If Cubs Want To Compete, Justin Steele, Shota Imanaga, and Javier Assad Must Become Long-Term Rotation Pieces

If the Cubs are serious about competing next season and beyond, Justin Steele, Shota Imanaga, and Javier Assad must remain on the team long-term. 

How’s that for a thesis statement? And if you’re still reading, you will soon find out why these three Cubby hurlers are worth keeping around, not just from a statistical standpoint but also from a cultural standpoint. In 2024, the game of baseball is so embedded in statistics and analytics, both on the field and off, that I sometimes forget if I’m creating a Microsoft Word document or an Excel spreadsheet. The first guy I will tell you about, Justin Steele, makes both diehards and casual fans forget about software programs and get locked into baseball. Steele has been with the organization for over six years and was effective almost immediately. In 2017, he was selected as an All-Star with the Myrtle Beach Pelicans. The 2023 season saw Steele rack up 16 wins, good enough to finish top five in the National League. Due to an early-season injury and the team’s weak offensive production, Steele’s wins have dropped off in 2024, yet he still boasts a 2.95 ERA and a 1.00 WHIP. I am neither Bill James nor Billy Beane, but those seem like the numbers of a guy you’d want to keep around. 

Every five days, usually at around 1:20 PM, “Shotamaina” takes over the North Side of Chicago. After going largely overlooked in free agency, thanks to the blockbuster presence of Yoshinobu Yamamoto and his now fellow Dodger Shohei Ohtani, Imanaga burst onto the scene. To say Shota Imanaga has been a pleasant surprise would be like calling the cinematography in a Christopher Nolan movie “adequate.” Imanaga is not adequate; he’s elite, and until the Cubs began this excruciating spiral into mediocrity, he was considered a top candidate to win the National League Cy Young Award. He’s been called “The Throwing Philosopher,” which makes plenty of sense the more you see him pitch. Imanaga claims to be working on a more varied arsenal of pitches, but he delivers dazzling numbers with a fastball that, when on, is virtually untouchable. Per Baseball Savant, his fastball ranks in the 89th percentile for value.

Moreover, he ranks in the 95th percentile for both fastball chase rate and walks allowed. What that translates to for the less statistically inclined: Shota Imanaga keeps guys off base. With a team experiencing a stark decline in defensive proficiency this season, limiting the opposition’s base runners is more critical than ever. Regardless of what the front office might yield from moving Imanaga, the loss of goodwill from a public perspective would be detrimental. 

The least of Jed Hoyer’s concerns should be how to get rid of the types of players that help this team win. The final piece of this starting pitching core we’ll talk about is Javier Assad. Through a striking level of consistency, Javier Assad has cemented himself as an underrated commodity in 2024. To me, his vitality to the Cubs’ rotation is non-negotiable. Like pretty much every other player on the team, Assad is injured right now, but Assad impresses nevertheless. Although Assad leads the league in songs written about him, he has a smaller sample size of games to analyze his work on. Over three seasons, Assad boasts a sub-4 ERA, and this season delivers surprisingly clutch performances with RISP. Unlike his colleagues we spoke about earlier, the 26-year-old right-hander gets by with a steady diet of his sinker, thrown 36.5% of the time. Again, it's a small sample size, but if a cornerstone of your game plan as a team is to stop the other guys from scoring runs, he excels in that category. 

No matter what words I put down here, the likelihood of all three of these starters being on the team by the end of the month is, unfortunately, slim. But good pitching has to come from somewhere, and every contending team has it. I get that the Cubs have it and aren’t contenders, but moving these guys will ensure we won’t be for a while.