Jason Ross

Really good pitchers can have a bad 5-6 starts. They are still really good. Just like sucky pitchers can have good runs for 36 innings! Chris Flexen probably sucks. But he way overperformed for the Cubs and I am thankful for that. I dont want to sound ungrateful, but he is likely as bad of an option to start a game as Brown is.

There are plenty of SP's for the Cubs to acquire. Realistically all of the following are available for the right price: MacKenzie Gore, Joe Ryan, Sandy Alcantara, Merril Kelly, Zac Gallen, Michael Soroka, Charlie Morton... Those are just a few off the top of my head and at various levels of ability. Some are buy low (Morton./Soroka) who have pitched better than their ERA suggest. Gore is a top-line pitcher who would cost a ton. All could be acquired using the system the Cubs have. Outside of Suarez, what difference making hitters are available? Most hitters are complimentary and the Brewers would get better by getting a Willi Castro or whatever, but he won't transform the team, either.

Reminder: 48 hours ago the Cubs had the best record in baseball, and even with a loss tonight will either have the same amount of wins as the Dodgers or one more win than them. We really don't need to panic.

Chris Flexen has 36 innings this year where he has an xFIP of 4.83. He has 684 IP in MLB and an xFIP of 5.03. His career ERA is 4.72. This season his K% is down from his career 16.2% to 13.6%. Of all pitchers with 40 IP, three in the league have a lower K%. He's had a lucky season. But if past production meant future prediction, Bryan LaHair would be a muilt-season all-star. Underlying data is the way to predict the future. Flexen is bad. He's just been fairly lucky.

Shota only throws his sweeper to LHH. To RHH he is almost entirely fastball-splitter. Even if Brown adds a changeup, it would almost be exclusively to LHH. He would remain fastball-deathball exclusively to RHH. The issue is not movement but command.

Flexen also sucks. Yes. He's a pumpkin. He's getting away with bottom barrel whiff (5th percentile) and chase (2nd percentile) rates. He misses barrels, but it's not an elite barrel miss rate. He also gives up a good deal of FB's so he doesn't profile as a FIP beater His xFIP is 4.83.

It would help if he had a little horizontal movement, but I don't think you have to have it. Shota Imanaga kills RHP going fastball-splitter and they run on a similar plane. His control of the fastball up and the splitter away kills hitters. Brown just pipes too many pitches because he cannot spot the fastball enough in a good place.

It's a two-party system. The Cubs cannot force a team to make a trade unless they overpay. As much as people are upset today that Brown was ******, they'd almost assuredly be just as mad as the excess trade capital they'd have to make to force these teams off their stance of "I'm competing". It's a double edged sword and the Cubs are damned if they do and damned if they don't. You're currently stuck dealing with the Rockies, White Sox and the A's if you want a SP. Or you're dealing with the fringe teams, like even Baltimore, and forcing them off their "Oh yeah, well we aren't selling" mantra. Even if we know they will eventually, they won't until they have to. These teams hold the power currently. It's a tough situation.

Because Chris Flexen also sucks. The Cubs were probably hoping that Brown against the Royals would be more effective against a poor team and build confidence. Didn't work, sadly.

His fastball is fine on the surface. It's two fold: 1. Hitters can sit on the fastball. Frankly, it desn't matter who you are and what your fastball is, if MLB hitters know it's coming, you're horsefeathered 2. He leaves it mid-mid too often early in the count. He's desperately trying to get to his deathball. But he won't throw the deathball behind to hitters because he wants to induce chase with that pitch. When ahead, hitters can spit on it more easily. It's a command/control issue. The pitch on the surface is not bad. It's everything around it.

Ben Brown has great stuff, but he's a classic "command vs control" issue. Even tonight, his walk rate is solid. He hasn't walked anyone. But I fully believe he cannot command pitches in the strike zone well. He can "get 'em in" but he misses in too often. Specifically, IMO, he gets caught "stealing strikes". As a two-pitch guy, he uses his fastball almost exclusively behind in the count and his curveball a ton when ahead. He can deceive hitters with the two pitches, he throws the fastball up and the deathball breaks down; there's a tunnel there. So when he's ahead in the count, he creates natural confusion. But once you know he's basically only throwing the fastball, he becomes an easy solve. Early in the count, he'll try to sneak the fastball in to get ahead. He *needs* a third pitch. He has not developed one.

I call Carl Weathers.

He fixed his front foot. He can clear his front shoulder without diving into it. He has *pulled* two home runs. Go back and watch the Twins series if you really are a sicko. He pulled a few swings hard but all were too early. He had to be early to clear his front side because he was so closed off. His foot is neutral now. He can clear his shoulder on time.

Been trying to tell ya'll...

He does.

The upgrade at 3b is likely not as major of an upgrade as people expect it will be. ZiPS projects it as less than half a win. I wouldn't do it for both, either. You can buy Kelly + another 3b for less than Ben Brown.

LHP on the mound. Cubs have given some guys days off here. Suspect they want to rest players more moving forward.

Alcantara is an interesting case. His LOB% is ridiculously low, lower than Mike Soroka who I just wrote about on the main page. Unlike Soroka, Miami's defense is more neutral and likely not a major cause but also isn't helping him. Stuff+ and velocity suggest he's just fine. His K% and control are issues. We're one start removed from Dany Syzmborski (the creator of ZiPS) writing this article suggesting Sandy is coming around. I think a smart team will have a fix. You almost certainly have to give up to get Sandy, so I would expect they would have to give up a Caissie or a Wiggins. But I also think if the Cubs do that, than the feeling we should have is that the Cubs are a smart team who have a fix. The stuff is there which fully suggests this is fixable.

I wouldn't trade Ben Brown for a rental either.

Michael Soroka you say?

He *was* starting but a good reason they sent him down was to conserve innings. He didn't pitch for a few weeks and hasn't fully stretched back out. His first start back was just 2 innings.

Even if they dont snag him in July, he would be someone Id would be interested in during the Winter. He fits a similar category as Boyd. Different reasons (Boyd was undervalued due to injury) but there is a dude here I feel.

Image courtesy of © Geoff Burke-Imagn Images With each passing day, the Cubs' need for at least one more starting pitcher to round out the rotation becomes more clear. Recently, there have been multiple bullpen games, or games started by the likes of Chris Flexen. Monday will see Ryan Brasier serve as the opener for the return (gulp) of Ben Brown. While you must do what you must mid-season, the Cubs are now dead level with the Milwaukee Brewers at the start of a 63-game sprint to the finish. Going with this type of a hole in the rotation feels unsustainable. The problem the Cubs (and every other contending team) face is that, with expanded playoffs, more and more teams feel as though they are "in it" and can make magic happen over the final two months. This means that in the days prior to the deadline, they can conceivably charge a higher price to buy them out of this slim chance to sneak into the postseason. Put another way: fewer teams are defined sellers, which leaves fewer obvious places for the Cubs to go buying without having to pay a premium. This makes a team like the Washington Nationals (whom FanGraphs currently gives a 0.0% chance to make the playoffs) all the more attractive. Much of the discourse around the Nationals and trades will obviously revolve around their ace starting pitcher, MacKenzie Gore. Gore has transformed himself into one of the premier left-handed hurlers in the game, and with multiple years of control, he would cost a ton of prospect capital if they are swayed to move him. The Cubs could probably field their price, but it could create a problem: would they have enough to solve their other issues? Beyond Gore, there would appear to be no obvious candidates on the roster whom the team would be willing to move (Bradley Lord looks the part, but is 25 and under control for six years) and who are productive (outside of Lord and Gore, the best ERA of any starter on the Nationals sits over 4.50). But, what if I told you that despite the bad production in traditional statistics, the team did have a pitcher I would run out in a playoff game? Enter: Michael Soroka. A former farmhand of the Atlanta Braves, Soroka was viewed as a top-five organizational prospect half a decade ago, but since then, he has struggled to find footing in the highest level of competition baseball has to offer. (Perhaps that's unfortunate phrasing, since an Achilles injury was a major reason for his struggles to become a consistent presence.) Since his sensational, 4-fWAR season back in 2019, injuries have derailed him. Eventually, Atlanta essentially gave up on Soroka, who was moved to the Chicago White Sox for reliever Aaron Bummer, and then was released from the Chicago-based organization just one year later. In his one year on the South Side, he showed poor chase rates, high walk rates, surrendered lots of barrels and provided little to get one excited about his future. On top of that, the optics of getting released from the team who set an MLB record for incompetence are, frankly, pretty bad. Soroka's career was on the ropes. However, Soroka found refuge with another bottom-dweller for the 2025 season, signing a one-year "prove-it" deal with the Washington Nationals—likely his last real chance to show that he's a pitcher worthy of an MLB roster spot. How's it going? Well, if you relied on his ERA for the season, you'd probably come to the conclusion that not much has changed, and that he was likely even closer to being finished. On the season, Soroka's ERA currently sits above 5.00, but I don't think that's a fair reflection of how he's pitched. After all, ERA takes more into account than just Michael Soroka. It can take into account the entire team—a team tied for the second-worst record in the National League. Usually, bad teams are bad for a reason. Maybe they hit poorly, or they have bad pitching. In the Nationals' case, they can't field anything. Currently, the team sits 27th in baseball with -27 Defensive Runs Saved (DRS). Being just "bad" would be an improvement; this is a team who has seemingly forsaken the idea of defense in general. This likely factors into Soroka's inflated ERA, as his strand rate is comically low, sitting as the 12th worst in baseball. This isn't the pitcher's fault, if the defense cannot and will not help him out on balls in play or even make routine plays. Soroka's expected ERA is 3.22, and his xFIP is 3.90. It's pretty clear that Soroka is far better than his ERA would suggest, and pointing the finger at the eight players who share a field with him at any given time is probably fair. But even going beyond just playing the blame game on his defensive counterparts, Soroka has made significant changes under the hood that point to his improvement as a pitcher, including ones that I suspect the Cubs would find interesting. His velocity has been rebounding, getting better than even it was in 2019, when it averaged 92.9 mph on the gun. Last year, the righty's velocity jumped half a mph to 93.5, and this season he's jumped to 94 mph. It's not just velocity, though; he's changed his mechanics. From 2024 to 2025, Soroka has dropped his arm slot around 5°. This has helped him, specifically with his slider and getting extra sweep on the pitch, away from right-handed hitters. Statcast even classifies the pitch as a "slurve" now, instead of a slider, due to the movement. Regardless of the classification, the results speak for themselves. The pitch has an expected opponent weighted on base average (xwOBA) of .206 and a whiff rate of 37.4%. Below is Soroka getting one of the most dangerous pitchers in baseball to swing over the top of the pitch. He gets significant movement and depth on it, and Shohei Ohtani swings over it helplessly. On the day, Soroka got 16 swings and misses, an impressive number against (arguably) the best lineup in baseball. Soroka's new arm slot, and his increased usage of his four-seam heater (up to 44.4% from 32.3% last season) would likely interest the Cubs. The Cubs have tinkered with pitchers this season in both regards—most notably, Colin Rea. Rea has seen a massive uptick in fastball usage, while also lowering his own arm slot; the hard work on that front with Soroka is done for the Cubs. With his lower angle, Soroka may be capable of cutting the baseball more, playing with seams (such as Cade Horton) or could develop a better changeup (say, the kick-change Jameson Taillon uses?), all of which are things the Cubs have history with as well. While I wouldn't advocate Soroka be the only pitcher the Cubs acquire in the upcoming time prior to the trade deadline, I think a smart organization will see the ERA Soroka is sporting is a mirage and hiding the true improvement. He should also be relatively cheap. The surface-level numbers do influence asking price. The Nationals have no reason to even pretend they can still make a playoff run, and Soroka is a free agent at year's end, making him a true rental. With his changes and a better defense, Soroka is miles better than Chris Flexen and the bullpen, and very well may be more trustworthy than even Jameson Taillon in a playoff series. So I'm begging anyone to save Michael Soroka from Washington's pitiful defense, but I would also hope that the "someone" in this scenario is the Cubs. He's a tailor-made pitcher for the Cubs, and fits a need. There's upside, and probably some juice left to squeeze if the Cubs feel like they wanted to tinker a bit. But even as it is, he's made improvements that Washington just isn't capable of using effectively, and would improve most teams' rotations. Imagine if Soroka played in front of Matt Shaw, Dansby Swanson, Nico Hoerner, Pete Crow-Armstrong and had the benefit of the wind blowing in at Wrigley Field. What do you think of Michael Soroka as a Cubs trade target? Do you think he would fit a need? Let us know in the comment section below! View full article

Freddie Freeman just took a Jose Quintana fastball directly on the wrist and left down the clubhouse immediately. Concern is that it is broken.