How the Pitching-Starved Cubs Mothballed Their Most Effective Pitcher for a Month

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The Cubs' pitching staff is a tire fire. Despite working in front of one of the league's best defenses, they've allowed 4.9 runs per game since the trade deadline. Shave off their five-game winning streak immediately after the deadline, and it's 5.1 runs per game in the last 30. Every year, this team finds and reclaims a few impressive arms—but not this time. The closest thing to a feel-good story on this year's staff is Ryan Rolison. Even moderately effective hurlers are in short supply. This isn't a problem that cropped up at the deadline. It's been true all year.

However, there's one Cubs starter who's been pitching quite well. Three of his last four have been quality starts, and he has a 3.30 ERA in his last eight. He's given them the length they need, averaging over 5 1/3 innings per game over those eight starts. There's just one problem: the team voluntarily demoted him from the rotation. Those eight starts spanned from June 20 to August 2. Since that date—since the deadline that brought Clay Holmes and Kevin Gausman to the Cubs and overhauled the team's starting staff—Colin Rea has thrown just 15 1/3 innings, almost all of them in low-leverage relief. He has a 3.52 ERA over that span, which means he has a 3.36 mark in 59 frames since the midpoint of June. The team, however, believed they needed to shove him roughly aside as part of their August shakeup.

There was some reason for that belief. I've written about this before, going back to Rea's time in Milwaukee but even last August. Rea, historically, runs out of steam at the ends of seasons, unless his workload is carefully managed. He'd also struggled mightily earlier in the summer, before finding his footing nicely in the second half of June and throughout July. You don't want to go into the postseason with Colin Rea as a top-three starter in your rotation. It wasn't even unreasonable for Chicago to want to get Rea out of their rotation altogether.

Still, it's now clear that deprioritizing him as much as they did was a mistake. Specifically, Craig Counsell failed to make real and valuable use of Rea after taking him out of the rotation. Rea started on August 2. It made sense that his first appearance in relief didn't come until August 8, but then, he didn't pitch again until August 15. He threw just one inning on August 21, and didn't pitch again until August 29. He's pitched a hair more frequently since then, but only in mop-up spots.

Meanwhile, almost everyone who has sponged up the innings taken away from Rea has sucked. Aaron Civale has been excellent; Javier Assad has been almost as good. Holmes has posted an ERA (3.51) almost identical to Rea's (3.52), so if you think of him as having taken Rea's job in the rotation, it's been a wash. Every other starter, though, has been much worse:

David Peterson: 4.45
Matthew Boyd: 4.98
Shota Imanaga: 5.02
Kevin Gausman: 5.31

Those numbers look bad, but they're nothing, really, compared to the ERAs of Caleb Thielbar, Ryan Zeferjahn, Jacob Webb and Daniel Palencia. Those four have all gotten high-leverage relief chances at the expense of Rea, and their ERAs are all over 6.00 in this span.

Rea's raw stuff won't blow you away. The Cubs were justified in trying to upgrade from him in the rotation, and his arsenal doesn't play up in relief quite the way some other hurlers' might. On balance, though, Rea is now a symbol of the Cubs' pitching failures—not because he's 10 years too old and throws 3 MPH too slow to be impressive, but because he was having success, and is still having success, and the team mothballed him, only to replace him with hurlers who have performed much worse.

Rea can't be a true savior for the staff, but he should move back into a meaningful role. Finding the right one for him is the job of Counsell and Tommy Hottovy, but handcuffing Rea to Peterson or Imanaga might make sense. He could work in long relief, without working in low leverage. He could get the team over the finish line and into the playoffs, and he might even have a rightful role in the postseason pitching plan, too. That's not a great reflection on the state of the Cubs' pitching group, but their choice to lift Rea from a job he was performing adequately and their failure to get similar production from more talented hurlers in the several weeks since is an even worse one.