really are two different pitches. The hook he throws to righties is just a rare variant on his much more common sweeper, to force hitters to look for something else. The one he throws to lefties is more vertical, and he throws it to the other side of the plate.

Taillon's curveball is his main breaking ball to lefties. He throws his four-seamer to the upper, outer quadrant of the zone against them, and his new kick-change and that curve play off that pitch. The changeup fades to the edge of the plate, or off of it. The curve dives to the bottom of the zone, after looking like a ball out of the hand. It's meant to lock up lefties and earn called strikes, and it did that job quite well in 2025.

Taillon, though, just got pushed down to fifth in a healthy Cubs rotation for 2026. If everyone is going well, Cade Horton, Edward Cabrera, Matthew Boyd and Shota Imanaga will be ahead of Taillon in the pecking order, and if and when Justin Steele returns, only other absences will save Taillon a place in the rotation. Why, then, am I telling you about Taillon's curve and its peculiarities?

Here's the first part of the reason:

This is the number of times each right-handed pitcher threw a curveball for a called strike to a left-handed batter in each season from 2023-25, charted against the percentage of all their curveballs to lefties that had that result. In other words, among righthanders who throw the curveball reasonably often against lefties, how often are they not only landing it in the zone, but freezing a batter for a strike with it? This is one of the two main ways that a curveball works.

Some curves are designed to get chases on pitches outside the zone, and to miss bats when the hitter swings. Others, though, are meant to steal strikes without even letting the batter get the lumber off their shoulder. Bigger-breaking curves can be easier to spot out of the hand for opponents, but if done correctly, that can prompt them to take the pitch, because they were primed for a fastball or aren't able to adjust their timing well enough to get off a good swing on the much slower pitch. That hasn't always been Taillon, but as part of his constellation of adjustments in 2025, he got much better at it. As you can see, he was fairly middling in this regard in 2023, and in 2024, he dipped down into the neighborhood of Ben Brown, a classic chase-and-miss curveball guy who doesn't get called strikes with that pitch often at all.

Last season, though, he shot up the list. Because they overlapped perfectly, I had to highlight Aaron Civale's 2024 instead of Taillon, but that same dot belongs to Taillon's 2025. He got there, in part, by observing and making some tweaks to mirror the changes Colin Rea made and the way he executed his curve to lefties. Rea is very much a change-of-pace, called-strike curveball guy. That's how he uses the pitch, and why the Cubs were excited about changing Rea's pitch mix to feature the four-seam fastball instead of his sinker. All else equal, the Cubs love a backdoor curveball artist. They want that guy who drops it into the zone in ways the opponent isn't ready for at all.

That brings me to the second reason why I brought this up, in the first place.

I removed the highlight on Civale's 2024, because it would have made the one for Cabrera harder to read. I also didn't highlight his 2023, because it's right next to that Civale/Taillon dot and would have left a muddle of text, too. The point is still plenty clear: Cabrera has always been this kind of curveball guy. Rather than a pitch designed to rack up whiffs, Cabrera's curve to lefties steals strikes with huge movement. It also misses bats at a dazzling rate (over 45% of swings against it last year), but he goes to that big, freeze-up curve often. This is a gorgeous match between team and new pitcher.

Cabrera is, in some other ways, a bit of a push against the grain for the Cubs. They don't normally pay handsomely for velocity and strikeout rate, as they've done here. They normally prize durability, but are rolling the dice on a guy with a long injury history. This illuminates, a bit, why they made this change of tack. Cabrera might not look like a typical Cubs starter on the surface, but in small and important ways, he is one. His breaking stuff also includes a good slider, but the curve is the featured piece, and it fits into the team's preferred plan for curves (especially to opposite-handed batters) perfectly.