Matthew Trueblood

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images Hitting is hard, unless a pitcher makes it easy for you. That's a fundamental truth of baseball; it's why batters who hit .300 make All-Star teams. The pitcher has all kinds of advantages in their showdown with the batter, up to and including the literal high ground. They also have a defense working as a team behind them. Most of the time, to produce a valuable result, a batter has to hit the ball squarely and get at least a little lucky. They have to make an almost superhuman ballistic assessment of the pitch coming their way, adjust well and connect cleanly. They have to hit the right spot on the barrel of the bat, without hitting the top or bottom of the ball instead of the center, and they have to be on time to hit it in a good direction. All a pitcher has to do is disrupt one of those three aspects to win most of their battles. Pitchers get paid incredibly well, though, so if pitching were as easy as all that, everyone would do it. In practice, the above often proves hard to do. Pitchers have to aim for a relatively small space from a relatively significant distance, and throwing the ball past the best hitters in the world while working in and near that square-shaped strike zone isn't as easy as it sounds. To produce enough speed to make a hitter's adjustments difficult, most pitchers must sacrifice some movement or command. To produce enough movement to fool them, most must give up some speed or command. To demonstrate sufficient command... look, you get it. Each side has to make tradeoffs. Last season, Ben Brown mostly made the wrong tradeoffs. In fairness to him, though, he spent much of the season in a role to which he was not well-suited. Fifteen of Brown's 25 appearances for the 2025 Cubs came as a starter, but at the time, he was a two-pitch pitcher with little wiggle on his fastball. He needed to consistently wreck hitters' timing to succeed, either by overpowering them with his heater or by catching them hunting that pitch and throwing them his sharp curveball instead. At times, that did work, and his strikeout rate was a robust 25.6%. He didn't put batters on base for free very often, either, with a very good 6.8% walk rate. However, pacing himself for full outings meant he didn't throw as hard as he needed to to beat hitters with the fastball most of the time, because his four-seam fastball doesn't have an especially good shape and is more reliant on speed than that of most starters. In just over 106 innings, he gave up 18 home runs. His ERA was 5.92, which is almost impossibly bad for a pitcher with such good strikeout and walk numbers. Batters simply found the barrel on him too often. Even when the ball wasn't clearing the fence, it zipped off the bat. He yielded a 91.2-MPH average exit velocity, and a lot of that contact was line drives. What's changed this year? Well, you know about his new sinker, and his slightly increased faith in a changeup. If you hang out around here, you also know that he's lowered his arm slot this season, with delightfully beneficial effects. His strikeout and walk rates haven't improved at all. Can those small changes really explain the drop from an opponents' batting line of .279/.333/.467 last year to .170/.236/.205, and Brown's sparkling 1.74 ERA? Thanks to new data from Statcast, the answer to that is 'yes'. What Brown is doing differently this year is responsible for much of the improvement in his numbers, even if some positive regression was inevitable, and even if he's been a bit lucky this spring. Here's what we're talking about. Last season, righties were able to put up surprisingly competitive at-bats against Brown. A guy with a high-90s fastball and such a hard curve usually does very well against same-handed batters, but right-handed hitters had a .728 OPS off Brown in 2025. This year, that figure is .369. To understand why, first, look at these visuals from the new swing timing and miss distance leaderboard at Baseball Savant. This is Brown's profile against righties last year. As you would guess, Brown's curveball (in blue) often got hitters out to (or beyond) the end of their bat, as seen in the left-hand image. It often forced them to be early (center image), and they often swung over the top of it (right-hand image). Those are all related, of course. A hitter sees the pitch, thinks it's the fastball they're trying to time their swing for, and attacks it. They're wrong, so their swing leaves the hitting zone too early, with the ball still out beyond the end of their flailing lumber. Usually, they've also misjudged where the pitch will end up, because they thought fastball and got the biting breaker. However, notice how well hitters usually stayed on the sweet spot of their bat against his fastball (in red). The distribution in the left-hand image shows that Brown got to the handle or to the end of opponents' bats much less than some pitchers do with that four-seamer last year. He did sometimes force the batter to be late and to swing beneath the ball, but he wasn't exceptionally good at either thing. Plenty of times, righties were getting off a swing that made them on time, caught the good part of the bat and did it in the center of the baseball. That's why Brown got hit so hard. Here's the same set of images for 2026, again against righties. The introduction of the sinker (in orange) and the small change in his arm angle has changed everything. In the left-hand image, you can see that the sinker is producing more batted balls on which the hitter is tied up or jammed, where Brown got in on their hands. The four-seamer, both because batters are now trying to cover that sinker more and because adding the sinker has allowed him to focus on attacking the outer edge with the four-seamer, is getting to the ends of bats a bit more often. In the center image, look how much more often batters are late on his heater this year, as they try to discern between the sinker and the four-seamer and still get to whichever it is on time. The four-seamer is above bats more often, for the same reason. The sinker has gotten below them consistently, yielding some whiffs but even more help in the ground-ball department. Hitters have, perhaps out of self-preservation, looked for the curve a bit more often this year. They're not early on it or swinging over it as much as they were in 2025. That's why the whiff rate on that pitch hasn't climbed at all. However, they're getting it off the end of the bat, when they do hit it, so the quality of contact is lower. Again, having the sinker to keep hitters honest on the inner third is helping a pitch that's usually going to the outer third. Many of the same trends show up for lefties. He's throwing the curve more against them this year, and they've adjusted to that, so they're on time for that pitch as much as ever. It's not enough to make them effective against it, though. On the contrary, his whiff rate is still just under 50% on the curve to lefties. As he's thrown it more and they've tried to be ready for it, they've also been late and off the barrel on the four-seamer much more often. Brown won't carry a sub-2.00 ERA all season. The changes he made this winter and spring, however, have turned him into a legitimate front-of-the-rotation starter. If he can continue to locate the sinker and work from an arm slot that gives his whole arsenal a bit more adaptability, he'll continue to dominate opponents—not just with whiffs, but by limiting hard contact better than he has in the past. 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Whose golden boy? And who would deny that? And what point does that observation serve?

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images Talking about the Chicago Cubs right now is hard. You have to talk about the many ways in which they could and should have (but haven't) methodically built a roster that can compete with the Milwaukee Brewers. You have to acknowledge the real streakiness that is part of their identity, without giving in to old saws about the nature of consistency and volatility in baseball. You have to talk about the many important players slumping or declining or trying to solve major problems. But it also feels ludicrous—absurd—to talk about anything but Pete Crow-Armstrong. I grew up in Northeast Wisconsin, as a Bulls, Cubs and Packers fan. I watched the final three years of Michael Jordan's career; the halcyon decade of Sammy Sosa's time with the Cubs; and 25 years worth of Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay. I know from cults of personality within sports teams, is what I'm trying to say. It's my normal. It's what I grew up with. It's been a long time, though, since I saw a baseball team as dominated by one player's talent and personality—one player's greatness and their terribleness; their scintillations and their calamities—as the current Cubs are by Crow-Armstrong. If anyone (at least, anyone who spends much time online) tells you this has been a fun ride, they're a dangerous lunatic or a liar. What's happening around the Cubs right now is a steady and inexorable rise in background toxicity, like there's an unreported leak into the water supply or a poorly contained radiation event nearby. Crow-Armstrong, who seemed so unusually authentic and self-assured at this time last year, has gone through a disastrous slump to end 2025; a winter of cement setting on his stardom; and a spring loaded with great new opportunities but lots of extra expectations, and he's handling it all terribly. He's also having an incredible season that could end with him in the thick of the MVP conversation. In the field, Crow-Armstrong burst out of the gate this spring playing center field as well as anyone has done it since Willie Mays. His anticipation, explosiveness and ability to field the ball cleanly at top speed are unmatched. His arm is a rocket, and he uses extraordinary footwork to make the most of it, most of the time. He's also had five or six of the worst, dumbest mistakes you'll see an outfielder make. The universe seems to be against him, too. He lost a Shea Langeliers fly ball in the bright, impossible sky Thursday night, leading to an inside-the-park homer on what should have been a routine flyout. He made the initial mistake of misreading the ball off the bat, but the particular hues of sunset sky in which the ball hung while he searched for it in desperation are expert concealers. No player could have found that ball, once it was lost up there. On evenings like that, you only get the initial moment to draw your bead; there's no recovery opportunity. Crow-Armstrong was, in that sense, unlucky. All year, though, there's been what's happened to Crow-Armstrong (and to his team), and how he's reacted to it. What happens can only make a baseball season hard. How you react to it—by hurling abuse at a fan in the heat of a play, or by trying to do way too much, or by needing to be corralled after trying to get a look at some heckler after a frightful mistake—can make one truly miserable. Of course, there's also another distinction: how you react, in terms of visible emotional displays, and how you react, in terms of playing the game. After losing that ball (and then standing flat-footed to watch the rest of the play, and then being ready to take issue with fans), Crow-Armstrong delivered two huge swings that turned the game around. He hit a blistered solo home run in the bottom of the same inning, at 110 MPH off the bat. He hit the walk-off single that won the game after his teammates' spirited rally in the bottom of the ninth, capping an insane night with a cathartic roar. Several times this season, Crow-Armstrong's on-field response to a bad mistake has been a display of such ferocious brilliance that it's made up for that mistake, and then some. This was something Sosa also often did—and Favre, too, for that matter. In baseball, one player can't get an outsize share of the chances and become the sole focus of a game, the way a quarterback or a basketball player can. But if you do everything with sufficient intensity, you can fill up the box score, both literally and metaphorically. Crow-Armstrong is perfecting the art of taking over a baseball game, even though he'll sometimes give away the game, too. This can be a recipe for a championship. Teams have been led to glory by players who sucked up all the media attention and all the oxygen in the room. It's just not going to be fun, or easy, or comfortable—and it might get very ugly. Any teammate or reporter can tell you, even if many fans cannot, that it was often unpleasant to be around Sosa, Jordan and Favre, for lots of reasons. The most fun teams to follow and to be a part of are the ones with diffuse leadership and a team ethos, on and off the field. Ironically, the Cubs have worked hard to cultivate that, including by bringing in a manager who believes as fervently in having 26 leaders on a 26-man roster as anyone in the game. They've eschewed the pursuit of incandescent superstars via trade or free agency, not only for budgetary reasons, but for philosophical ones. Too bad. Crow-Armstrong is such a forceful personality—there's so much charisma in his presence on the field, and so much volatility in his interactions with everyone surrounding it—that he's changing all of that, whether anyone likes it or not. Even he doesn't necessarily seem to like it, but he doesn't have the self-control to stop it. This is a team out of control, It's a player out of control. It's a situation that makes you hear a high-pitched ringing you can't place. That ringing is the song of the blade. It's the universe drawing its bow across a string pulled so taut the note is above the top of the scale, just like Crow-Armstrong's fielding ability, his newfound bat speed, and his unreserved aggressiveness. It is, in a word, danger. The 2023 Cubs won 83 games. The 2024 team won the same number. The 2025 team got to 92 wins, but still felt stuck in the middle. If you're sick of that averageness, I have great news. It's over. Despite their current record, the Cubs are destined either for greatness or destruction this year. They're at the mercy of a player whose talent can turn being badly jammed by a 99-MPH fastball into a game-winning muscle single (because he swung the bat at 87.4 MPH, so the ball got up the handle, but he was already around on it), and who can catch anything—but who can also absolutely blow it sometimes, and whose intensity has begotten angry outbursts that are no longer directed only at himself. He can pull a team of slightly declining veterans all the way to the World Series. If he explodes, though—if all this volatility slips even further beyond his control, as it has for so many players with a similar combination of potential and insecurity—everything and everyone else around the Cubs will go kaput with him. So, keep tuning in. This is HBO stuff. It's high drama with high stakes and all the nastiness you love—the stuff they won't show you on basic cable. It's scary, and not exactly in a good way. There's a real risk you're going to learn all the wrong lessons from it. Irrefutably, though, it's entertaining as hell. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jeff Le-Imagn Images The 2026 Cubs have played 62 games. Their star closer, Daniel Palencia, has entered in a traditional save situation just twice. Palencia spent a few weeks on the injured list with a mild strain in his lat, but he's made 15 total appearances. He's just not getting chances to close games, because the Cubs rarely win, and when they do, they have an odd knack for winning in big, cathartic ways. All three times he's had a chance to save a game, Palencia has done it. However, the first such occasion didn't come until the team's eighth game of the season. It would be more than a month until the second, which wasn't even a normal save; he came on to get the final out of an 8-3 win against the Reds on May 7. A week after that, he got his third save (and second typical one) of the season. It's now been three full weeks since, without a fourth opportunity arising. Craig Counsell has therefore had to find times to use his closer, just to give him work, but even those games have been relatively thin on the ground. After Palencia's stint on the IL, the Cubs are using him carefully on purpose, a plan that makes a ton of sense for a tight, muscular athlete who throws this hard—but which gets very complicated when the usual chances to pitch aren't coming. Until Counsell used him in each of the first two games of the team's current series against the Athletics, Palencia hadn't worked on fewer than two days' rest since May 7. He's had five days between healthy appearances as many times as he's appeared on back-to-back days this year: twice each. It's been maddening, for the team and for its fans, to watch a pitcher who became an international star in March with a dominant run for the World Baseball Classic champion Team Venezuela have almost no impact on their season to date. Palencia hasn't been idle, though. He's only getting better, even if he's had to wait and wait and wait for chances to prove it. The samples are, alas, too small to jump to conclusions about whether Palencia's improvement in avoiding hard contact is sustainable. He's been prone to getting hit hard at times in the past, despite (or because of) his exceptional velocity. This year, barely over 26% of the batted balls he's allowed have been hit 95 MPH or harder, down from a career rate over 45% entering this season. He's also keeping his walk rate very low, for a late-inning reliever who throws so hard. That's all great, but it's impossible to say whether it's permanent, given how little he's worked. However, there are other things we can study that lend some credence to those improvements in results. Here's Palencia throwing a slider to the Brewers' Brice Turang during the NLDS last year: TkE0MjdfV0ZRVkV3dEdEUT09X0JnZ0FWMUpXQTFRQVcxVlFBd0FIVXdSZkFBQlJVd01BQWwxVEFWY0ZCd3BjVTFkWA==.mp4 And here's him throwing one to Christian Yelich, last month: b0d3OWxfWGw0TUFRPT1fVWdSWEIxUlNCMVFBWEZWUlh3QUhCZ1JlQUFBRkJnTUFBbEVGQndGWFZBY0JCZ1JV.mp4 If you can, ignore the results of the two offerings. Watch Palencia pitch. Can you spot the important differences? There are two. Firstly, his lower half gives him more power and direction. His stride is longer down the mound, which gets him into his legs more and helps him get over his front leg as he releases the ball. Second, his arm slot is higher. His average arm angle is up about 4° on his slider and 3° on his fastball this year. That sounds small, and isn't necessarily a sign of a conscious change in the way he's moving, but it makes a difference. Here's Palencia's spin profile for 2025, with the distribution of spin directions out of the hand for each pitch type on the left and the actual movement of the pitches on the right: Here's the same pair of images for 2026: Changing his delivery a little bit has dramatically improved the consistency with which Palencia executes his slider, giving it a shape he can tweak a bit but which seems to be devastating in whatever form he chooses for it. On average, he's also throwing it about 2 MPH harder (despite his fastball sitting right where it was last year), but that's because he's found ways to turn it into more of a cutterish offering at times, then increasing its depth (and giving back that extra velocity) at others. Palencia's extension at release is up significantly this year. That's created half a tick of increased perceived velocity even on a fastball technically traveling the same speed, according to Statcast. His whole arsenal plays up because of that. The Palencia we saw in March is still here; he just hasn't had enough chances to save the day for his domestic club. Hopefully, that will change soon, because the wasted outings by an elite reliever are getting hard to stomach. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jeff Le-Imagn Images This site is, I hope, the epicenter of Pete Crow-Armstrong swing talk. If it isn't, it ought to be, and we're gonna work even harder to make it so. Crow-Armstrong is the most interesting thing happening in Chicago baseball, in ways both good and bad, and that doesn't just include his sensational but sometimes erratic fielding or his massive star power and the difficulty he's had in managing the attention and expectations. It also includes his swing. We're going to take more about that swing today, but rather than get all wordy, I mostly want to talk this through visually. So, first, check out his rolling expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) over 100-plate appearance samples, throughout his career. I would guess it doesn't feel quite this way—not yet—but Crow-Armstrong has gone to a new level since the middle of May. I don't mean 'new' relative to his very slow start or his tough finish to last season, either. I mean he's never produced more expected value at the plate than he's currently yielding, even at the peak of his blazing hot streak in the first half of last year. The first thing you need to know about his ascent toward what will (if this continues; more later on that) be full-shine superstardom is that he started swinging considerably less as May went on. We all knew that swinging less would be key to him getting more good pitches to hit, and thus to him becoming his best self. He finally found some ways to start doing it. That's not the only important thing that has changed recently, though. Crow-Armstrong started making changes to his approach, and the results began to improve—but he was still exploitable. He was still off-balance a bit too often, mostly because his swing is a complicated thing. So, he (slightly) simplified it. I'm going to show you four pictures, three times. These are four moments in the progress of a pitch to Crow-Armstrong, first from May 18; then from May 23; and then from Saturday. The four moments are labeled, but to clarify those labels, they are: Setup: Crow-Armstrong's stance in the box, as the pitcher prepares to begin their delivery; High Point: The moment at which, after executing his toe tap and lifting his foot a second time, Crow-Armstrong's front leg reaches the highest point of his leg kick, before the foot starts to head downward; Pitch Release: Just what it sounds like; and Foot Down: The moment when Crow-Armstrong's front foot lands, and his swing can begin in earnest. Ok, here goes. May 18, against the Brewers' Shane Drohan: May 23, against the Astros, after a day off between the two home series of that week: And Saturday in St. Louis, the pitch that became the hardest-hit ball of Crow-Armstrong's career and a 444-foot homer: In the setup, note how he gets more upright and less spread-out in the box. Note, too, the more relaxed placement of his bat on his shoulder, and the angle of it going from flat over his back shoulder to more like 40°. At the high point of his leg kick, notice how he's crunching more into a stable but explosive position with his core. At the release of the pitch, notice how he's more balanced and how his front foot is closer to landing. And when that foot does land, look at how much more work he's already doing with his upper half, and how much more open his front hip is, without the front shoulder following it too closely. These changes all emanate from that change in setup, which is visible in the data, too. Here are Crow-Armstrong's average stance and stride positions for this year, broken down into pre- and post-May 21. He's moved closer to the plate. His feet start closer together, as a result of standing taller. He's striding a bit farther, but that stride is more of a controlled, violent forward flash of energy, and less of a lurch, because he started more upright and isn't leaking forward until he gets past that high point, now. The changes in stance and mechanics have produced a different set of swing data for Crow-Armstrong over the last two weeks or so: Through May 20: 74.3 MPH bat speed, 35° tilt, 14° attack angle, 5° pull attack direction, intercept point 37.1 inches in front of his center of mass Since May 22: 75.4 MPH, 34° tilt, 18° attack angle, 9° pull attack direction, intercept point 39.4 inches in front of his center of mass Already, the bat speed Crow-Armstrong had added since last year had given him a boost in power upside, if he could consistently access that pop. Now, he's positively thrumming with danger in the box. In fact, did that setup from the St. Louis pitch remind you of someone? Perhaps someone else who famously hits lasers to right field, in much the same way—albeit with a much more patient baseline approach? Here's the Crow-Armstrong homer: OTdQOXdfV0ZRVkV3dEdEUT09X1VsSlhYUWRTQndJQVcxY0NCUUFIQmdWVEFBQUJBRklBVkFGUUFnY0dVMUJTVVZNSA==.mp4 And here's a guy who could be a fascinating new comp for him: N3l6eDZfWGw0TUFRPT1fVUFnREFGRUhWRmNBWGxJRVh3QUhCd05VQUFCV0FRY0FVRlpYVVFZTkFnWlNBbFJV.mp4 Make no mistake about it: If Crow-Armstrong keeps swinging like this, he's going to strike out more than he has in the past. He might continue to improve his plate discipline, but he'll almost certainly never walk as much as Kyle Schwarber. He doesn't swing quite as hard (or get off that 'A' swing quite as consistently) as Schwarber does, either. At least, that's been true so far. But the version of Crow-Armstrong who hit the homer above, and who also hit a similar one the previous weekend against the Astros, is an honest-to-God threat to hit 40 homers a year. Coming into this season, we talked a lot about the way Crow-Armstrong had engineered his swing to get high-level power outcomes out of merely average-plus bat speed. Suddenly, the latter no longer applies. This version of Crow-Armstrong—the specific version we've seen the last two weeks, who will still have to prove he can avoid being perpetually early and who has to manage to stay healthy while creating this much torque, so you never know how long we'll have him—swings as fast as Austin Riley and Matt Wallner, but with both a better plan to get the head out and catch the barrel with an elevated pitch to the pull field, and more sheer bat control. Of Crow-Armstrong's last 50 batted balls, 23 have been in the launch angle sweet spot, according to Statcast. The lack of that concentration of batted balls in the sweet spot was precisely the problem we talked about him needing to solve in the middle of last month, and he seems to have solved it just days later. This will be terrifically hard to sustain. Crow-Armstrong is working with a contact point way out in front of his frame, and though the numbers exaggerate that circumstance slightly because of the changed pattern of his stride and balance of his body, it still spells some whiffs. Pitchers will start forcing him to prove he can stay back on non-fastballs, and his plate discipline—even more vulnerable to the entropy of the game than most players'—will have to hold. At this moment, though, Crow-Armstrong is the best he's ever been at bat, and one of the dozen best hitters in baseball. That's the new upside he's established, and when you pair that run production in the box with his speed and defense, you get the MVP candidate the Cubs so delighted in having for the first half of last year—only more so. View full article

Don't worry. The way things are going, White Sox fans will make sure it's emblazoned on your brain and everyone else's, soon enough.

FWIW: I don't *think* it was the Cubs' idea. And it wasn't the goal when Wicks made those changes. He thought he'd be able to change his body and his delivery and add good things, without losing the strengths he already had. Some pitchers succeed at that! Unfortunately, he didn't—which does have to fall at least partly at the feet of the Cubs.

It's easy to forget, but the guy they drafted definitely had a plus changeup. In remaking his delivery to get to more velocity and to throw four-seamers instead of sinkers, he both started getting hurt a lot and lost that change, I think. But yeah, it's a pretty clear mistake. Taken within six picks, right after him: Gavin Williams, Colson Montgomery, Jackson Merrill. The Cubs flubbed that one.

Image courtesy of © Jeff Curry-Imagn Images Matthew Boyd can't come back too soon. The veteran lefty is on the rehab trail, and threw 63 pitches in four innings in a rehab start for Triple-A Iowa Sunday afternoon. He wasn't exceptionally effective, but the Cubs didn't need to see him dominate minor-league batters to know they want him back in their starting rotation. Boyd averaged 93 miles per hour on his fastball, and if his surgically repaired knee responds well over the first two days of this week, Boyd could certainly make his next start with the parent club over the weekend. Edward Cabrera might not be far behind Boyd. Sidelined since May 20 by a blister, Cabrera should be back with the team in the first half of this month, though he won't even be eligible to return until the end of the week. Even before he landed on the IL, he was less effective and less impressive than he'd been at the beginning of the season, and the team will want to make sure the blister has time to fully resolve before reinstating him. At the same time, last week made it appallingly clear: the Cubs can't afford to wait any longer than is absolutely necessary. In a 3-4 week against two division rivals, Chicago gave away two games by sending out starter Jordan Wicks to take Cabrera's turns in the rotation. They weren't expecting a miracle; they weren't expecting anything. The Cubs don't believe in Wicks, at this point, any more than you or I do—and I don't quite know about you, but I don't believe in Wicks at all. He's a pitcher whose ceiling was always low, and for whom an attempt to reengineer his mechanics and tap into more intense stuff only brought on a series of injuries that have dropped the floor out from under him. He could have a big-league future; he has no meaningful future with the Cubs. Unfortunately, with Boyd (twice), Cabrera and Cade Horton already having been shelved this year, the team had few alternatives to giving Wicks another shot. They've already pulled Colin Rea and Ben Brown back from bullpen assignments into the rotation. Javier Assad got a shot, too, but he's been so unable to make his kitchen-sink magic work this spring that even when the Cubs could have recalled him to replace Cabrera on the roster, they elected not to do so. Assad is now eligible to return to the majors for non-injury reasons, but he might not be back any time soon, anyway; he's just gone backward as a pitcher. Brown (with his lower arm angle and newfound sinker-heavy approach against righties) has taken wonderfully to the rotation. He, Shota Imanaga, Jameson Taillon and Rea look locked into the starting group for now, with Boyd likely to take the next turn that would otherwise go to Wicks. When Cabrera returns, Rea might get shoved back into the pen, rather than Brown, but that (perhaps too hopefully) assumes no one else is hurt and that Taillon and Imanaga are able to keep the ball in the park a bit better in the next couple of starts. A fan in a summery mood could have sat down late in the winter and sketched a dream-like summer rotation for this team: Boyd, Horton, Cabrera, Imanaga, and Justin Steele all at their best, with Taillon, Rea, Brown and Assad as mere reinforcements. Instead, this team has no ace unless Brown proves this burst to be sustainable (which is unlikely), and very shaky depth. Suddenly but urgently, and at a rough time of year for it, they need pitching depth, badly. Over the weekend, the Twins designated right-handed starter Simeon Woods Richardson for assignment. Richardson is young and relatively controllable. He has a fastball that can touch the mid-90s and a slider and a splitter that each flash above-average. However, he also has an 0-7 record and a 7.74 ERA this season, and he can't be optioned to the minors. Fixing him is probably a bigger project than the team can handle in the time and space provided. Sunday saw the Pirates place righty Carmen Mlodzinski on the restricted list, after he (more or less) refused a reassignment to the bullpen. Mlodzinski is easy to underrate, but he's a six-pitch guy with a fastball that sits 95 and a 3.37 career ERA. If the Pirates are overflowing with starters (or, as is more accurate, just believe more in a couple of guys yet to prove as much as Mlodzinski has, in Bubba Chandler and Jared Jones), the Cubs could try to swoop in and take the disgruntled one they've displaced off their hands. That would work much better, of course, were the Cubs and Pirates not both in the NL Central. In all likelihood, even if the Pirates do trade Mlodzinski, they'll ship him far from home, to some team in the American League. Besides, disgruntled or not, Mlodzinski has three-plus years of team control remaining and can probably slot fourth into most big-league rotations. The Cubs don't have whatever Pittsburgh would demand in return for Mlodzinski—or, if they do, they can't afford to trade it. For the moment, the team is stuck. Whatever positive momentum they could have created this week was wasted by Wicks surrendering 11 runs while getting just 19 outs, leaving his team no chance to win in two of their seven games. Boyd might be able to slap a Band-Aid on this problem, but Jed Hoyer has been given his wakeup call. The Cubs need to make a move, and not in two months. They need help right now, or they can kiss their dreams of a first true division title since 2017 goodbye. View full article

I agree with *almost* all of this. The key difference is, I actually don't think you can do some of this mental work over the offseason. In those months, you go into an offseason mode. It's a lot easier to be clear-eyed, to make plans, to be patient. I think you have to learn those things during seasons. My disappointment in PCA lies in the fact that I don't see him making those strides as well or as quickly as he should, because he seems in such a rush to reach the pinnacle. Eventually, he (and the team) will have to accept that it will take time to go from good to great.