Kyle Hendricks Can't Be On the Active Roster Right Now

I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, or anything the Chicago Cubs front office or Craig Counsell or Tommy Hottovy or Kyle Hendricks himself doesn't already know. I'm also not suggesting anything radical. It's just this side of a fact. Sometime very soon (perhaps Thursday, when Jameson Taillon is activated and room needs to be made both on the active roster and in the starting rotation; perhaps sooner, like in time for Wednesday's game, since Hendricks is one culprit in the ruthless overworking of the team's bullpen that has taken place early this year), Hendricks is headed to the injured list.

All the smart money says it won't even be a phantom IL stint--not really. Knowing Hendricks, who has done this before; who is a consummate teammate; who knew his team needed innings and stability here in the early going, he's probably been pitching through a legitimate injury, anyway. Four starts into his 11th season with the Cubs, though, it's safe to say that if that be the case, gutting it out isn't turning out to be helpful. If he's fully healthy, of course, that's even worse, but he's pitched long enough that someone will be able to find something to justify a sitdown for him.

Either way, it has to happen. The string is out. Hendricks has been obliterated to start this season, and the only things he's doing differently or worse this year are minuscule or subtle--but that, like his hypothetically being fully healthy right now, is even worse than the alternative. There's no quick fix here. He's not pulling out of this, at least in the short term.

I don't offer this diagnosis lightly. Hendricks has earned the respect of baseball fans everywhere, and deserves the love and loyalty of Cubs fans everywhere. There are some fans who have waited five years for Hendricks's low-velocity, low-strikeout approach to stop working, and who will snidely conclude that they were finally right, or that he merely ran out of smoke and mirrors. We're not here to do that. Let's run through a few of the many places I checked for something Hendricks could do differently, to make clear what's wrong (in case he's eventually able to correct it).

Firstly, Hendricks has been especially nightmarish with runners on base this year. You remember Barry Bonds, from 2001-04? In none of those seasons was Bonds as good as hitters have been against Hendricks with anyone on base in 2024. He's been very bad with the bases empty, too, but it's gone to another level when anyone reaches. It wasn't like this in 2023.

Note that hitters aren't chasing at anywhere near the same rate when Hendricks isn't in the zone with runners on this year. That's not normal. Normalcy looks like that 2023 disparity: hitters get a little more aggressive, and a little more susceptible to manipulation, when there are ducks on the pond. Of course, look, too, at the in-zone rates for the two seasons. It's normal to nibble more and throw fewer strikes with men on base. It's not normal to see as steep a decline as Hendricks has this year.

The rightmost column there is telling us something, too. "Competitive pitches" are all those within 18 inches of the center of the strike zone, be they inside or outside the zone. Hendricks hasn't been more erratic, in terms of wide misses. Rather, he's been just missing the edges, and hitters aren't biting at the bait.

The reason why the share of competitive pitches hasn't really fallen, though, is just that Hendricks doesn't have stuff intense enough to generate very many non-competitive ones. The magnitude of his movement is too small. That's also why hitters aren't expanding their zones for him. Hendricks knows that. He's not trying to pitch outside the zone more. He's aiming for those edges; he just isn't hitting them.

I'll propose one reason for that. I think Hendricks, who calls his own pitches using the hip-mounted version of PitchCom, has struggled to get a call in to his catchers, comfortably set himself on the rubber, and attend to the baserunner(s), then deliver the ball with any rhythm. That's not a complaint about the clock, which has been tightened from 20 seconds to 18 when runners are on this year. In fact, I was in favor of that constriction. It's also not an indictment of Hendricks for wanting to call his own game; he thrived doing things that way last year. It's a purely anecdotal bit of speculative observation. He looks a little rushed, this season, between getting the ball back, dialing in his selection, and getting it off in time.

Let's dispense with speculative observation and examine some hard data, though. Here are Hendricks's pitch locations on sinkers to left-handed batters, last year and this year.

Here is an indisputable failure of execution, where he was previously lethal in his accuracy. Sinkers don't work very well to opposite-handed batters. Sinkers that sit 88 and scrape 90 only when the sun shines on Tuesday afternoons in July almost never work to them at all. Hendricks, though, possessed deadeye precision with the pitch for years. Up and in, low and away, and he could reliably induce either jam-shots or end-of-the-bat squibbers. He's not that precise this year, and he's paid a heavy price--not only in not getting outs with the pitch, but in not even being able to use it as often, forcing him to turn to his four-seamer more and show lefties the changeup earlier in counts and games.

He's not commanding the sinker as well to righties, either, though because he uses that pitch differently against them, it looks very different.

Over the winter, I wrote about how Hendricks succeeded last year by almost never working inside. Away, away, away was his motto in 2023. This is the one place where I see a strategic misstep at play, because obviously, he's gone back to trying to get inside on righties with the sinker, but I also think a fair number of those inner-third sinkers were meant to be outer-third ones. That's how far from on-target he is, with a pitch that drives the rest of his arsenal.

If you were hoping it would even be this neat with everything, though, I can't help you. Hendricks is locating his cut-change to righties just about as well as he did last year.

He's not quite as fine on the outer third with four-seamers to lefties, but the difference doesn't come anywhere close to explaining the gap in results.

I can squint my way through these and other, similar charts, slicing and dicing in several ways, and tell you that I see a pattern of missing to his arm side, with everything in his arsenal, and that it's slightly exaggerated with runners on, and that that is consistent with him rushing himself against the shortened clock, but the spin profile, movement, velocity, and release points of all of his pitches are virtually identical to last year. He's less fine, but not materially different in a way he'll be able to fix in a single side session. He might have an injury that is making it harder to manipulate the ball or perfectly time his release, or he might not, but there's no easy tweak to make.

Hendricks got pretty lucky last year. He was genuinely good, much of the time, and it was delightful to watch him work with such fine control, but he still needed a lot of luck, because he doesn't miss enough bats to provide himself with a healthy margin for error and he's too vulnerable to the home run. His luck has run out this year, and his control has faltered, and his stuff is exactly the same as it was.

A certain kind of statistically-inclined fan could look at Hendricks's data and take an optimistic tack. If not much has physically changed, maybe this is all a mirage, give or take. He's faced three lineups (Rangers, Dodgers, Padres) who have thunderous power, and one (Diamondbacks) who hardly ever swing and miss. All four were rough matchups for him. I want to muster that much hope. I just can't.

Sometimes, when there's no explanation for something, its unbearably heavy reality just sits on your chest and crushes you, anyway. It's ugly, but it's also inescapable. Barring news that he's dealing with an injury that has limited him this year, I'm most inclined to think that Hendricks is simply cooked. It's a sad state to reach, especially so soon. It's enough to make one wish, a little bit, that Marcus Stroman hadn't opted out last winter, so that fans could remember Hendricks by a much better final season in a Cubs uniform. As it is, this isn't going to end pretty, unless Hottovy has a truly extreme makeover in store for Hendricks during his coming stint on the IL.

From a team perspective, the news is much better. Hendricks has been blasted out of the rotation by opponents, but he's also being crowded out of it by talented hurlers. Steele, Shota Imanaga, Taillon, Ben Brown, and Javier Assad could yet turn out to be a strong rotation. Swap Brown out for Cade Horton, and perhaps it gets even better. The organization's pitching pipeline is more robust than it has been in years. This team might well be fine without Hendricks. In the short term, it will certainly be better off without him. On balance, though, that's a sad sentence. Cubs fans have to hope it's a poignant part of a story with a happier denouement.