Matthew Trueblood

If you see Kevin Alcántara on the street today near Wrigley Field, be sure to congratulate him. Monday was his 50th day on an active big-league roster. After coming up at the tail end of 2024 and again for most of last September, Alcántara spent roughly a fortnight with the parent club in late May and early June. He was there to replace Matt Shaw, who had been placed on the injured list with a back strain. He was shuttled back to Triple-A Iowa, though, and it took another Shaw injury to get him back up for a fourth major-league stint. It's probably hard for Alcántara to tell he's a big-leaguer, though. He's gotten no real chance to show anything—either the magnitude of his talent nor the depth of his flaws—in his previous times as part of the team. He's stuck on 32 career plate appearances, which is about what Pete Crow-Armstrong collects each week. He's only played a complete game—neither coming on as some sort of sub nor being replaced mid-game—three times in the majors: September 25, 2024, in his MLB debut September 27, 2024 September 7, 2025 Neither the Cubs organization nor Craig Counsell has shown much faith in Alcántara. Yet, they do keep him around, and in a strange but real way, they need him. With Shaw shelved again and Michael Conforto circling the drain, they need a player who can play some corner outfield. With their offense running on Crow-Armstrong's increasingly well-rounded brilliance and a whole lot of luck and pluck around that, they need someone who can catch hold of a ball and hit it 425 feet now and then. Alcántara can be that guy. In the long run, I'm skeptical of Alcántara. In the short term, he needs to get a chance to help the team this time. After the Cubs put him in the cooler by calling him up for 16 days and 10 plate appearances starting May 23, it would have been understandable if he'd gone back to Iowa and struggled. Instead, he hit the ground running, with a 21-for-59 showing that included nine extra-base hits. He's up to 826 career plate appearances for the I-Cubs, with an OPS just under .860, all as a young and athletic player. His swing is long and whiff-prone; he needs to be shielded from bad matchups to have success in the big leagues right now. But he does still have the upside of a big-league regular, and right now, the Cubs don't have a strong alternative to him, at least against lefty starters. They'll see one of those Tuesday night, as the Padres send southpaw JP Sears to the mound. Alcántara needs to be in the lineup. One of Cubs fans' legitimate laments about David Ross was that he mistrusted young players too much and stunted their development, especially by leaving them to rot on the bench amid call-ups. Miguel Amaya and Crow-Armstrong felt that very pain in 2023. The hope was that Counsell would be better at bringing along homegrown guys, but while his tenure has seen Michael Busch and Crow-Armstrong establish themselves successfully (and he's done everything right with regard to Shaw), Owen Caissie, Moisés Ballesteros and Alcántara are each marks against him as a player development guy so far. That has to change in the coming days. Alcántara could be a decent trade chip this summer. He could be retained with an eye toward replacing Ian Happ and/or Seiya Suzuki, who are each impending free agents. Either way, though, this is the last season in which he can be optioned to the minors, so the Cubs (and all other parties with interest in Alcántara) need some hard information about what he can do. This is the opportunity to obtain that information. The Cubs need another guy who can hit the ball hard enough to split a gap or clear a fence, anyway. They need to swing for the fences, metaphorically, to survive their slew of pitching injuries and catalyze a scrappy but aging lineup. They might as well go with a guy who can swing for the fences, literally, and see what doubling his career plate appearance figure in about 10 days tells them.

Over halfway through the season, the regression monster hasn't yet caught up to Ryan Rolison. In fact, with Caleb Thielbar finally, sadly looking his age and Hoby Milner sidelined by an emergency appendectomy, there's not much doubt that Rolison is now the Cubs' top left-handed reliever. It's less fun to note this part, but with Daniel Palencia headlining tim times and a long list of injured righties, Rolison might even be their relief ace, without regard to handedness. The only other candidate is Jacob Webb, and if anything, Rolison has been more consistent. That's not to oversell him. Rolison's win probability added (WPA) over the 25 appearances since he came to the majors to stay in late April is -0.16. He hasn't been dominant, and he doesn't even have a save. His ERA is great, but his peripheral numbers are more like "good". He's allowed a pretty average 6 of 17 inherited runners to score. He's arguably the team's relief ace right now, not because he's great, but because the team is so far underwater in the bullpen. Still, this level of contribution is vital, especially for a team so awash in injuries and underperformance. Rolison started the season with Triple-A Iowa, even after a good spring. The Cubs picked him up over the winter, in no small part, because he's an optionable arm. He first came up on April 14, the first time the team was in scramble mode in the relief corps, but he stayed just that one day. He didn't come back until April 24. Since then, though, he's appeared 25 times and pitched 30 2/3 innings in the Cubs' 59 team games. Over a full season at this pace, he'd work 69 times and amass just under 85 innings. Craig Counsell has often been short on hurlers who are so much as available, let alone reliable; Rolison has been a rubber arm who doesn't give away games. He's markedly better than he was last season. Made to look much worse than he was by playing his home games in Colorado, Rolison had a 7.02 ERA in 2025, with little life on his fastball. He's up about 1.5 miles per hour on the four-seamer this year, with a more aggressive delivery in which he gets down the mound farther and draws more force from his landing leg. But more importantly, he's increased the induced vertical break on that heater by 3 inches, mostly because he's no longer pitching in the mountains. His curveball has more depth, too. To all of that, he's added a sweeper. The Cubs started talking to Rolison about incorporating that pitch back in the spring, but only stepwise as the season has progressed has he worked it into his attack within games. It's still his fourth-most used offering, but between that sweeper and the sinker that he's also mixed in more often of late, Rolison is moving east and west more than he has in the past. The variety of shapes he's now showing hitters is as wide as that of many starters, and because he's not seeing right-handed batters two or three times in a game, he can more than get by without a reliable changeup. It helps, of course, that it turns out that his new sweeper is the best swing-and-miss weapon in his arsenal. Tweak by tweak and sweeper by sweeper, Rolison has worked his way to striking out over a quarter of the batters he faces. He still walks too many opponents, but he can get off their barrels well with the two fastball looks, and his three breakers ensure that he gets the whiffs he needs. He's still not a playoff-caliber relief ace, but he's cemented himself as this year's Drew Pomeranz or Tyson Miller: a fine middle reliever who can be a bit more in a pinch, for a team very much in that kind of pinch.

In a strange way, the most telling plate appearance in the five-plus weeks since Pete Crow-Armstrong got molten-lava hot might have come Sunday afternoon, after the flow had raced down the mountain and begun to cool a bit. Brandon Woodruff struck out Crow-Armstrong in the first inning, but the next two times up, he was even more careful, and Crow-Armstrong drew two walks. In the third inning, Crow-Armstrong's swing decisions were dead solid perfect. In a six-pitch at-bat, Woddruff only hit the zone twice. Crow-Armstrong swung at both (changeups, fouled off) and took the four bad ones, including two very tempting offerings. The sixth inning at-bat was even better. Woodruff went with the four-seamer that had worked to start the game, but couldn't hit the zone with it. He tried a changeup, but missed low. Crow-Armstrong got ahead 3-0, but with one out and nobody on base in a game the Brewers led 1-0, he stayed patient and took two strikes on the outer half. Then, Woodruff—never one to give up a free base without good cause—stayed in the zone three straight times, but only made one mistake, with the third 3-2 pitch. Hitting as defensively as one must in such a deep count, Crow-Armstrong fouled that off, too. When Woodruff missed away with the ninth pitch, though, he laid off and drew another walk. Those were the 34th and 35th walks of the season for Crow-Armstrong, who only walked 53 total times in his first two-plus years in the majors. It's not just the walks that mark him as a different hitter. though. When he came to bat in the top of the eighth, he showed as much maturity as in either of his previous two trips. Facing the viciously difficult Abner Uribe, Crow-Armstrong did well to lay off a first-pitch sinker above the zone. It was called a strike, and he probably should have challenged it, but the Cubs have been conservative by design when it comes to batters challenging this season. At any rate, he made the right swing decision. Uribe lured him out of the zone on the next pitch, with a sinker that ran off the plate away, and Crow-Armstrong was down 0-2 in the most frustrating fashion. For any hitter, that sequence—bad call strike, chase out of the zone—threatens to destabilize the mental approach. It's easy to get on tilt in such situations. For Crow-Armstrong, that sequence has nearly always led to an easy out for the pitcher. He's struggled mightily with that mental battle throughout his career. But this time, he laid off a sinker up and away, and then watched a slider that plunged out of the bottom of the zone. On 2-2, Uribe sawed him off with a slider, catching Crow-Armstrong a hair early because he needed to stay ready for the sinker. It was a floater that bounced lazily out to the middle infield, and despite getting jammed, Crow-Armstrong got out of the box well. He almost beat it out for an infield hit. Yes, he was thrown out. No, he didn't play the hero, because the Brewers were careful not to let him do so. But that plate appearance was huge. It was tough, and professional, and it showed how Crow-Armstrong has improved both at staying in the fight and at covering multiple pitches within a pitcher's arsenal. From May 22 through June 25, Crow-Armstrong batted .376/.456/.760. In 147 trips to the plate, he had 22 extra-base hits, including 12 homers. It was a transcendent heater, the likes of which the Cubs haven't seen since Derrek Lee's near-MVP season of 2005. (Technically, Aramis Ramírez also had a hotter 31-game stretch in 2006, but like Lee, Moisés Alou and Sammy Sosa, all of whom have been similarly good over such stretches during this century, Ramírez played in a much more offense-friendly league than does Crow-Armstrong.) With any streak that incredible, though, you can feel the moment when it ends, and that happened over the weekend. Crow-Armstrong drew four walks (one intentional, in the 10th inning Sunday) but was hitless against the Brewers. He's not quite clicking on everything that comes within his happy zone, the way he was a week ago. What we saw Sunday, though, is that—not unlike that lava that hardens into rock after escaping the inferno—Crow-Armstrong has been reborn. He's not going to go back to the guy who batted .188/.237/.295 in August and September last year. His ceiling, as we now see, is as high as literally anyone in the sport; he is the only player in the last half-decade to demonstrate the ability to be as valuable as Shohei Ohtani. It's his floor that has really moved, though. He was, for a while there, capable of slumps as hideous as his streaks are thrilling. The new Crow-Armstrong simply can't be that bad. He's still going to have rough stretches, because he still borders on overly aggressive inside and outside the strike zone. He's morphed into a much more complete and dangerous hitter, though—even now that he's settling into a new normal, instead of doing backflips across a highwire, as he seemed to do for a month.

You don't have to squint to see David Peterson's appeal for the Chicago Cubs. Firstly, look at that pulse! You won't find it on the Savant sliders panel, but being a living, breathing pitcher who isn't injured is a tough box to check these days, it seems, and the Cubs found a guy who checks it. More seriously, though, Peterson is a lefty who throws 92 MPH; succeeds by missing barrels, not missing bats; and was available in a buy-low deal, despite the calendar not yet having flipped to July and most could-be trade partners still being focused on preparations for the draft. When Ben Brown and Edward Cabrera landed on the injured list simultaneously (with no imminent return looking likely for either), Jed Hoyer did what he had to do. That doesn't mean that Peterson was selected solely because of his availability, though, or even because of the natural cut on his four-seam fastball. Rather, the Cubs locked in on him because there are real reasons to believe he's better than the ugly 6.09 ERA he's posted in 16 appearances (only half of them starts) this year. First, let's talk about what's gone wrong. To do so, we can look at Statcast's new swing timing metrics, to spot the ways in which hitters are reacting differently to his stuff this year than last. Peterson's best pitch is his sinker, but that offering (his ticket to last year's All-Star roster) is getting pummeled in 2026. Against lefties, the problem seems to be a failure to bust them inside and get them to hit the top half of the pitch, as you can see most clearly in the righthand image below: Against righties, the problem is that Peterson hasn't been able to get batters looking up or in, thereby incuding contact off the end of the bat when he goes to the sinker. Instead, righties are centering that pitch up relentlessly. Peterson actually throws his four-seamer more than the sinker to righties, a sensible practice for any non-fireballing southpaw. This year, though, righties aren't fooled by that, either. He's actually getting in on the label with that cutting four-seamer a bit better than in the past, which could be good news. Unfortunately, paired with the batter being on time more consistently, rather than late, it's yielding good results for the batter, not for Peterson. When he's right, Peterson's slider is also a solid pitch, working across the plate to lefties and dipping below what a righty batter thinks they have lined up. This year, none of that is happening. A good left-on-left slider should have an opposing batter reaching, flailing, way early and over the top of the pitch. Peterson just isn't producing those swings nearly as well this season as he did when he had a small star turn last year. At this moment, it's fair to say that hitters have him figured out a bit. The Cubs can help him, though. For one thing, Peterson's slider is very much a gyro-style tight spinner, but it's taken on an unwelcome cement-mixer quality this season. He's throwing the pitch harder, but partially because of that, it's moving less. It has some dart to it, but it's lost depth. Here's the spin profile of his pitches for 2025, with the initial spin direction on the left and the actual movement direction on the right. Here's the same image for 2026: Peterson's slider feels much more like a cutter this year, and the result is a pitch that doesn't dominate lefties as well. If it looked a lot like the sinker and/or the four-seamer out of the hand, it could at least fool batters that way, but it does that (if anything) less well than a year ago. That seems like something a new pitching coach can help a pitcher restore in short order. A small mechanical fix might go a long way for Peterson. Even better, though, the Cubs have one of the league's best defenses to offer Peterson. He's had a below-average strikeout rate in each of the last three years, but he keeps the ball on the ground often and in the park nearly always. The Cubs saw, up close, just how bad the Mets' defense has been all season. The jump from that to the Cubs' phalanx should be very good for Peterson—and what's good for him will be good for the team. The upside on this acquisition is extremely low. Peterson will be a free agent this fall. He doesn't pound the zone the way you'd like to see a pitcher who doesn't strike batters out do so; that's part of his strategy to limit the damage done against his highly hittable stuff. He can't save the Cubs' season. If it's to be saved, that will be done by the team's offense and its defense. Peterson is a couple small adjustments from regaining the much better results he enjoyed last season, though. A restored slider would give him an edge in the fight to get batters off the barrel on his sinker. A bit of counseling from Tommy Hottovy should help him see a better way to utilize that cutting four-seamer in on righties. Mostly, Peterson needs to soak up innings. But the Cubs didn't grab him just to get those innings out of the way. They believe, rightly, that they can get him back into the shape of a credible backend starter, and that would check several boxes at once on the North Side.

It's not about finding playoff-caliber starters right now. It's not about building a bridge to a long-term winner, either. The Cubs simply have games to play this weekend, and too few healthy starting pitchers to fill the slots on their schedule. Feeling around in the dark, they scooped up the first thing they could grab hold of, acquiring David Peterson from the Mets in a late-night trade Wednesday. Jeff Passan of ESPN was first with the news, on Twitter. A source with knowledge of the deal confirmed that the teams have agreed to terms. Peterson, 30, will be a free agent at season's end. He's running a hideous 6.09 ERA this season, in stark contrast with last year, when he made the National League All-Star team. However, below the surface, he's been almost the same guy in both years. In fact, per Baseball Prospectus, his DRA- for 2026 (90) is lower than the mark he put up last year (97). Nothing Peterson throws misses bats very well, so he runs a below-average strikeout rate. However, his best pitch is a worm-killer of a sinker, with which he induces lots of ground balls. He's a fine fit for the Cubs, who not only have a good defense to put behind him but badly need a hurler who can keep the ball in the park more often. With that inability to pile up strikeouts, Peterson will slide into the back end even of a atrociously depleted Cubs rotation, but he gives them stability and upside there. His fastball shapes fit the Cubs' predilections well. This deal could pave the way for the team to keep Peterson around relatively cheaply beyond this year, despite his impending free agency, and for now, it rescues them from needing to install the empty husk of Vince Velazquez in their rotation for any significant length of time. According to Will Sammon of The Athletic, minor-leaguer Cole Mathis will go to New York in the trade. Mathis, 22, was a second-round pick in 2024 and has put up good numbers this year at High-A South Bend. That it took until his second full year in pro ball to get out of Myrtle Beach after playing high-level college ball, however, says something about his long-term outlook. It's a small price to pay for Peterson, but because of his contract status and his struggles this year, Peterson was extremely available. For now, this stabilizes the Cubs rotation.

Both Ben Brown and Edward Cabrera landed on the injured list Wednesday. Brown (ironically, the one Cubs hurler not plagued by the home-run ball and vulnerable to whiplash this year) has a neck strain; Cabrera has injuries to both his hamstring and his adductor. Brown could be back relatively soon, but then again, it could be months. Cabrera is almost certainly out until after the All-Star break. Neither is officially being shelved with a broken back, but that sound you heard was this pair of straws breaking the Cubs'. Though they began Wednesday's doubleheader in playoff position, the Cubs aren't making it to October. That much should be obvious by now. They're too diminished and depleted by injury, and too few of the hurlers currently on the IL have clear paths to returning to form this year. Of the handful of pitchers who have stayed relatively healthy, too few have any upside beyond what they're already doing, and too many have had major flaws exposed or appear to be pitching through some nagging trouble of their own. This team can't win anything important. They'll have to turn their eyes to next year. The last sentence should send shrieking alarms into life in your mind, though. That's a catastrophe. That's an unmitigated and massive failure that will haunt this team for years to come. The 2026 Cubs were built to compete for a pennant, and certainly to wrest the NL Central back from the Milwaukee Brewers. That's not happening, and the organization is not nearly ready to thrive in the wake of this misfire. They have a weak farm system. They have a poor track record for player development, and they've ceased to be good even at keeping pitchers relatively healthy, a strength about which they boasted a few years ago. Technically, the team does have several trade candidates they can move before the trade deadline on August 3. Seiya Suzuki, Ian Happ, Carson Kelly and Shota Imanaga headline that group. If Jameson Taillon can get healthy or if Caleb Thielbar, Phil Maton, Jacob Webb or Michael Conforto can show enough to convince suitors of their utility, they could be dealt, too. For the most part, though, this team is ossified. They intentionally invested in and committed to a long-term core of Dansby Swanson, Nico Hoerner, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Alex Bregman, Cade Horton, Justin Steele, Cabrera, and Daniel Palencia, with Matt Shaw, Moisés Ballesteros and Ben Brown as key supplementary pieces. Crow-Armstrong looks like the biggest star the Cubs have had since Sammy Sosa, and arguably the best all-around player they've ever had, at least while he's on this scintillating hot streak. The rest of that group, however, is proving either flawed or injury-prone, and because of what the club has already committed to each, they can't quickly shift gears and build around a different core, instead. They don't have the financial flexibility to do that via free agency; they don't have trade assets capable of bringing back that caliber of player; and they certainly don't have either the star power or the depth in their farm system to reload. In most articles like this one, this would be where I offer a creative solution or a radical possibility. I've done that a lot of times with a lot of different teams, over the years. I can't come up with anything this time. The Cubs have owners with only moderate interest in fielding a competitive team, who have hired and renewed their commitment to a front office with similarly tepid ambitions. That front office sells itself constantly to the media as a competent and nimble outfit, but the reality is that they're a below-average all-around team. They have above-average talent on the big-league roster, but only because they've concentrated almost all their resources there over the last three years. They've traded first-round picks, spent money to retain former first-round picks, and signed players to massive, long-term free-agent deals. They've swapped prospects for controllable players who could contribute immediately. They've done everything they can do to make themselves a winning major-league team right now, and 2026 was meant to be the high point in their competitive cycle. The results have been two 83-win teams, a 92-win one that lost the division and fell to their biggest rivals in October, and this unit, which will probably finish more like the 2023 and 2024 Cubs than like the 2025 ones. Meanwhile, the cupboard has been left bare in the minor leagues, and even the guys they hoped to convert into homegrown help have faltered badly. Jed Hoyer should never have gotten the extension he signed last July. That he did was the sign of an unearnedly content ownership group. The Cubs don't draft well, develop well, coach well or make smart enough transactions to make up for those glaring weaknesses. They don't have what they would need to turbo-charge a reload for next season, but this season is circling the drain, due as much to their lack of homegrown depth as to the bad injury luck they courted by leaning so hard on the likes of Horton and Cabrera. A decade after its greatest success, this franchise is right back where it's spent much more of the last 80 years: in a quagmire of its own making, and unlikely to rise from the muck any time soon.

The good news, according to Baseball Prospectus's StuffPro metric, is that Edward Cabrera's slider hasn't gotten any worse this year. It's still a plus pitch, when he can locate it anywhere near the zone. In fact, that pitch should have more utility this year, in theory, because he's throwing from a lower arm angle and the top of the zone has been lopped off by the advent of the ABS system; his ability to use the slider to go from east to west is vital. The bad news, according not just to StuffPro but to Stuff+ and also your eyes and the surface-level numbers, too, is everything else. Cabrera's whole arsenal has gotten worse in his first season with the Cubs. Whether the team asked him to further lower his arm slot after he significantly lowered it last year or whether (as he said happened in 2025) it's just gotten lower as a result of his efforts to be more natural and athletic on the mound, the results have been calamitous. After 13 starts, Cabrera's ERA stands at 5.21. He's limiting walks better than he did in the past, keeping up the trend that seemed like the key to his breakout in 2025. However, his strikeout rate is way down, from 25.8% to 21.3%, and worse, he's giving up one home run for every 20 batters he faces. His Cubs debut was electric, and he worked a second straight scoreless outing after that, but since then, the ERA is 6.31. Even in that scoreless appearance against the Guardians, he walked five and struck out just four. The biggest problem seems to be that arm slot. Coming down a little last year was good, insofar as it loosened Cabrera up, kept him healthier and let him find the strike zone. Coming down more this year has been catastrophic, for two reasons: He can't find the zone as well anymore; and His key pitch shapes have become too similar. Last year, Cabrera's sinker was less a sinker than a running two-seamer, often thrown to the up-and-in quadrant against right-handed batters. It was a viciously difficult pitch to square up, at roughly 98 miles per hour with so much tailing action, but it also kept righty batters honest. If they sat on a changeup, they were likely to swing underneath the sinker, just as if it were a rising four-seam heater. At best, they might fight it off the handle of their bat and produce weak contact. Here's where his sinkers were located last season. When you lower your arm slot, you're likely to see any sinker become more of a true sinker, with depth. That can be a good thing, if you play the pitch mostly off a slider or a four-seamer. It produces more grounders and even more whiffs that way than if it's a two-seamer like last year's version of Cabrera threw. And sure enough, that's been the small but real change in movement for Cabrera this year. He's had a little more depth on the pitch, though it's still a two-seamer at heart. He's had a little less run on it. Playing as the partner to a changeup that's meant to be the centerpiece of an arsenal, though, that's nothing but bad news. Cabrera has never gotten many whiffs with the sinker, but he's all the way down to 6.8% whiffs on swings with it now. He can't get to that up-and-in spot with it; the pitch ends up down and in the zone much more often this year. When he tries to force the location where he lived with it last year, he mostly misses, for balls. But that's not Cabrera's biggest problem. The biggest problem is that signature changeup. Last year, opponents had a .226 weighted on-base average (wOBA) against that pitch. This year, it's .304. A good wOBA (for a batter) is something more like .350, so at a glance, that's not a disaster, but Cabrera has always had hittable fastballs, and he doesn't have good enough command of his curveball or slider to throw those all day. The changeup is his out pitch and his centerpiece. For such a nerve center of an offering, a .304 wOBA isn't good enough. Cabrera is missing with the change more often, not just in the sense that he's throwing fewer strikes with it, but in the sense that more of his strikes are mistakes. The lower slot isn't helping. Here's a good cambio he threw to Fernando Tatis Jr. last July. Nnk5V3ZfWGw0TUFRPT1fQmdOWkFRWU1WZ0VBRFFaVUJBQUhBZ2RYQUFNQVZsVUFVVkVEQmdwUkFnb0JVZ3BU.mp4 Here's him trying to pull a string on Luis Arraez this season. OHliUXZfWGw0TUFRPT1fQmdBRkFWTUJBQVFBVzFvRkJBQUhWRklDQUFNQ0JWUUFWRk1HQWxJRlZ3TUhVbFJS.mp4 The locations for which he was aiming aren't quite identical, but they're not as far apart as the two pitches' actual landing spots. The difference lies in his delivery. Last season, he was able to pronate better, getting inside and on top of the ball at release: This season, he's stuck behind the ball more. There's just no way to avoid that, with the lower arm slot, without totally changing the shape of the pitch and trading some depth for some run to the arm side. As small as the difference might look, the effect is big. Cabrera has been in the zone lass this year (partially because the zone itself is smaller), and when he is, it's more often a mistake with a lot of the plate. Hitters are swinging more often at his strikes and hitting it harder when they do. They're pulling it in the air much more often than they have in the past. He's just not the same uncomfortable at-bat he's been for most of his career. Unfortunately, much of this might be tough to fix this year. Some mechanical fix needs to be accomplished, and that's hard to do when one is also nursing a blister and/or a nebulous forearm issue. Things could always click back into place—maybe he just needs a different stride pattern, or to get past that blister problem and feel more conviction in his arsenal. Right now, though, he's a guy who has always depended on a changeup, whose changeup doesn't move much off his fastball when it's a strike. He's a guy who can still touch 100 MPH but is sitting a tick lower than in the past. He's a guy who's always needed the zone to flex for him, because his pitch shapes already limited his movement differentials, for whom the zone no longer flexes. It's been a brutal start to what the Cubs hope will be a multi-year partnership, and so far, Cabrera looks like the latest in a string of high-profile pitching acquisitions (going back to Yu Darvish and Tyler Chatwood) whom the Cubs have made worse, instead of better. Given what they surrendered to get him and how badly they need him right now, that's very, very bad news.