Matthew Trueblood

Image courtesy of Matt Marton-Imagn Images You might have seen the news, over the weekend, that veteran Cubs starter Justin Steele fired two shutout innings Friday for the Triple-A Iowa Cubs, striking out five in the process. It was the fourth official appearance of Steele's rehab assignment with Iowa, and the last one. It's time for Steele to rejoin the Cubs, if he's to continue pitching competitively this year, and the Cubs could sorely use a lively arm in the bullpen—especially one who's such a great competitor; who throws left-handed; and who has proved they can get out both lefties and righties in the majors. It's my sad duty to give you the straight dope: Steele is still very much diminished. If he's not permanently broken, he's at least out of commission, and more service will be needed to get him back online. Even in that latest outing (by far his best for Iowa), Steele was only sitting around 90 miles per hour with his fastball. At his best, from 2022-24, Steele sat 92 and touched 96; this is a tangible loss of velocity for a pitcher who didn't have it to spare. The lost velocity on Steele's slider matters, too, for its implications about his ability to miss bats against big-league hitters. The hard cutter that is his primary fastball has also picked up a troubling tendency to cut even more than it used to; that's going to make it less deceptive. Again, we all know Steele to be a great competitor and a skilled athlete. However, he's never had an especially deep arsenal, and the two pitches he's always leaned on are now markedly worse. To succeed in the majors with his present stuff, he'd have to be razor-sharp in terms of locations. Even as he sliced through a Triple-A lineup Sunday, though, Steele didn't show the ability to do that. The truth is that what little success he's had in the minors this fall needs to be chalked up to pitching in the minors; he's nowhere near a big-league-caliber pitcher right now. This is bad news on every possible level. If you were holding out hope that Steele would return to save the 2026 bullpen and become a playoff hero, you're out of luck. It gets worse still, though. He's almost 18 months removed from Tommy John surgery—his second. If this is the best he can muster even in a short stint, after that much time, it's very likely that Steele will be unable to help the 2027 Cubs. The team would have to pay him almost $7 million to keep him via arbitration this fall. They could strike a deal with him instead, bringing him back on an incentive-laden deal with a low base salary, but there's a real chance that Steele will depart the Cubs organization for good before Thanksgiving. It's just a confluence of the realities of his injury and the business of the game; he's a year from free agency and positioned to earn more money than he's likely to be worth. The team has showed their willingness to be frank and ruthless in such situations, even while being grateful for their pitchers' work. This is just a slightly higher-profile version of the sequence that saw Adbert Alzolay leave the organization two years ago. All of that sucks. It leaves only one small way for everyone involved to benefit. Steele should be called up to join the team at some point during the final home series against the Marlins. After the Cubs clinch a playoff berth (likely to happen Tuesday), Steele should get a chance to pitch once more in the majors for the team that drafted him, and to which he has belonged for 12 years. He can't give them a bullpen boost next month, and he can't be counted upon as a starter for 2027. Many fans aren't even thinking about that yet, and hopefully, Steele himself hasn't acceded to that way of thinking, either. It's all true, though. Looming on the horizon is the probable end of his tenure with the Cubs. The vibes around the Cubs are shaky right now. Alex Bregman's serious facial injury casts a pall even over the imminent clinch of a playoff spot. Barring a miraculous run from a few key guys, the pitching staff is too thin for the team to go win a World Series, and everyone knows it. And Steele, like Ben Brown and Cade Horton, has only an uncertain future in the game, not long after being an All-Star. It would do everyone some good—Steele, the fans, and the team itself—if Steele could climb the mound at Wrigley, hear the fans' raucous ovation, and check the box of making it back to the bigs after his second major elbow surgery. It sounds terribly small, and maybe it is, but it's the only way Steele will be able to help the club this fall—this and, perhaps, some roaring and cheering from the railing of the dugout next month, having at least nominally reclaimed his right to be there. View full article

Image courtesy of Katie Stratman-Imagn Images It's never going to look as good as a good day for Kevin Gausman, Clay Holmes, Matthew Boyd or Shota Imanaga. The dominance of which those guys are capable is not quite within David Peterson's reach. He misses more bats than most ground-ball guys, but in the end, he's still a ground-ball guy. If you can be a ground-ball guy who also minimizes walks, you can still be an elite starter, but that's never been Peterson. He's capable of good, but not of great. He misses too few bats for that, given that he'll still put runners on base and isn't completely immune to hard contact. The numbers don't lie, though. Over the last three starts, Peterson has been quite good. He fired six innings of one-run ball against the Reds Sunday, earning the Cubs a series win with his second straight quality start. He fanned seven and walked just one, after striking out another seven (and walking three) in six frames of equally strong work against the visitors from the Atlanta suburbs last week at Wrigley Field. Before that, he'd allowed just one run in a second straight start against the Brewers, at Uecker Field in Milwaukee. Craig Counsell was proactive with him that day, getting him out of the game after just 4 2/3 innings, but Peterson did his job: avoid damage and keep the team in the game. That will be the remit of whoever pitches Game 1 of the Wild Card Series for the Cubs next Tuesday. be it at Wrigley or in San Diego, Philadelphia or the shadows of the highway northwest of Atlanta. As surprising as this state of affairs is, Peterson is building a case to be that guy. Consider this table showing the performances of Cubs hurlers with 30 or more innings since July 4: Name K% BB% K-BB% BABIP LOB% ERA- FIP- xFIP- Aaron Civale 23.3% 8.3% 15.0% .250 83.8% 34 67 92 David Peterson 22.3% 10.6% 11.7% .282 83.3% 70 96 86 Clay Holmes 16.3% 11.4% 4.9% .240 65.6% 104 99 95 Shota Imanaga 25.1% 4.9% 20.2% .283 91.5% 75 105 88 Kevin Gausman 26.6% 5.3% 21.3% .297 70.7% 122 107 75 Matthew Boyd 16.1% 7.8% 8.3% .246 74.8% 89 111 110 Javier Assad 17.9% 8.0% 9.9% .268 91.5% 60 114 98 Colin Rea 17.5% 7.1% 10.4% .246 78.9% 93 117 107 Now, there are some lies nestled in here. Don't fall too in love with Peterson's adjusted ERA (ERA-, where 100 is average and lower is better), lest you miss the fact that he's stranded five of every six runners who reaches base over this span. As you can see, Gausman is at the opposite end of the spectrum. Gausman has been better at striking out batters and at filling up the strike zone, as has Imanaga. Because only Imanaga has had the combination of guttiness and good luck to leave most of the runners who get on against him out there, though, only Imanaga has had the superficial sheen of a frontline starter. Peterson is striking out a healthy number of hitters, which is more than Boyd or Holmes can say. However, he's also walking more batters than you'd like. The question is how willing you are to trust that Peterson can persistently outperform his FIP, by stranding runners (or eliminating them via the double play) and by keeping the ball in the park. That last bit is the key, though. What separates Peterson from everyone else on this list? He avoids giving up home runs—at least when he's going well. He's only allowed nine homers since coming to the Cubs; seven in his last 13 starts; and four in his last nine. Because he keeps the ball on the ground, he can frustrate power hitters who depend on hitting it in the air to generate value. The rest of this starting rotation candidate pool can't say that. If Gausman, Boyd and Imanaga come through their final starts looking healthy and pitching the way they each have of late, they're the most likely hurlers to be tabbed for starts in the Wild Card Series. In reality, though, Peterson might be as deserving of the chance as any of those three. That's not great news for the Cubs' starting staff. A World Series contender needs two starters who are clearly superior to Peterson, which is two more than the Cubs have. If they want to press deep into October, though, they might be well-advised to give the ball to a starter they acquired only in an emergency and have never really looked at as more than a back-end guy. View full article

Image courtesy of Katie Stratman-Imagn Images It's been an exhilarating season for Pete Crow-Armstrong, in almost every possible way. He started the season by playing center field about as well as it's ever been played, and by making plays with his legs on offenses, even as he struggled at the plate overall. He seemed to be playing with swagger and intensity that exceeded even what he showed in 2025, despite those poor early results. It's not a coincidence that he did so after agreeing, just before Opening Day, to a six-year deal that will keep him in Chicago for the rest of his 20s. Since mid-May, of course, Crow-Armstrong has gone to a new level. We've chronicled the physical and technical changes that have facilitated that change; they're fascinating in their own right. But one thing that's made him especially fun to watch—and which has also been a huge reason for his next-level breakout—is more mental than mechanical. With all that intensity and clarity of purpose, Crow-Armstrong beats himself up when he's going badly, and he sometimes fights so hard to get right that he goes even more wrong. However, when he starts to feel good, he can get molten-lava hot in a hurry. Here's one small, incomplete way to capture that. In the five plate appearances after each of his first 44 home runs this season (he hit his 45th Sunday in Cincinnati), Crow-Armstrong batted .283/.373/.623. That's better than the .277/.369/.571 line he carried into play Sunday for the entire season, even though each of those samples necessarily removes one of his 44 most valuable plate appearances from the mix. Even if you start on May 22, when he hit his sixth homer and began the torrid streak he's been on ever since, his line in the five trips after each homer (.296/.385/.663) is almost identical to his line in that span overall (.300/.397/.664). If you just stop at the end of each game—take, in other words, the plate appearances that came after a homer in any given game, but not any that stretched into ensuing days—Crow-Armstrong is batting .351/.430/.824 after dingers this year. Once he gets you once, he's much more likely to get you again. Maybe that'll be another homer; maybe it will just be another hit or walk. But any home run is a sign that Crow-Armstrong is clicking, and he gains momentum from it, rather than being satisfied or getting overeager the next time up. He's not alone in this regard. In fact, Alex Bregman is an even more eye-popping case study. In the 130 trips to the plate following his 26 homers this season, Bregman is batting .299/.369/.709. If you focus only on the times he comes up in the same game, he breaks the scale: .395/.435/1.070. His OPS is over 1.500 for the rest of any game in which he hits a dinger. Even taking his season line only since he got hot just before the All-Star break (.293/.372/.612) as a comparator, Bregman has been unbelievably good for the rest of the day after he goes yard. Compare those two to Seiya Suzuki, the team's (slightly) steadier slugger. In the five-plate appearance windows after each of his first 24 homers (he hit No. 25 Sunday against the Reds), Suzuki batted .308/.400/.490. That's an impressive line, better than Suzuki's .267/.366/.467 line, but it's not the same heat that Bregman and Crow-Armstrong have carried over after each of their bombs. For the balance of the game, after each homer, he's much more patient, but nowhere near as dangerous: .282/.404/.333. This is far from a robust way to tell how much a hitter is tending to get hot or to feed off their most recent success. For one thing, homers aren't the only sign of hitting well. Still, that Crow-Armstrong and Bregman have been so unstoppable in the short periods after each time they go deep—even going deep again, often, within that window or within the same game—is impressive and unusual. Crow-Armstrong's seven multi-homer games and Bregman's four are only partial proof that they get an extra gleam in their eye once they ambush a pitcher once; these data suggest it even more strongly. It's not clear which of these tendencies is better for the team. Each of Suzuki, Crow-Armstrong and Bregman has taken a turn carrying the club this year, as you can see in this rolling 16-game chart of their wRC+. Suzuki's streakiness runs a little more in fortnights and months, rather than days and weeks. It's still streakiness, though, and almost every player is streaky, if you break down their data just right. Nonetheless, it's worth knowing (and noting) that Crow-Armstrong and Bregman have been this dangerous once they get ahold of a ball. It's one expression of what every fan has felt all year: these guys feed not only off each other, but off their own success. That makes them dangerous, for the balance of the waning regular season and on into October. View full article

Image courtesy of Matt Marton-Imagn Images The first remit of the big-league batter is to be on time for the fastball. It's the bare minimum for any player hoping to stick around in the majors. It's necessary, but not sufficient, because there are plenty of guys who can do it. The real challenges are to do it without giving up your power by shortening your swing too much; to define 'on time' in a way that produces batted balls with real value; and to do it while still covering slower pitches, like sliders, curveballs and changeups. The name of the game is conviction; you have to swing with confidence to hit the ball with authority. Get overconfident, though, and all you've done is make yourself vulnerable to constantly being fooled. It's this balance that Pete Crow-Armstrong has struck with ferocious perfection over the last four months. In fact, he's been moving steadily toward that perfect balance not only since the middle of 2024, but even since the 2026 All-Star break. He's a unique case to study in this regard, because he forces us to answer an interesting question: Where the hell did the erraticism of his batting profile go, exactly? Real improvement is possible, of course. We live in the Golden Age of player development. Teams, independent facilities, and players themselves have gotten far better at adjusting and leveling up than they used to be. Still, there's a version of science's law of conservation of mass that applies to baseball, too. To borrow from a different discipline, there's no such thing as a free adjustment. Everything requires a tradeoff. When we're talking about hitters, that usually means trading contact for power (or vice-versa); being more patient but striking out more because you end up in deeper counts; or pulling the ball less often so as to wait longer and make better swing decisions. Add more tilt to your swing so that you can handle breaking stuff better and use the opposite field more, and you might be susceptible to the high fastball. Flatten it to cover the heater, and you're likely to hit more grounders and more pop-ups. How, then, is what Crow-Armstrong is doing possible? Consider this comparison of his last three seasons, and it's hard to see where he's traded anything for this massive change in production. Yes, he's striking out more, but it's a tiny bit more. That really doesn't count as a tradeoff—not when your walk rate has moved three times as much as your strikeout rate, and there's so much more production on balls in play, to boot. He's lost a tiny bit of speed and arm strength, as virtually every player does even throughout their early 20s, but we're not seeing him become materially less lithe in order to build the strength and generate the power we've seen from him. The Squared-Up% line is the only other one in which he's not currently at his best. At first, that looks like a small, even negligible difference, too. In fact, though, that's where he's made the hidden, vital tradeoff that has unlocked this version of him. Let's talk about how. First, you need to know what Squared-Up% is. It's simpler than it will sound, at first, so hang with me. To determine whether a ball is Squared-Up, by Statcast's reckoning: Collect the swing speed, the pitch velocity and the exit velocity for any given batted ball. Using a physics equation we laypeople don't need to memorize, find the maximum exit velocity that was possible on that pitch, given the swing speed and the pitch velocity. Divide the actual exit velocity by the maximum possible one. Then, to get to their Squared-Up%, take the number of batted balls on which the steps above return a result over 80%, and divide it by the player's total number of batted balls. That's not quite arbitrary, but it's a line they settled on; another way to report the same number would be to stop after the three steps above and take the average result on all their batted balls as the player's Squared-Up rate. There are pluses and minuses to each; it's hard to create a perfect version of this stat. For reference, here's a chart showing Crow-Armstrong's Squared-Up rate (over rolling 100-plate appearance windows) in that second way, throughout his career. It tells the same story: he's squaring it up a bit less this season than in the past. Ok, so that's what this number is. Why is it such a key to understanding Crow-Armstrong? Because it reveals what he's done to go from a hacktastic, erratic slugger to a more lethal one, even though it demonstrates less precision on his part. In the past, Crow-Armstrong was swinging under a bit more control—not in terms of whether he swung, unfortunately, but in terms of where and how he did so. He has slightly above-average feel to hit, and early in his career, his approach was geared toward using it. He wanted to pull and lift the ball, but he wanted to do it by being accurate with the barrel. Over the offseason, Crow-Armstrong and the Cubs decided to sacrifice that restraint for more bat speed. That's been the key to his season, and it's why his Squared-Up rate both betrays the underlying tradeoff he made and, in the grand scheme, doesn't matter very much. If you swing the bat 70.6 MPH on average, you need to square it up fairly well to hit for power. If you swing it 72.7 MPH, you have a bigger margin for error, but you're not yet at the point where you can do much damage without hitting it on the screws. If you swing it 75.0 MPH, though—and, at this point, Crow-Armstrong is really swinging it even faster than that most of the time—you've reached the point where your mishit balls still pose a threat. Since the All-Star break, Crow-Armstrong has put 13 balls in play on swings that were 81 MPH or faster. That's as many such swings as he connected on in his entire career before that. His bat speed is through the roof, and specifically, his bat speed on swings that result in balls in play has risen sharply. That means that he can miss the sweet spot a little bit and still hit it hard and far. Don't get me wrong. Any hitter is still going to find most of their value on batted balls on the swings that connect cleanly with the ball, resulting in Squared-Up contact by the Statcast definition. Crow-Armstrong just doesn't rely as much on that as most elite sluggers do. Here's a comparison of the timing profiles on hard-hit balls for the best offensive weapon of each of the last three seasons: 2024 Shohei Ohtani, 2025 Aaron Judge, and this year's version of Crow-Armstrong. Notice that, compared to the other two super-sluggers, Crow-Armstrong is exactly on time (the center panel) more often on his hard-hit balls, but more likely to hit it in toward the handle (left panel). Exit velocity is controlled most strongly by that left-hand image; getting the ball in the center of the barrel (rather than off the end of the bat or on the label) is the surest way to produce hard contact. But that's less true for Crow-Armstrong than for most hitters. He needs to be on time, but not as much on barrel. Balls hit either direction from the center of the barrel by more than about one baseball (2.9 inches) are rarely going to register as Squared-Up. But if you hit that ball with the bat square to it, and if you're on plane with it and/or working uphill at contact, and if you swing the bat 80 MPH as you do so, you don't have to produce Squared-Up contact to hit a screaming double, or even a homer. So, we circle back to what I said at the very beginning of this piece: a hitter's remit is to be on time for the fastball. That part is even truer of Crow-Armstrong than of most players, even though other general rules about a hitter's process don't seem to apply to him. That's exactly what Crow-Armstrong has done this season. Here's his set of swing timing visuals for each of the last three seasons, on four-seamers and sinkers only. Unsurprisingly, we see him being much more consistently on time this season, and late less often. The tradeoff here is that he's getting the ball in on the label much more often. We've already talked about this a bit. It's what he had to sacrifice to get on time by swinging faster, without being too early on the breaking stuff. Speaking of which, here's the same set of visuals for breaking pitches. He's early on spin as often as ever, but notice how he's moved into the sweet spot more often in terms of centering those pitches on his barrel. He probably wouldn't put it quite this way, but his swing is now designed to attack the fastball with brute force, worrying about colliding with it at speed but not about being precise with the barrel—while, because it works out given the locations and shapes of the respective pitches most of the time and because of the arc of his swing, he's getting more value on breaking pitches by getting from that inefficient contact point to an efficient one. This takes great pitch-recognition skills. It takes a hitter with above-average feel, which was always lurking in his skill set before, underutilized. It also takes a flexible approach, because once you show opponents that you can do all of this, they're going to adjust to you, too. Thus, even within the season, Crow-Armstrong is learning to time hurlers up slightly differently, to combat the different ways he's being pitched. Here are the same visuals as above, returning to fastballs, but this time, the breakdown is month by month throughout this season, rather than season by season. August marks a departure from what he did in the season up to that point. Crow-Armstrong moved slightly back toward letting himself be late on the fastball—not quite to actually being late, as he too often was in the past, but toward it. By letting the heater travel that tiny bit more and clipping the bottom half of it a bit more (right-hand panel), he was putting himself in a less exploitable position against softer stuff. These kinds of tweaks have kept him from being solved throughout what first looked like an incredible hot streak. Now, instead, it looks like a durable Hall of Fame breakthrough. Back in mid-May (just before he implemented the set of adjustments that lit the fuse on his rocket to superstardom), I wrote about the way Crow-Armstrong's newfound bat speed was actually getting in the way of being productive. That was because he hadn't learned to time pitches up right, given how much faster he was moving the bat; he was early too much. That was leading to lots of ground balls and lazy fly balls. To capitalize on swinging with such abandon, he needed to be on time more consistently. Even in noting the deficiencies, though, I said the following: What needed to happen was not more collision efficiency in Crow-Armstrong's swing, exactly, but better timing. His bat speed boost had rendered him capable of hitting it hard even when he didn't line everything up perfectly, and his unique directionality profile—the orientation toward pulling and lifting that made him an unexpected slugger even last year—meant that that hard contact was often going to be in the air, headed to the part of the park it would have a chance to leave. He just had to be on time, in order for that to happen. Shortly after that, Crow-Armstrong moved closer to the plate, altered his setup in the box, and—thanks to those changes, which forced his lower half to move differently as he loaded up for each hack—found his way to being on time. The rest is, without hyperbole, history. Moving closer to the plate exposed Crow-Armstrong to a little more risk of catching the ball up toward the handle from the sweet spot, of course, but as long as he was on time, that didn't matter too much. What's happened, ultimately, is that his much-improved swing decisions—a trend that started early this season, after he flipped the turbo switch on the swing but before the setup and timing changes—and his bat speed increase allowed him to make a 1-for-2 trade. He gave up efficiency of contact, for both more contact (especially more of it in the air and to the pull side) and more bat speed. Only a player with a perfect confluence of enormous talent, tenacity, intelligence and a great support system could pull this off. Crow-Armstrong owes much to his teammates and coaches, but in evolving this way—in avoiding a compensatory slump of any real length as he's been adjusted to and tested in new ways by opponents—he's showed the depth of his genius and his desire, as well as his ability. This is the most impressive season by any baseball player in at least 60 years, not only because of the physical prowess on display, but because the player who's achieving it had to be so diligent, obsessive and adaptable to do so. View full article

Image courtesy of Matt Marton-Imagn Images The watchword of this season, for hitters throughout the league, is conviction. As pitchers find new ways to make life in the batter's box hell via velocity and movement, batters need to find ways to get off their 'A' swing consistently; it's their only hope. To do that, they're working harder than ever to get a sense of what's coming—to study pitchers, anticipate their sequences, pick up on tells, and attack as if they'd been tipped off. It's a survival plan that relies on good intelligence. Often, what they're picking up on must actually be seen by a teammate or a base coach, who then relays it. As we've discussed, the Cubs are one of the best teams in the league at this; it's fueled their success at the plate. In the third inning of Wednesday night's game, though, we saw the flip side of Chicago's operation in this arena. Shota Imanaga fanned the fearsome Ronald Acuña Jr. to begin the frame, but Acuña took some extremely healthy cuts in the at-bat, especially against Imanaga's fastball. He also laid off a couple of splitters in a way that might have worried the Cubs; it was noticeable even for outsiders. The team has a counterespionage plan in place at all times. When the other team is picking something up and relaying it to batters, the Cubs don't attempt to enforce the unwritten rules and shame or intimidate the opponent into not doing so—as the Cardinals tried to do to the Brewers earlier this year, and as the Diamondbacks tried to do to the Cubs more recently, among other examples. Instead, any of the team's key leaders and decision-makers (a group that includes Craig Counsell and his coaching staff, but also veteran players, led by the incredibly sharp-eyed Alex Bregman) will initiate a conversation about how to thwart the other side's detection efforts. In this case, someone saw something from one of the visitors' base coaches, and a mound visit was commenced. Imanaga was tipping, and they needed to address it. Later in the game, Marquee play-by-play man Boog Sciambi and analyst Jim Deshaies highlighted that Imanaga had changed his ritualistic pre-pitch movement pattern. He'd begun turning away from the batter in an exaggerated way as he reached into the glove to grip the ball before each pitch. That movement was big and unmissable. Before making the switch to include it between innings, though, Imanaga also made a subtler adjustment within the third inning. There are multiple ways to fix a tell on the mound. He went with the Band-Aid at first, then got the problem properly treated between frames. The issue came when Imanaga reached into his glove to grip the ball. Setting up in the stretch (with his body facing first base), Imanaga starts with his left hand dangling at his hip. Once he settles on a pitch selection, he brings his hands together right in front of his belt, then brings them up to his chest. That sequence contained a slight giveaway early in his outing Wednesday night. When he was preparing to throw the splitter, he tensed his arms a bit more as he brought the hands together, and the pause at the belt was slightly longer. When he was throwing his fastball or sweeper, that pause wasn't there. Later in the game, to make it especially hard for players or coaches from the near-Atlantans to get a reliable read, Imanaga went to the more exaggerated set of moves shown above. That also reminded him, physically, not to fall into the pattern the team had identified. In the at-bats just after the mound visit from Tommy Hottovy, though, he had a more improvised fix, He just paused the same way on everything. He became almost imperceptibly more deliberate, and the extra movement opposing players or coaches were noticing with the splitter became indistinguishable from what he was doing otherwise. Remember Ryan Dempster's career as a starter? He turned the corner for the Cubs in 2008 when he realized that he was flaring his glove open in a noticeable way when he gripped his own splitter. To foil hitters trying to pick up on that, he began a ritual of wiggling his glove back and forth in a big, noisy way to begin his windup, regardless of what pitch he was throwing. It worked like a charm. But as Dempster acknowledged, the flutter was more than was really required. If he felt confident that he could always flare the glove the same way without doing that, he could just as easily have simply done that—something fans at home wouldn't even have seen, but which would have had the same result. Imanaga made an ad hoc tweak in that third inning, and then went a bit bigger later in the appearance. Whether he'll continue the shoulder turn in his future outings will be interesting to watch, but either way, we gained some insight Wednesday into how opponents try to pick up what's coming from him—and about how quickly and productively the Cubs are capable of responding. View full article

Image courtesy of Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images Edward Cabrera came to the Cubs with some well-known warts. His injury history is long and frightening, and there were lurking concerns about his elbow even entering last offseason. He also has shaky control, and neither his four-seam fastball nor his sinker has ever maintained a shape that allowed the heater to lead his arsenal. Instead, he's always had to lean on his changeup and curveball, which is part of why he's always had issues with walks. By trading top prospect Owen Caissie to land Cabrera, the Cubs made a forceful statement of their belief in themselves. They were betting on their pitching infrastructure, in which they take considerable (though not always earned) pride, to both keep Cabrera healthy and foster the development that saw him turn the corner in 2025. Caissie has hardly been a superstar in his rookie season with Miami, but nonetheless, it feels like the Cubs lost their gamble. They needed the Cabrera who pitched like a strong mid-rotation starter last year and showed the potential to be a true frontliner. Instead, recurring blister problems and a severe hamstring strain have limited Cabrera 78 1/3 innings—and he's been disastrously bad when he has been on the mound. Several things are happening at once within Cabrera's game. It's hard to tell which are products of the team's tinkering, and which are the result of Cabrera scrambling to fix what has repeatedly gone wrong or of him trying to protect himself from injuries. Whatever the causes, though, the following things have changed: He's throwing a bit less hard; his four-seamer has averaged 96.3 MPH, down from 97 in 2025. His four-seamer and changeup have become more prominent; he's reduced his usage of both of his breaking balls. Both breaking pitches, when he does throw them, are firmer and move less than they did last year. His arm slot, which he significantly lowered in 2025 en route to his best campaign, has gotten even lower; and As a result, his four-seamer has gotten more similar to his sinker, with more arm-side run but less carry. The sinker, meanwhile, has changed hardly at all. These changes haven't worked, but you already knew that. It's interesting, too, to note that it was never likely to work, according to pitch-modeling data. Cabrera's PitchingBot, Stuff+ and StuffPro have each gotten worse, on a pitch-by-pitch basis and in the grades for his overall arsenal. That he's missing fewer bats and still running right into barrels is no surprise. If these degradations had been mitigated by compensatory improvements in command and durability, it would be easy to understand and accept the changes. As it is, there's been no such tradeoff. Cabrera has just gotten worse at almost everything under the Cubs' stewardship. He's the highest-profile, highest-ceiling pitching acquisition the team has made since Marcus Stroman, and so far, he's a total bust. At this point, there's little hope for Cabrera helping the Cubs in 2026. He throws hard, but that's the only nice thing you can say about him without lying, and it's not enough—not nearly enough—to make up for all of the things he does poorly right now. The team will almost certainly change pitching coaches and shake some things up this winter; being this lousy has to cost someone their job. Cabrera is under team control through 2028, as long as the Cubs are willing to pay him escalating salaries via the arbitration process. It's too early to give up on him in any long-term sense. However long they play this fall, though, the team will have to look elsewhere for help on the mound—which is a glaring indictment of their front office and coaching staff, no matter how you slice it. View full article

Image courtesy of David Banks-Imagn Images The 2026 Cubs would be a sub-.500 team without Pete Crow-Armstrong. He's been worth 67 runs relative to an average player, according to Baseball Reference: 41 as a batter, 10 as a runner, and 16 in the field. If you prefer Statcast's valuations, those numbers are 47, 7 and 27, respectively. Either way, the story is the same. If you insist on the value of clutchness and situational hitting, nothing changes, because Crow-Armstrong has been extremely clutch this year. His Win Probability Added (WPA) at the plate is a league-best 5.2; he also leads the majors with a 3.5% Championship WPA. He's been even better in big moments than in low- and medium-leverage spots. The Cubs are 84-68. Take Crow-Armstrong away, and they're no better than 76-76—and really, they're probably worse. That's a heavy burden for any player to bear—let alone a 24-year-old whose intensity is just barely under control at all times, anyway. Crow-Armstrong's desire to win is pumped from his heart out to his fingertips with every beat, moving faster than his blood, crackling like electricity. It feels slightly but significantly different than even last season, when Crow-Armstrong was obviously and fiercely competitive but seemed to be motivated as much by proving himself and being great as by winning itself. This season, he's been so livid and disconsolate when the team is losing and so delirious when the team is winning that there's no mistaking the fuel for his fire. He wants this. He's made his first huge payday; he's all but assured of the MVP award; and he's quieted the doubters, if not the haters. What he wants, now, is for his team to rise to his level. A few of them have, of course—or, at least, they've tried. Seiya Suzuki and Alex Bregman are having marvelous seasons, and the shape of their production suggests that they're receiving as much inspiration and intel from their younger teammate as he's getting from them. On the whole, though, this remains a bad team with an all-time great player papering over its flaws, and although Crow-Armstrong would be loath to characterize it that way, it's becoming clear that he knows just how badly the club needs him to be great every day. Unfortunately (but also unsurprisingly), that has led Crow-Armstrong back into some old, bad habits. The grind of the season erodes players' plate discipline, anyway, but Crow-Armstrong is back in swing mode, in a way that feels much more like him trying to put the team on his back in every plate appearance than like him getting tired or going up there without a plan. One way or another, he's currently swinging as much as he did in 2025—something that hadn't been true at any point since the first few weeks of the season. As you can also see, swinging so much has only dragged down Crow-Armstrong's production, despite plenty of continued hard contact and some home runs. For about 100 days, he morphed into a marvelously consistent and balanced offensive weapon, as well as a dynamic one. Right now, he's dangerous—but he's also gettable. This isn't about playing for stats. If Crow-Armstrong were thinking selfishly, he'd be swinging less often, trying to work a few walks and go steal the three bases left between him and the 40/40 club. No, he's swinging like crazy again because he can sense his team sliding toward the danger zone where they might even miss the playoffs—or, more likely, end up as the second or third Wild Card entrant and have to play the Wild Card Series on the road. He's trying to save the day. He's trying to be a superhero, and no player this side of Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge has been more up to that task at any time in the last decade. Alas, baseball games aren't won by superheroes. They have to be won with depth, teamwork, and the slow accretion of good plays. Crow-Armstrong is keenly aware that his team can't produce that kind of win as consistently as it needs to right now. That's why he's trying to win games by himself. Unless they put up a basketball hoop behind second base, though, that's not an option that will be available most of the time. Crow-Armstrong has to rediscover his patience at the plate, and hope (if not quite trust; that would be too generous) that his teammates round into form in time to support his historic brilliance the way it deserves. View full article

Image courtesy of David Banks-Imagn Images Kevin Gausman was cruising. He was mowing down the visitors from the suburbs of Atlanta efficiently and impressively. Through five innings, he enjoyed a 3-0 lead, and his command of both his fastball and his splitter looked good. Unfortunately, like all his colleagues on this year's Chicago pitching staff, he never has as much margin for error as one might think or wish. On an 0-1 pitch with one out in the sixth, Drake Baldwin hit a sharp one-hopper through the right side for a single. Early counts have been a problem for Gausman this year. He's been ambushed much more often than is usual for him, because he's too often in the meaty part of the zone while rushing to get ahead—and because he can be a bit predictable. He'd gotten a swinging strike near the top of the zone on a fastball for strike one; Baldwin knew to sit on a splitter. The splitter Gausman threw was in the zone, and it was hit hard. It was just a bases-empty single. That shouldn't be a big deal, especially in a three-run game. It was, though, because any opposing batter who reaches even first base (hell, even one in the batter's box) is in scoring position against Cubs pitchers. No team has given up more homers than Chicago's 227—not the A's (226), who play in a minor-league park; not the Rockies (208). who play on the moon; not the nationals (204) or Reds (201). The reason for that vulnerability is a little different with each Cubs pitcher, but the vulnerability itself is a common thread tying far too many of them together. In Gausman's case, the other problem—especially early in counts, but not solely then—is that he's too often left his fastball on the inner edge against righties this year. In the past, he was good at targeting the glove-side, outer third of the zone, where it both allowed less damage and set up his splitter better. After giving up the single to Baldwin, he left a 1-1 heater to Ronald Acuña Jr. middle-in, and he paid the predictable price. Suddenly, Chicago led only 3-2. The veteran workhorse wouldn't even escape the sixth, after having been so untouchable through five; Daniel Palencia cleaned up his mess to get the Cubs back to the bats. The Cubs ran face-first into a wall after an early barrage against Martín Pérez, though. They scored once in the second and twice in the fourth, and then everything dried up. Thus, when Jacob Webb took over for the top of the seventh, the margin was still razor-thin—much too thin, it turned out. Webb's bugaboo is less subtle and more familiar: he's hung far too many changeups lately. The four-pitch leadoff walk he issued to Austin Riley was uncharacteristic, but when he fell behind Ozzie Albies 2-1 and then left a changeup thigh-high, everything felt (excruciatingly) right again. Some fans, surely, had wished Edward Cabrera would get the chance that went (instead) to Webb. Craig Counsell turned to Cabrera for the eighth and ninth, to let everyone see why that wasn't a good idea, either. Cabrera's confidence is every bit as shattered as Webb's. The Cubs screwed up his onboarding and development badly in the first year after trading a top prospect for him, and he will need the offseason to get right—if he can be reclaimed, at all. He gave up a line-drive single in the top of the ninth, allowed a stolen base, moved the runner to third via a wild pitch, and then gave up a back-breaking home run on yet another meatball, this time to Baldwin. The Cubs probably didn't have a comeback in them Tuesday night, anyway, but that put the nail in their coffin. On any night on which Pete Crow-Armstrong doesn't light up the game with his brilliance, the Cubs are depressingly mediocre. They need to fire pitching coach Tommy Hottovy, who has overseen too many failures of development and optimization to be retained. That's one of several steps between here and a solution for 2027, though. It offers nothing for 2026. To get where they hope to go—to do enough in October to make this season feel like a success—the Cubs need to find some way to stop giving up two-run homers. Unfortunately, right now, that looks unlikely. Hitting lots of home runs is not the only way to win in the playoffs, but giving up lots of them is the surest way to go home early. This team has run out of pitchers who can keep the ball in the ballpark; the results are as painful as they are predictable. View full article