Will Ben Brown Be the Swiss Army Knife of the 2025 Cubs Pitching Staff?

One of the key questions about this team revolves around the fifth spot in the starting rotation. Shota Imanaga, Justin Steele, Jameson Taillon and Matthew Boyd figure to have the top four spots locked in, perhaps in that order. The final spot is a lot more fluid, and one intriguing option is Ben Brown. The lanky righthander might just be the Swiss Army knife for Chicago.

Now fully recovered after his 2024 campaign was cut short due to a neck strain in June, Brown is a major X-factor for this Cubs roster—maybe the biggest one in the organization, for 2025. He appeared in 15 games last season for the Cubs, eight as a starter. In 55 1/3 innings, the hard-throwing righty racked up 66 strikeouts. If that stretch of the season had been even a hair less aggressively soul-sucking, his seven innings of no-hit ball against Milwaukee in a late May start (wtih 10 strikeouts, to boot!) would be a landmark moment of the last several years for the Cubs.

Brown has a fastball that lives around 97 MPH, and a wipe-you-out breaking ball to go with it. His stuff has the potential to make a front office drool, if he works out to be a starting pitcher. The fact that he heavily relies on a two-pitch mix at the moment has some believing a role in the bullpen would be the best fit.

Regardless of the path taken by the Cubs and Brown, there's no doubting the talent and the upside. Javier Assad and Colin Rea each have a leg up on Brown for the fifth spot in the rotation, for the simple reason that each has spent big parts of past big-league seasons in that role. They're more durable, and they each have the very depth of repertoire that is missing with Brown, begetting the biggest performance-related questions about his future. If he shoves during Cactus League play, though, Brown should get a chance to unseat his more veteran teammates.

At 34 years of age and with a whole drawer full of team-issued workout shirts in various colors, Rea has a solid floor, but not a high ceiling. If the Cubs want to take a conservative, cautious approach to the last spot in the rotation, Rea could fit like a glove. He was asked to do a bit more with Milwaukee in 2024, due to a long list of injuries elsewhere in the rotation. Once the rotation got somewhat stabilized, however, Rea's opportunities diminished to the point where he was left off Milwaukee's playoff roster for its matchup with New York.

Rea's unsexy mixture of stuff and approach don't leave much room to dream on him, but the steadiness of his five-inning, two-run starts is astonishing. Seriously, since the start of last season, he has 16 starts in which he got 15, 16, or 17 outs and allowed 0, 1, 2, or 3 runs. He will keep you in the game and get you to the bullpen in decent shape. That's more than pitchers like Brown can say, sometimes.

Assad is a bit less reliable than Rea, but he, too, has the kitchen sink at his disposal. Unlike Rea, he weathers the times through the order penalty well. The crafty righty is dealing with an oblique strain which, thankfully, doesn't appear to be serious. He was a horse for the Cubs in 2024, chewing up 147 innings across 29 starts, but he did miss a bit of time with a balky elbow. He's probably a better health bet than Brown, but a worse one than Brown, and probably offers a higher ceiling than Rea, but he certainly has a lower one than Brown's.

Brown's stuff is far superior to both Assad's and Rea's. If he's able to develop a changeup and establish it as a true third pitch, he can be not just a starter, but a mid-rotation one who occasionally looks like an ace for a month at a time. The risk is greater going with Brown over Assad or Rea at this point, given the lack of experience and coming off the neck strain in 2024. The reward, however, is the potential for Brown to hit the ground running and flourish in the rotation, on a level that Assad and Rea just can't match.

So what does Brown think about the starter or bullpen arm debate?

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"I think depth is great. Having a lot of guys is great. My expectation is that when I do get a role, or whatever my role is, if it is more of a fluid role like it was last year, I just want to be ready for that and ready to dominate that role."

When asked if he still sees himself as a starter long-term, the answer was simpler, and less smothered in cliché.

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"100 percent,"

Brown stated to reporters. 

For now, he'll probably either be a starter with "Iowa" faux-scrawled across the Cubs logo on his cap, or a reliever in the majors. Rea and Assad have too many skins on the wall to shove them aside, so only an injury or an in-season failure by someone can open the door for Brown to start games for the parent club. Those happen all the time, though, and having a fallback plan as good and versatile as Brown could be a game-changed for the 2025 Cubs.