Matthew Trueblood

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images This has been a strange spring for Matthew Boyd. He missed a chunk of Cubs camp to join Team USA for the World Baseball Classic, but returned after pool play so he could prepare for the honor and duty of starting on Opening Day. Unfortunately, the Nationals had a good plan against him that day, and he struggled mightily. He looked better the next time out, against the Angels, striking out 10 in 5 2/3 innings, but then he hit the injured list with a triceps strain and lost three weeks. Since re-joining the rotation, he's been uneven. He entered Sunday's start against the Diamondbacks with a 7.00 ERA for the season. In a solid win to extend the Cubs' winning streak to five, Boyd brought that ERA down to 6.00. He pitched six innings of two-run ball, allowing four hits and a walk but striking out five. It was a great way to reassert his place at (or near) the top of the team's rotation, made all the more welcome by the news that Justin Steele won't be back as soon (or, we might fairly speculate, as strong) as previously hoped. Chicago won't go far without a strong season from Boyd, and Sunday brought some evidence that he can step into the breach and be the stopper (or, in this case, the perpetuator) the team needs him to be. Specifically, the changeup was a reliable, even devastating weapon. Boyd threw 35 of them, the highest single-outing total of his Cubs tenure, and it worked wonders. Diamondbacks hitters whiffed on seven of 18 swings against it and watched another seven sail by for called strikes. The change earned Boyd three of his five punchouts and eight total outs, but Arizona didn't collect a hit against it. Some of that can be chalked up to working against a team that leans heavily on switch-hitters and some veteran right-handed bats, but another key consideration is this: Boyd will have to pitch backward more this year. That's not because his stuff is down, though his fastball is sitting much more at 91-92 than the 93-94 he often had early in starts last year. He threw at least 95.0 MPH 81 times last regular season, getting as high as 96.9. So far this season, he's only touched 95.0 four times, and never gotten above 95.3. Velocity isn't the whole story with Boyd, especially because he changes speeds so well with his changeup, curveball and slider. Hitters have to respect those much slower offerings, so they can't take full advantage of a heater that lacks elite heat. Rather, the reason why Boyd might need to pitch off the changeup more is his fastball's location. Boyd likes to use that four-seamer to ride the top rail of the strike zone, inducing chases and whiffs by forcing hitters to stretch their strike zone vertically in both directions. Last season, 45.6% of Boyd's fastballs were between 2.8 feet and 4.0 feet above the ground when they crossed the plate, just above the league's average. This season, that number is nearly 60%, in a small sample. As we've discussed, though, the top of the strike zone has come down. That's a problem for Boyd, and pitchers like him. He needs hitters to climb the ladder with him, both to set up his softer stuff and to get the ball above their barrels. He doesn't have elite carry on his fastball, nor overpowering velocity. He gets value from the way his low arm slot flattens out the approach angle of a high fastball, and the way it thus tantalizes and thwarts a hitter. But look what's happened to pitches in the aforementioned height zone, under ABS standardization (and the umpires' responses thereto). A much higher percentage of those balls are now above the zone, or close enough thereto that batters need not chase them. That's made it hard for Boyd either to get quick outs or put away hitters there, or to set opponents up for a change of eye level using that pitch. Working backward might be the best and only salve, for now. If Boyd can establish the bottom edges of the zone and/or get hitters behind in the count with his slow stuff, he can speed them up and fool them with the high fastball afterward. That was always one option, but because of the aforementioned lack of velocity or extreme raw movement, it was never a great one. Now, it might be the way he needs to go for a while. On Sunday, at least, he showed he can be that flexible and clever, but more adjustments lie ahead. View full article

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images Offensively, it's been an uneven start to the season for Pete Crow-Armstrong. He's batting .241/.307/.362, even after a torrid road trip to Los Angeles and San Diego. As we've discussed multiple times, he's gotten ever-so-slightly more patient this season, which has led to more walks, but he's also striking out more, and he didn't get his swing calibrated well enough to produce his usual power until this weekend, when he hit his second and third homers of the year against the Padres. Something else happened in San Diego, too, though. For the first time all year, an opposing player challenged a called ball against Crow-Armstrong. The Padres lost that challenge, and Crow-Armstrong eventually drew a walk, but finally, someone actually challenged a call on him. OTdQM1FfWGw0TUFRPT1fQmxSVlhGd0dWUXNBQ3dSVUFBQUhBbFZRQUZrQVZGSUFVMUJYVlFJTUFBSlRBd0VI.mp4 It might seem unsurprising that the free-swinging Crow-Armstrong is relatively unimpacted by the advent of ABS, but the stats say he should have been more affected. According to Baseball Savant's ABS Leaderboard, opponents should have challenged roughly five times against him by now, winning three of them. The only qualifying hitter with a bigger difference between the rate at which opponents should have challenged them and the rate at which they've actually done so is the Rockies' Troy Johnston. Lots of times, this year, the Cubs' star outfielder has taken pitches on the very edge of the zone; watched them be called a ball; and gotten a reprieve from an opposing catcher who was either otherwise occupied, insufficiently confident in the pitch they'd just caught, or unwilling to risk losing a challenge on the rare take by an exceptionally aggressive hitter. OTdQM1FfVjBZQUhRPT1fQkFoWlVsMVdBRmNBRHdRRFh3QUhDRkpYQUFNRkJnTUFWbEFNQWdzTkJGWUdBRmRR.mp4 This is a good example of the first of those means of escape from a challenge and an overturned call. With the runner going, the catcher's focus moved to making a throw, and he wasn't sure enough that the pitch he'd caught was a strike to issue a challenge on the non-call. Other times, the situation in which Crow-Armstrong took a borderline pitch isn't high-leverage enough to warrant a challenge. He gets away with one, because he's taking a pitch in the right situation to do so. WnhxdjlfWGw0TUFRPT1fVUFKU1hBSlhCMUFBQ0ZVRlVnQUhCQThBQUFCVFdnSUFBVjBGQWdjREFBRlRBQWRm.mp4 Sometimes, multiple things are happening at once. The league is likely to arrive, eventually, at a mutual understanding whereby players don't challenge often in games that aren't close late, like this one. Early in at-bats, that goes double. But the fact that Crow-Armstrong squares to bunt and that the catcher is again distracted by baserunners has something to do with the non-challenge, too. WERaNVhfWGw0TUFRPT1fVlFJREJnVUZVd0VBV2dGVUF3QUhBZ0VDQUFNQVVWUUFDbGNFVXdzTlV3QlZBUU5T.mp4 Those little qualifiers and mitigating factors can't explain away everything, though. Statcast's 4.9 expected challenges for Crow-Armstrong is the product of a probabilistic model. In truth, opponents have had a whopping 18 reasonable opportunities to challenge, and by my count, 11 of those were actually strikes. Some of those, inevitably, came in important situations and/or leverage counts, where it's quite clear that the catcher should have tapped their head. NHlLcTZfWGw0TUFRPT1fQVFKWlZ3SUFBQUlBQ1ZWVEJBQUhCdzRGQUZoUlVGY0FCVjBGQkFNQkNWVlNCQU5T.mp4 Is that non-challenge a product of undue timidity, or did the Pirates just not realize that pitch found the corner? One way to answer that is by looking at another, very similar instance. WU9WZ2dfWGw0TUFRPT1fQWxkV0JnQUVWUU1BQ2xZRlZBQUhBRkJWQUZnTUIxWUFWQVFEQ0ZFQlZ3SmRCQXRV.mp4 With the bases loaded and two outs in a close game, even a 0-0 pitch is a high-leverage one. Oyster Analytics's model for assessing challenge decisions says the Phillies should have challenged even if they thought they were just on the wrong side of a coin flip here; the actual pitch location should have given them roughly a 65% confidence level. Ok, here's the twist: this isn't actually a Pete Crow-Armstrong issue. I mean it is, but in another way, it isn't. This year, a recent trend toward fewer strikes being called on the outer edge of the zone to lefties has accelerated. Roughly 15 years ago, one of the pernicious little problems the game faced was a strike zone that bulged weirdly off the plate for lefty batters. Now, strangely, things have almost tipped the other way. Umpires are calling fewer strikes than they should on the outside corner—and on the inside corner, to righties. The called strike rate on takes on the third-base edge of home plate has plummeted. WU9WQVdfVjBZQUhRPT1fVndjRkFsZFNCQVlBQ1ZNQUFnQUhWVkFBQUZrRFZBUUFBd0ZYQXdBSEFsY0RBd1pl.mp4 To his credit, though, Crow-Armstrong has responded in the rational way to this change in the state of play. He swung at over 63% of the pitches he saw in the three Shadow zones along the outside edge of the plate last season, according to Statcast. This year, that number is under 50%. This is where his extra walks are coming from. He's getting help, to draw them, because umpires should have called a fistful of extra strikes, and (failing that) catchers should have challenged and won a few of those strikes, anyway. It's not quite luck, though, because the zone's shrinkage is a structural reality of the game this year. Crow-Armstrong has made the right adjustment to suit that. It shouldn't be working quite as well as it has, and he needs to keep adjusting, but swinging less at pitches on the fringes of the zone is a good thing, especially for the often hyper-aggressive Crow-Armstrong. His opponents are likely to stop going so easy on him soon, but now that his swing is back online, he won't need that help as much, anyway. View full article

Image courtesy of © Denis Poroy-Imagn Images Coming into this season, the weakness of the Cubs' bench was a glaring problem. Little was expected of Michael Conforto or Dylan Carlson, but with Seiya Suzuki starting the year on the injured list, the team was compelled to hope for at least some amount of help from each. Because Craig Counsell didn't trust Carlson, he instead moved Matt Shaw into an outfield role, which forced the team to carry Scott Kingery for the first few weeks of the campaign. Of Shaw himself, no one knew quite what to expect. His rookie season was so uneven and so pockmarked by big changes in mechanics and approach that projecting his offense was difficult, and he had lost his regular defensive home when the team signed Alex Bregman. Kingery and Carlson are gone, now, but the former has been replaced with Nicky Lopez, who's just Scott Kingery in a mirror. He, too, is a glove-over-bat utility infielder whose glove is merely good, not great. He, too, is a quasi-local product. He just happens to bat left-handed. Suzuki is back and has taken nicely to a restored home in right field, while rookie Moisés Ballesteros has been terrific as the DH. That's slightly reduced the role of Shaw and significantly reduced what the team is asking of Conforto, which is for the best. However, Counsell has tried hard to keep finding regular playing time for Shaw, and the sophomore is rewarding his manager's proactive show of faith. He's ironed out some of his early wrinkles in the outfield, still taking shaky routes but making most of the plays asked of him thanks to good jumps and his above-average speed. Lately, he's also been called upon more often on the dirt. Nagging injuries for Alex Bregman and Dansby Swanson have prompted Counsell to slot Shaw in at third and second base, where he's much more comfortable. In Wednesday's final game of a road trip to face the Dodgers and Padres, Shaw started at second, with Nico Hoerner moving to shortstop to fill in for Swanson. He and Conforto were the catalysts of a key victory, as they continue to play better than was expected. Shaw collected three hits against the Padres; Conforto had a double and scored twice, including the go-ahead run in the top of the sixth. Shaw is the big story, though. He, too, had a double, his sixth of the year. Then, in the top of the eighth, he got just enough of a Jason Adam fastball that caught just too much of the upper third of the zone. Often, when a player hits a high heater a long way, we say they got on top of the ball. That couldn't have been less true in Shaw's case: he clipped the ball with a 41° launch angle, arcing high down the left-field line. Because he caught it flush enough to hit it 101.2 miles per hour, though, it carried just beyond the reach of Padres left fielder Nick Castellanos and into the stands for a homer. ek13cW9fWGw0TUFRPT1fVXdjRFZ3VldBbGNBQ3dNQVVBQUhCUUJmQUFOVVZnY0FCMU1OVWxZTVVnc0RCQWRR.mp4 In that swing, one can glimpse a lot of what this season has been for Shaw. He got a good pitch to hit and made solid contact. He's still somewhat constrained by below-average bat speed, which has gotten even worse this year, and all three of his homers on the young season have been hit down the lines and just barely gotten out. Yet, he's increased the loft in his swing and his approach, which has given him slightly more consistency in adjusting to and producing against tough pitchers. Last season, we never saw a version of Shaw who could both collect hits to the center of the diamond and the opposite way and turn around mistakes for power. The combination of his mechanics, his pitch selection and and his timing never permitted that. This season, he's increased the tilt in his swing and is working to catch the ball out front more when he's able to anticipate the pitch type. That combination has made him a more complete hitter. Shaw still has much to work on, and he's gotten pretty lucky en route to his nice-looking numbers so far. However, he's made genuine improvements, too. If he can even settle in at the levels suggested by his preseason projections and his expected stats for this year (something like .270/.335/.400), the Cubs will gladly take it. On Wednesday, the emergence of that version of Shaw made the telling difference in what ended up a one-run win. View full article

Image courtesy of © David Frerker-Imagn Images Pete Crow-Armstrong had, arguably, the two biggest at-bats of the night in the Cubs' 8-3 win over the Padres Tuesday. The impact of one was obvious: he slammed a three-run homer that broke open the game in the top of the seventh inning. The other was a subtler achievement, but a vital one in itself—for the team, in that moment; for Crow-Armstrong, individually; and for the team, again, because of just how important Crow-Armstrong is to them. Let's start at the end, for once. In the seventh inning, the Cubs were clinging to a 4-3 lead. 'Clinging' is the cliche word for such a game state, but for the current Cubs, it's no exaggeration. A one-run lead, for this team at this time, is no lead at all—especially in San Diego, where the hosts have made a habit of revealing the Cubs' frailties each time they visit over the past few years. However, with runners on the corners and two outs, Craig Counsell pinch-hit Alex Bregman (who'd had the night off, to that point) and got the payoff he needed: an opposite-field single to double the team's cushion. That also gave Crow-Armstrong a chance to do bigger damage. Wandy Peralta started Crow-Armstrong with a slider below the zone. Crow-Armstrong took it for ball one. That, alone, was noteworthy. Crow-Armstrong is, famously, the league's most swing-happy star, and sometimes its most swing-happy player of any quality. For his career, he's offered at the first pitch over half the time (51.6%); the league averages about 30%. This year, though—to his credit, though not (yet) to his consistent actual benefit—he's swinging a little bit less. On the first pitch, it's down to 48.6%. Overall, it's down from 60% to 58%, which doesn't sound like much. It's not much, in a vacuum. For Crow-Armstrong, though, maybe it could be enough. At any rate, he's making an adjustment, which is important and valuable. The strike zone is smaller. Most players are swinging less. Certainly, the guy who swings more than anyone should be following that particular trend. He is. Anyway (and it might seem like this nullifies some of the above; I think it just reminds us to place it in context), Peralta came back with a changeup below the zone, and this time, Crow-Armstrong obliged him with a chase. That drew the count level at 1-1, and it gave Peralta and Padres catcher Luis Campusano the confidence to try the left-on-left changeup again. Big mistake. The pitch wasn't nearly as well-executed as its older sibling, and Crow-Armstrong punished it. Fool a hitter once, and you can reasonably hope to fool them again with the same trick, the data says. They don't tell you that if you throw a meatball the second time, the success rate of running it back goes through the floor, while the ball tends to go over the wall. That home run was crucial for the Cubs. It took much of the pressure and worry out of the final nine outs of the game. Hoby Milner had come on in the bottom of the sixth (more on that later); he pitched a smooth seventh. Lefty Ryan Rolison closed out the Padres with two strong, scoreless innings. That's the formula for this team to win games right now: blow teams out, so whoever's available in relief that night can pitch with as little pressure as possible. When Cade Horton was lost for the season to elbow surgery in early April, Cubs fans had little with which to console themselves. Horton was one of the joys of last season's run back to the playoffs, but his fragility was always at issue. The team handled him very carefully in the second half, but he still broke and missed the tail end of the regular season, plus the team's brief appearance in the playoffs. Injuries have never been far from the center of the discussion around Horton, and in the wake of this latest major one, his career prospects are somewhat muddied. It's bad, bad news. One of the ways the team hoped to weather the loss of Horton, though, was the impending return of fellow two-time elbow surgery survivor Justin Steele. For a long period from mid-January through the time of Horton's injury, Steele appeared to be ahead of schedule and sailing toward a return to the rotation around Memorial Day. If he could be back around then, the team might just be able to swat away the injury bugs, despite all the bites they were inflicting. Several relievers hit the injured list throughout the first half of the month, making everything harder, but Steele's return would ease some of that trouble, too. Getting him back could push Colin Rea back into a relief role, lightening the burden on the rest of the pen. On Tuesday, the Cubs announced that they've shut down Steele's throwing program, just when a rehab assignment should have been coming into view on the horizon. This isn't some galloping surprise; setbacks are normal for pitchers trying to return from a second elbow reconstruction. Then again, failing to return at all is also normal for pitchers in that situation. It's impossible to know, now, when the team might get Steele back, but it would be foolish to assume he'll pitch for the major-league team any time before the Fourth of July. Meanwhile, the hits keep coming in the bullpen. The team was just beginning to feel they'd found something nice in homegrown lefty Riley Martin, when he had to return to Chicago in the early part of this road trip and was shelved by elbow inflammation. For a long while, this team will have to survive with a patchwork pen, because they won't be back to full strength for some time—if ever. Daniel Palencia's return is on the horizon, and Phil Maton is already back, but Hunter Harvey and Caleb Thielbar are not as close. Nor will it feel safe to say Palencia has dodged a bigger problem until he actually returns and strings together some healthy outings; lat injuries can be very tricky. Thus, the team needs the likes of Corbin Martin (who earned a save Friday against the Dodgers) and Rolison (who got the win in that same game over the weekend and now has six scoreless innings across three appearances) to keep delivering solid outings. We talked about the good reasons for optimism about Martin when he signed a minor-league deal late in the offseason, and about how good Rolison looked early in spring training, but still, these are little-known journeymen. As Maton gets his legs back under him (literally) and Palencia once again shoulders the load (literally) in the ninth inning, the roles of these spare pieces will become less vital, but right now, this is how Counsell has to live. That makes every insurance run count double, for the foreseeable future. It also made the sixth inning Tuesday night an exhilarating, painful sequence. The Cubs took the lead in the top half of the frame, 4-2 (more on that, again, later), and Edward Cabrera got the first two Padres batters of the bottom half with no trouble at all. It looked like Cabrera, who had only thrown 85 pitches and was past the dangerous top four in the San Diego lineup for the third time already, should be able to get them through the sixth, and maybe even start the seventh. Then, Ty France happened. France is not a great overall hitter or a good defender anywhere but first base, but he's beloved by every team he joins. Part of that is his personality, which is jocular and energetic and good for the dugout vibes. Another part, though, is the fact that he's a great clutch hitter. With two outs, the Padres needed a baserunner and a tone change, and France delivered. On a 2-2 count, he fouled off a sinker that was running way in on him. France is an expert at getting hit by pitches, and he probably should have withheld his swing and let that pitch do so, but he'd already committed—and besides, the thing came in at 98 MPH. Cabrera had been trying to end the inning with an exclamation point. Feeling (perhaps rightly) that they now had France set up for a breaking ball away, Cabrera and Carson Kelly chose to go with the big righty's slider on the second 2-2 offering. That pitch takes on some extra importance for Cabrera this season, especially against righties; more on that another time. But he missed with this one, leaving it in the middle of the zone. France scalded a single to left field, extending the inning—and the frustration of that at-bat got into Cabrera's head. He threw three straight non-competitive pitches to Gavin Sheets, the third of which hit him. He got Campusano into a 2-2 count, too, but left a changeup up and in. The Padres catcher expertly scooped a liner into left field to score France, and the inning had officially gotten away from the Cubs. It looked like the game would surely follow. Cabrera, furious with himself, went down the tunnel behind the dugout and slammed his glove after Counsel removed him from the game. Milner came on to clean up the mess, but the Cubs were into their bullpen before they'd wanted to be—and you can see, now, why that's going to be a bigger problem for this team than for most good ones, over the next few months. Now, let's complete our journey backward in time, because I still have one more promise to fulfill. We said we would talk about two Crow-Armstrong at-bats, and all of the above informs the importance of this second (well, first, in that it came before the one we talked about first; third, in that it came after two other at-bats in the game; are you having fun with this game of non-sequential storytelling?) one. If the Cubs are going to win during this stretch in which their pitching is thin, they'll have to get more from Crow-Armstrong than they got from (give or take) the start of last August through the beginning of last week. Crow-Armstrong's offensive struggles got a lot of media attention early this year—probably too much, given that most of his value will always reside in his incredible defensive work, but you can understand why he came under some scrutiny. The Cubs, after all, bet $115 million on him this spring, and he had a long stretch there in which his OPS was well under .600. Although he's hit near the bottom of the order for some time now and isn't the linchpin of the offense, Crow-Armstrong has to give them some offensive value, too, because they're going to have to win some games 8-6, in addition to the ones they win 8-3. They need to score a lot, to make up for the fact that their injury-depleted staff will inevitably give up runs in bunches at times over the coming weeks and months. That means getting something substantial from every player who has a regular job—even their defensive ace. Crow-Armstrong is actually trending the right way, and again, the concerns might have been exaggerated a bit, all along. He's digging himself out of an early hole a bit later than he did last year, but he did have to do it last year, too. He might not be a hitter who can find his swing and hit his stride on Opening Day; he might be one of those who warms with the weather. At any rate, Crow-Armstrong is already coming out of his early funk, and mere competence from him will do. When he delivers in clutch moments, the team will win, because they're built to need just one or two such unexpected contributions to win on a given day. On Tuesday, the first such contribution he made came not with the decisive homer, but in setting up the scoreboard-flipping rally the inning before. Kelly had led off the frame with a single, but Nicky Lopez (in for Dansby Swanson, who was removed with glute tightness) laid down a dreadful would-be sacrifice bunt, allowing the Padres to easily take down the lead runner, instead. That brought up Crow-Armstrong with a runner on first and one out. Padres starter Walker Buehler had abused him earlier in the game, working him into deep counts and then getting hopeless-looking chases with curveballs in the dirt for a pair of strikeouts. It looked like another bad night in the annals of Crow-Armstrong's spring, especially because he now had to face his kryptonite: any left-handed pitcher. Reliever Kyle Hart might have thought his job would be easy. He might just have failed to execute. Whatever the case, though, he didn't get the same obliging chases from Crow-Armstrong. On five pitches, he got just one swing, on a sweeper. The other four missed the zone, and Crow-Armstrong took his hase. That seems like a small moment, in which the pitcher did most of the work. In truth, though, there have been plenty of times over the last several months when pitchers' plans were clearly to keep throwing junk below the zone and let Crow-Armstrong get himself out. This time, he didn't do it, and that's becoming a bit of a pattern. He's walked and gotten a hit in three straight games, and four out of five on this tough West Coast swing. Since April 7, he's batting .257/.337/.392; that's all the Cubs really need from him. His walk in the sixth forced the Padres to go to their third pitcher of the night, David Morgan. With two outs, Nico Hoerner laced a hustle double to right-center, scoring both Lopez and Crow-Armstrong to give the Cubs the lead, 4-2. It was a huge hit by Hoerner, who has been the team's offensive hero all year, but it was made possible by a good at-bat from Crow-Armstrong. The Cubs are trying to prove they're robust enough to withstand all these pitching injuries. They've done so admirably so far. Tuesday night was a great win for them, not just because they needed to snap a sudden three-game losing skein, but because of the way they won. If this team is going to achieve its goals for the year, it needs Crow-Armstrong to string together good at-bats. Not all of them have to be as electrifying as the homer in the seventh, though. The quieter wins matter, too. View full article

Yes we do.

Image courtesy of © Denis Poroy-Imagn Images In defense of Matthew Boyd and Moisés Ballesteros, neither was put in a position to succeed on Monday night. Craig Counsell tried to force-fit his young designated hitter into the extremely valuable defensive position he played in the minors, but Ballesteros is a poor receiver—a poor defender behind the plate, in general. He's still young enough to dream on him eventually developing as a catcher, if that's what the team wanted to most, but what the team wants most is to win in 2026, so they have him in the majors, where he can be a key cog in their lineup. Ballesteros is a star-caliber hitter, so the team decided it would be an untenable waste to send him to Triple-A Iowa to start the season. That was a right and reasonable choice, but it came with a cost. Ballesteros isn't a big-league catcher right now, and has no business catching for a team that wants to win games. He doesn't inspire confidence in his pitchers with the way he receives pitches, calls the game, blocks pitches in the dirt or handles the running game. The team is trying to find reps for him behind the plate so that they don't have to entirely let go of the glimmer, but each time they do so, it hurts the team. Pairing Ballesteros with Boyd to form the battery Monday night was especially peculiar. Boyd lives at the edges of the zone and succeeds with contrasts in movement and speed. He's not strictly reliant on piling up called strikes, but he needs opposing batters to be antsy in the box. He needs them to feel defensive about the zone, and he needs them to be off-balance. Putting a rookie who struggles with every aspect of the defensive art of catching made it unlikely that Boyd would have a good night; putting Ballesteros behind the plate made it unlikely that he would have a good one. The trouble began in the bottom of the first. Boyd missed inside with his fourth pitch of the day, to the Padres' Ramón Laureano, and immediately, he tapped the bill of his cap to challenge it. He knew he was wrong almost right away, but you can't take back a challenge once you issue one. Boyd's regret was obvious. He was flustered by an inability to locate the way he wanted to in the first at-bat of the game, and any pitcher is still burning off some pent-up adrenaline for the first handful of pitches in a game. Further frustrated by his folly, Boyd lost Laureano on the next pitch. One batter later, he laid a 1-0 fastball so nicely in the middle of the zone to Jackson Merrill that he was lucky only to surrender an RBI single. He never really settled in. With a chance to escape a major jam having surrendered just that one run, he made a mistake to Ty France (an excellent clutch hitter), and it became a 3-0 game. Ballesteros did what he does best in the top of the third, though, changing the game with one fell stroke. The bases were loaded, and Padres starter Randy Vásquez tried to crowd Ballesteros with his a cutterish slider. He failed, because Ballesteros is a short guy with short levers who stands way off the plate. Come to think of it, trying to attack him there was foolish, anyway. Ballesteros launched a grand slam to right field to thrust the Cubs into the lead. But he was quickly put back into his place, and the Cubs with him. Boyd allowed a double by Manny Machado and a single by Xander Bogaerts with one out in the third. Machado had to hold at third on the Bogaerts hit, so there was hope to avoid giving up a run, but on a 1-1 pitch to Miguel Andujar, Boyd missed with a backdoor curveball. It wasn't that close a miss, just as the pitch in the first hadn't been that close. Because he felt like his pitcher had executed his pitch (and perhaps misjudged his own position when he caught the ball), though, Ballesteros challenged again. The Cubs were thwarted, and that left them out of challenges for the rest of the game. Ballesteros's bad decision—the pitch wasn't high-leverage enough to challenge unless Ballesteros were about 69% confident of an overturn. Given the location of the pitch, it was a coin flip. In trying to bail out his struggling starter, he put the team behind the 8-ball, instead. The Padres would score just once in the third, but in the fifth, they chased Boyd immediately, with a Machado double. Ben Brown came on and collected two quick, harmless outs—and he should have had the third, with the lead intact. Unfortunately, home plate umpire Dan Merzel missed on what should clearly have been strike three to France. It's not Merzel's fault. Brown missed his spot badly, and Ballesteros (too small to reach subtly on a ball like this) made it look like a bad pitch. More importantly, though, the Cubs had questioned him on two previous occasions on which he was right, so they'd lost the right to challenge. That's not on him; it's on Boyd and Ballesteros. Brown, coming in for his share of blame, then walked France on a non-competitive pitch. On a 1-2 count to Nick Castellanos, he lost focus on France, who stole second—a process made much easier by Ballesteros choosing to appeal for a check-swing strike instead of throwing through against one of the slowest players in baseball. (Castellanos didn't go around.) On a two-run Castellanos single, the Padres retook the lead, for good. Along the way, they had one more real chance to flip the script again. In the top of the seventh, Pete Crow-Armstrong drew a leadoff walk. He stole second and advanced on a convoluted fielder's choice, so he carried the tying run at third base with one out. Michael Busch went down on strikes, though, which left it up to Alex Bregman. Here's a visual look at that showdown, between Bregman and Padres reliever Jason Adam. Each of the first two pitches of the showdown were sliders just off the outer edge of the plate. Merzel called the first one a strike. It was pretty clear Bregman knew it wasn't one, but he had no recourse. When Adam repeated his pitch type and location, Bregman had no choice but to swing, but he came up empty. He battled from there, a little, but the Cubs' best chance to level things went by the wayside because they couldn't challenge a call. Ballesteros is a bad framer, but he did well with the ABS system last year at Iowa. Boyd is a savvy veteran who knows better than to challenge a pitch himself, especially in that early situation. Because each slipped just a little bit, though, a game got away from the team Monday night. It was a brutal way to lose a game, not least because Ballesteros being installed behind the plate in the first place seemed to set all the wheels of it in motion. The Cubs got too cute in a game against a good team. They'll have to be smarter, as well as better, to rebound and take the series. View full article

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images By mid-May 2024, the Cubs were in trouble. They'd built their bullpen plans around three right-handed pitchers: flamethrower Julian Merryweather, coming off a 2023 season in which he'd gone from an unnoticed waiver claim to a relief ace; analytics darling Yency Almonte, part of the Michael Busch trade; and Héctor Neris, a free-agent reclamation project whom the team hoped would rediscover the swing-and-miss that made him a dominant closer in Houston. Within a month and a half, Merryweather and Almonte were sidelined by injuries from which they still haven't really recovered, and Neris was clearly a failed experiment. In desperation, Jed Hoyer scooped up former Cubs farmhand Tyson Miller, who was on the outside looking in for the Mariners at the time. Miller's funky delivery and command of a terrific cutting fastball/sweeper combination turned out to be more than enough to offset his lack of velocity, though, and he became one part of a rebuilt Chicago bullpen. Miller pitched 50 1/3 innings in 49 appearances for Chicago that year, with a 22.5% strikeout rate, a 5.3% walk rate, and a 2.15 ERA. Along with fellow scrapheap find Jorge López and developmental breakthrough Porter Hodge, Miller saved that bullpen—though it wasn't quite enough to save the season. Last spring, the crisis arrived even sooner. Ryan Pressly was a flop, just as Neris had been. It was Hodge's turn to get hurt and never be the same. Ryan Brasier and Eli Morgan, too, had been waylaid by arm trouble. The team had rousing successes in Caleb Thielbar and Brad Keller, but they were short on healthy arms and pitchers who could absorb innings to keep Craig Counsell from having to overuse his best relievers. Hoyer found salvation in Seattle again, this time purchasing the rights to Drew Pomeranz. The two-pitch southpaw pitched 57 times for Counsell, with a 2.17 ERA and similarly solid strikeout and walk numbers. He gave the team time to find the hierarchy that worked for them the rest of the year, headlined by Keller, emerging homegrown star Daniel Palencia, and trade deadline acquisition Andrew Kittredge—along with Pomeranz and Thielbar. Those are just a few examples of Hoyer finding improbable ways to assemble viable bullpens on the fly. Mark Leiter Jr., Rowan Wick and Scott Effross also number among his success stories. On the other hand, it can be too easy to forget all the acquisitions who didn't hurt the team as glaringly or cost as much to sign as Pressly, Neris, Almonte or Morgan, but who also didn't yield what the front office hoped for—guys like Nate Pearson, Michael Fulmer, and José Cuas. In some important degree, the Cubs' bullpen magic has been the product of good luck and/or good timing. Even having gotten it broadly right over the last three years doesn't guarantee that the team will do so again. That's a scary notion, because lo, they already need to do it again. Palencia, Hunter Harvey, and Phil Maton have already hit the injured list, along with lower-upside options Ethan Roberts and Hodge. Injuries to the starting rotation have drawn Colin Rea and Javier Assad into that duty and away from the pen, though Wednesday's return of Matthew Boyd put Assad in the pen again for now. On Thursday, the team might have suffered another loss, as Thielbar left in the ninth inning of the team's game against the Phillies with a hamstring problem. The relief pitching scaffolds Hoyer built this winter have already crumbled. He'll have to go out and find an arm outside the organization, and the sooner, the better. However, his track record only goes a short way in providing real confidence about the outcome of that addition. The Cubs need relief help, right away, but the odds of them nailing yet another such move feel lousy, The good news, of course, is that Ben Brown is settling into his new role gorgeously. Having failed in an extended audition as a starter last season and not having earned even a top-7 spot on the rotation depth chart this spring, Brown is now a reliever in full. He's taking to it marvelously. Brown's fastball is up a tick, sitting just under 97 MPH. His curveball, meanwhile, is as firm as ever, but with slightly more depth. After two years of trying to get the changeup right, he's leaning more into the two-seamer this season, creating the lane change he's long needed to keep right-handed batters off the two main pitches in his arsenal. As a result, he's running numbers similar to what Pomeranz and Miller gave the Cubs over the last two seasons, but in more volume. If the team stops needing him to give them multiple innings within games, there might even be another gear, but this version of him is already a viable stand-in for Palencia and Maton. With some luck, the team will get at least one of their top right-handed relievers back soon, and keep them healthy the rest of the way. To survive their current barrage of injuries, though, they need outside help, and that means that risk lies ahead. They've done some things right already. There are encouraging signs about the usefulness of homegrown lefty Riley Martin and minor-league signing Corbin Martin, each of whom are (for the moment) healthy. Brown is what they need him to be. With so many pitchers already hurt, though, what they have so far is necessary but not sufficient. View full article

Just that he doesn't think in numerical terms about it all. He's plenty smart enough to, and he accepts that kind of feedback, but he isn't consciously going, "The new rules make the zone smaller. I'm going to swing less often, because that's the best way to take advantage of this change." It's more like, he has his zone organized, spatially, and when he does lay off that high pitch and it's not called a strike, he's both getting reinforcement of his swing decisions and moving further ahead in the count, forcing pitchers to come into the meat of the zone, where he can do the real damage. It's a little more physical and a little less statistical than the way I presented it.

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images Have you seen the new Peacock show "The Miniature Wife"? Yeah, me neither. It's baseball season. The NBA playoffs are here. My nephew played the lead in his high school's production of Anastasia last weekend, and I have a new niece and a new nephew to fawn over, and I really should clean out the garden beds now that it's finally warming up. And did I mention that it's baseball season? There's a lot going on! I feel a little (no pun intended) (ok, pun intended, don't pretend you didn't see that one coming) like I've seen the show, though, because I've been watching so much of this season's baseball. Elizabeth Banks plays a shrunken person in the show, but if she were a strike zone instead of a wife, the show would be exactly like an MLB game in 2026. I assume so, at least. You know what? Actually, I don't know enough about the show to make any further meaningful assumptions. Let's all agree to binge "The Miniature Wife" together in November. Until then, it's time to focus on The Miniature Strike Zone. This season brought the implementation of the ABS challenge system, and with it has come a smaller strike zone. The change actually began in 2025, when the league informed umpires they would be evaluated based on a smaller margin for error in advance of the onset of the computerized zone. Tightening tolerances at the edges and corners created a slightly smaller zone. This year, with the zone still called by humans but now actually, tangibly reinforced by computers, the effect has run in the same direction, but even more markedly. For several years, now, the league has trended toward filling up the strike zone more. Fastballs are harder and livelier than ever; pitchers have better command of their non-fastballs than ever; and fielders are better-positioned than ever. You have to pitch more carefully, because hitters are also more powerful and more focused on hitting for power than ever, but on balance, the league has found the incentives favor throwing more pitches in the zone, so that's what they've been doing. This year, that trend has been stopped cold. It's not that the league has stopped trying to fill up the zone, though. It's that the zone itself has gotten smaller. Hitters have noticed, too. The league's average swing rate is down. Twice as many batters have substantially reduced their swing rate so far this year (at least two percentage points lower than last year, with a qualifying number of plate appearances in each campaign) as have substantially increased it. Dansby Swanson isn't just participating in that trend; he's one of the foremost drivers of it. In fact, only two batters (Ceddanne Rafaela and Royce Lewis) have lowered their swing rates more than Swanson has in 2026. Last year, he swung at 50.3% of the pitches he saw. This spring, that number is down to 38.6%. He's being radically patient, in response to the shrinking of a zone he already understood well, but couldn't always cover. Though umpires aren't perfect (and neither batters nor catchers challenge often enough to make them so by correcting their mistakes), theoretically, the top of Swanson's strike zone now is about 38.52 inches above the ground. (I say "about", here, not because two places after the decimal is too few to have the precision right, but because we only have Swanson's reported height of 6 feet to work with; the league has his height down to the millimeter.) The bottom of his zone is now roughly 19.44 inches above the ground. The first thing you should notice is that that's only 19 inches from high to low. Traditionally, we've thought about the strike zone as being taller than that, even for batters around Swanson's height. When you picture the zone in your head, you probably think of a rectangle taller than it is wide, by a noticeable margin. Well, it's now more like a square. Because any pitch that touches even the edge of the zone is called a strike if challenged, we can say that Swanson's zone is now basically 22.8 inches (the 17-inch width of home plate, plus the diameter of a baseball on each side) by 24.9 inches (19.1 inches, or a hair less, plus the same ball's width high and low). That's a lot like a square. It leaves Swanson needing to cover as much as he always has from east to west, but less from north to south. He's taking full advantage of that, too. I looked at pitches in each of the zones about two balls' width wide along the top and bottom of Swanson's newly concretized zone, and at the pitches in between those railings. Swanson is swinging less in each of the three locales, but especially down at the bottom of the zone—and he's benefiting from the new shape of his zone, especially at the top. 2025 Pitch Height Swing Rate Swings RV/100 Take Rate Takes RV/100 1.4-1.9 ft. 48.0 -5.8 52.0 1.2 1.9-3.4 ft. 64.1 -1.3 35.9 -0.2 3.4-3.9 ft. 63.8 -1.7 36.2 0.0 2026 Pitch Height Swing Rate Swings RV/100 Take Rate Takes RV/100 1.4-1.9 ft. 25.7 0.0 74.3 1.0 1.9-3.4 ft. 54.1 -2.2 45.9 1.1 3.4-3.9 ft. 50.0 -13.6 50.0 2.6 At his best, Swanson is a guy who wants to see the ball up and attack it there. He has a relatively steep swing for a high-ball hitter, with plenty of tilt in his bat path and a combination of contact point and attack angle that says he's always trying to launch the ball. He's a low-average, high-power hitter. However, he often gets himself in trouble because (in the process of trying to see the ball up) he chases too many pitches above the zone. His zone now stops much lower than it used to, which makes it easier for him to be more selective up there, even as he maintains the aggressive mindset of seeing it up to make the high-value contact he seeks. Setting the pitches at which he didn't swing along the top of his new zone side-by-side really shows how the altered zone is making his life easier. He's gotten a handful of calls, already, on pitches up and in that would have been—were—strikes last year. That takes a lot of pressure off him, as he looks for that belt-high pitch he can belt. Along the bottom rail of the zone, it's harder to see the clear benefit in terms of extra calls, but Swanson can afford to let a few more called strikes accumulate there than he used to be able to. Not having to sweat the top of the zone makes the bottom edge of the zone less important. He's ahead in counts more often. He can be more selective, then aggressive on the pitches that enter his happy zone. I've talked to Dansby Swanson a couple of times. Based on those conversations, I don't think this is quite how he's thinking about the changes to his approach this season. Whether you conceptualize it this way or not, though, this is what's happening. Swanson doesn't have exceptionally good feel for the barrel, like teammates Nico Hoerner and Alex Bregman do. He's still going to swing and miss quite a bit, and he's never likely to run a very high BABIP. Some younger versions of him could do that, but this one can't. Instead, Swanson's upside at the plate lies in his ability to hit the ball over the wall, without losing contact with all of his other skills. He has a well-engineered power hitter's swing, even though he's a fairly fast, glove-first shortstop and has never had elite bat speed. With this change in the league's rules and the shape of the strike zone, the best version of Swanson can emerge. It's just not the version you might have thought would be the best form of him. Right now, Swanson is batting .187/.337/.400. He probably won't finish the season with such an extreme-looking line, but yes: Dansby Swanson really is a little bit like Rob Deer and Carlos Peña. Those guys swung for the fences, and they knew they would strike out a lot. By also walking a lot, though, they kept themselves viable even when the ball wasn't clearing the fences. When it did, they became star-caliber sluggers. A smaller zone means Swanson can focus that unique swing on pitches in a smaller space, and he's been very smart about doing so. If he continues to, he can still produce the 25-homer power that first made him a star in Atlanta, and he can walk enough to be a plus OBP guy, too. It might come with an ugly batting average, because the called strikes and the whiffs will add up to a rising strikeout rate, but that might be the best version of this late-career Swanson. I'm not sure we want ABS to turn many players into peak Rob Deer. It might be a sign of something troubling, just as "The Miniature Wife" leaves me with an inarticulable unease. There might need to be tweaks to this new, robot-influenced zone. For now, though, it's allowed Swanson to draw 18 walks and hit 5 homers in just 23 games. Well-utilized by a savvy veteran, the system is turning out to be a boon to the patient power hitter. View full article