Matthew Trueblood

Image courtesy of © David Richard-Imagn Images Pete Crow-Armstrong is the best defensive center fielder in baseball. As recently as last season, there was at least a modicum of debate about that—Ceddanne Rafaela of the Red Sox won the prestigious Fielding Bible Award for center field, and might even have deserved it. Now, though, Crow-Armstrong is leaving even Rafaela behind, and doing things in outfield defense that are barely even possible. On plays Statcast rates as 2 Stars or higher on its difficulty scale (i.e., plays where the chance of the ball being caught was under 90% but higher than 0%, based on the model's estimates using fielder location data and the hang time of the batted ball), Crow-Armstrong is 9-for-12 so far. That's a sensational 75% success rate, close to the 77.5% rate he put up on such plays last year. No other player was higher than 73.5% last season, so if he keeps this up, he's got a good chance to pace the league in that regard again. For one thing, though, that underrates him. Crow-Armstrong has one actual missed opportunity to make a catch this season. You probably remember it. In the Angels series in the first week of the campaign, Crow-Armstrong misplayed a sinking liner by Jeimer Candelario into a double. At worst, he should have stopped it and held Candelario to a single, but the ball was catchable. That was a mistake; even the best of us make one. Here's one of the other two balls rated as catchable (although the Catch Probability was just 5%) by Statcast. UHY2YTlfWGw0TUFRPT1fQmxCWlhRRUVCUWNBV1ZaVVVRQUhVRk5mQUFNRUJRSUFCVkVNQlFZQkNRUlFCZ1ZW.mp4 The model does try to account for the presence of the outfield wall, which is why the Catch Probability on this one was so low, but let's be real: the chance of making that catch is 0.0%, for anyone. Crow-Armstrong got a good jump and a fine read, but if he'd kept running fast enough to catch that ball, he'd have dislodged his shoulder (and perhaps an internal organ or two) in the subsequent collision with the wall. It's fine; other players are also having 5% plays counted against them when the real chance was none. But it's important to me that you know about this dynamic in defensive metrics. Here's the other play the system says he had a 5% chance to make, but missed. R0JyUVlfWGw0TUFRPT1fQkFGUlZWVUJVUVVBQ1ZvRFh3QUhWUU5YQUZrR1ZBY0FBMUlCQVZJR0FRWlFVZ29B.mp4 Once again, Crow-Armstrong slows—even stops—shy of the wall to play this ball. It looks less makeable than it might have looked if he'd been chasing down a would-be walkoff hit with two outs; maybe there's a universe in which a player never breaks stride, gets the right footing as they plant their foot in the wall (no time to flatten the angle of body to wall and glide up unassisted) and snares this ball, but it would be the catch of the century. It'd also risk a broken wrist, or ribs. The real catch probability (lower-case letters, since my model is not official) on this is 0.001%. Meanwhile, on several plays since the start of 2025, Crow-Armstrong has seemed to do the scarcely possible. He runs underneath high flies very well, but lots of fast players can do that. Byron Buxton, of the Twins, is excellent at using his speed to make up for slow breaks and at adjusting his body when needed to make a tough catch. Crow-Armstrong, though, takes away a stunning number of singles and doubles on line drives, by breaking exceptionally quickly and accelerating both faster and more relentlessly than any other outfielder in pursuit of a ball daring to seek purchase on the outfield grass. It's not the 120-foot runs on high drives that make Crow-Armstrong extraordinary; it's the plays like this one. NHlLcTZfWGw0TUFRPT1fVlFGV0JRVlhBd01BQUZKV1ZnQUhCUUpTQUFNQ1ZBQUFBVlVBQ0FkVUExQlJDRlFF (1).mp4 Statcast's Outfield Jump leaderboard tells a fascinating story about Crow-Armstrong's excellence. It grades players on the amount of ground they cover (in any direction) in the first 1.5 seconds after contact (Reaction); and in the next 1.5 seconds (Burst); and on the ground they gain or lose, relative to average fielders, via the efficiency of their routes to the ball (Route). It gives each of these in feet above average, and then gives a total—both relative to average, and raw. This season, Crow-Armstrong sits atop that Jump leaderboard. He gains 5.2 feet of ground across the three components, relative to the average outfielder, with a good (+1.8 feet) initial reaction but an otherworldly (+3.2 feet) burst in that secondary moment of pursuit. He's also more efficient in his routes than the average outfielder—and, again, here we risk underrating him. The more a player moves in that 3-second window, the more likely they are to waste at least a little bit of that movement. That's not a new idea, or even a bad thing; it's part of the conscious tradeoff outfielders make all the time. However, Crow-Armstrong doesn't lose efficiency to his remarkably quick response on fly balls. He shoots himself at the ball's landing spot like he's a missile-defense system, and he never misses. That 5.2 feet of ground covered relative to the average is impressive, but barely beats out Chandler Simpson and Jacob Young (the dots breaking the scale, off the right and lower edges of the graph above, respectively, with their incredibly fast but noisy starts after balls) to top the leaderboard. The raw number of territory Crow-Armstrong covers in that 3-second window, though, is the more astonishing one: 40.1 feet. That's not a number anyone else in the league is terribly close to. Second on the list is Simpson, who plays left field instead of center and only covers 38.6 feet. In fact, going back to the dawn of this tracking of outfielders in 2016, no one has covered 40 feet in those 3 seconds over a full season, or even done so in a partial campaign as an overzealous rookie. Crow-Armstrong is stretching the boundaries of the possible. He's a seaplane, in this way, flying just above a rising tide. In 2016, the median figure for ground covered in that window was 32.5 feet, and it stayed fairly flat through 2021 (32.6 feet). Since then, though, teams have accelerated their move toward younger, faster, better-instructed outfielders. The median ground covered in those 3 seconds over the last four seasons (and so far this year) go like this: 2022: 33.0 ft. 2023: 33.0 2024: 33.4 2025: 33.4 2026: 34.1 The sample for this year is still small, and the number is likely to come down a bit. Even so, the trend is clear. It's harder than ever to be 5 feet better at chasing after a fly ball than your peers in the big leagues, because those peers are getting better by the minute. Last summer, Isaac Collins of the Brewers became an Outfield Jump star by taking the practice of timing a hop to put oneself in the air when a pitch passed through the hitting zone from the infield dirt to his place in the outfield. A handful of players around the league now emulate Collins, making the outfield a more explosive, reactive area of the field than it was even a few years ago. To be a plus center fielder, you have to be able to cover at least 12 yards in 3 seconds, and (of course) you have to move in the right direction to flag down the ball every time. Crow-Armstrong is breaking the scale. He might not keep his average ground covered over 40 feet all season, and even if he does, someone else might come along and do it soon, too. The tide is rising. Somehow, though, even at a moment when outfield defense is getting much better, Crow-Armstrong is widening the gap between himself and the rest of the group. He catches everything; he catches some things that don't even register at remotely catchable. He's also brilliant at playing balls off the wall, charging ground-ball singles, and setting up under fly balls to get off the best possible throw. He can change a game with his defense in center field in a way no other player in the league can, because he's taken his game to a new level over the last year. It's not a matter of raw talent, though he's always had the tools he needed out there. It's about the way he's shaved all the rough edges off his game, until he stands well clear of a pack that leaves much less room for clearance than it used to. View full article

Anyone know of anyone who keeps stats on Mound Ball?

Catch Prob usually won't be posted until the day after a game, on the fielder's fielding tab on their Savant page. You can always try pestering Mike Petriello or Tom Tango on social media! But no guarantees.

Image courtesy of © Eric Hartline-Imagn Images It's about to get a little nutty at Wrigley Field. The Cubs have managed to win four games in a row this week, flipping the narrative that had begun to surround a rocky start to the season. However, even as they've done so, they've been further depleted by injury. Matthew Boyd and Cade Horton have already been sidelined for a fortnight. One by one, though, they've also lost a number of key relievers: Phil Maton, Hunter Harvey, Ethan Roberts, and Daniel Palencia. That was after starting the season down Jordan Wicks and Porter Hodge, the latter of whom will miss the entire season after undergoing elbow surgery. At Triple-A Iowa, starter Jaxon Wiggins and reliever Gavin Hollowell have also been sidelined. As a result, the team already has several pitchers in the mix to whom they were hoping not to turn until summer. The latest addition, righty Corbin Martin, was with the team on a minor-league deal and joins the 40-man roster at the expense of Horton, who was transferred to the 60-day injured list to make room. Now, however, Martin can't be optioned back to the minors without being exposed to waivers. The team didn't want to recall him this soon, since that makes it much more likely that they'll lose him amid a roster crunch sometime soon. They had little choice, though. Thus, starter Javier Assad takes the ball Sunday, with a simple task: eat some innings. The Cubs' bullpen has just four (Jacob Webb, Caleb Thielbar, Hoby Milner and Ben Brown) of the eight members with whom they began the season. They're missing their top three right-handed options, and Brown (who became the de facto righty relief ace when Palencia went down) threw 38 pitches Saturday to secure their win over New York. Webb's combination of recent usage and wavering effectiveness will make Craig Counsell unlikely to turn to him with much enthusiasm in the late innings. Other than Thielbar and Milner, the team has no one fresh whom you want trying to hold a lead Sunday. Pitcher TUE WED THU FRI SAT TOT Brown, B 0 17 0 0 38 55 Webb, J 15 0 0 25 0 40 Thielbar 18 0 0 0 14 32 Milner 0 10 0 10 0 20 Little 0 19 0 0 0 19 Martin, R. 6 0 0 12 0 18 Rolison 11 0 0 0 0 11 Martin, C. 0 0 0 0 0 0 Assad himself is the team's seventh starting pitching option. He'll be asked, however, to pitch more like a No. 3: soak up innings and keep the team in the game. As long as he can do so, Counsell can piece together the final three-plus innings without overusing Ryan Rolison or Corbin Martin. Martin (the righty, not to be confused with the younger, optionable, left-handed Riley Martin) showed impressive stuff in his brief time with Iowa. His cut-ride fastball and knuckle-curve make a fascinating pair, and though he's thrown them just a few times, his sinker and changeup show startling amounts of arm-side run coming from his arm slot and branching from his main arsenal. That only makes it more important that the team not ask him to throw 45 pitches to get them six or seven outs. With Palencia and Harvey, especially, likely to be out for a while, the team badly needs right-handed relief depth, and Martin looks capable of being a solid middle reliever. Losing him before the end of April would put them at real risk of bullpen collapse. Counsell needs Assad to get him into the sixth inning Sunday, so he can mix and match and keep the pitch counts on each of the relievers he uses low. A lefty-heavy bullpen is a small problem. One running out of options altogether is a larger one, and it's a problem the team is on the cusp of running into at full speed, early in a long season. For a little while, every pitching appearance will be higher-leverage than it seems, because the team will have a need that reaches beyond that day: for the pitcher to come through the outing healthy, and for them to get the number of outs Counsell is asking for, so they don't stretch a thin staff past its breaking point. View full article

Image courtesy of © Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images In the last decade—and especially on this side of the COVID-19 disruption—we've seen MLB teams move from the traditional starter-backup catching arrangement to one much closer to an even timeshare. The Cubs signed Carons Kelly in late 2024 to accommodate their move toward that very model. With Miguel Amaya establishing himself as (they hoped) the catcher of the present and future, Chicago looked to Kelly to provide stability and keep Amaya's workload relatively low, given his long history of injury trouble. To whatever extent the goal was to keep Amaya healthy, the plan failed. The younger backstop went down with an oblique strain in May, then came back and immediately suffered an ankle sprain in August. Amaya is still dealing with the effects of those injuries, and his track record says he might never be able to carry even an 80-game burden at catcher. Fortunately, though, the Cubs got more than they could reasonably have hoped for from Kelly. A stance and stride adjustment last spring helped Kelly get off to a blazing start at the plate. He struggled after Amaya went down, as his own workload suddenly spiked, but he remained a solid defensive backstop and manager of the game plan on the field. He wasn't a zero in the lineup, either; he just lost the thunder that he showed early in the campaign. Maybe that will happen again this season. The Cubs will be similarly out of good complementary options if Amaya gets hurt again, so the risk that Kelly ends up overloaded remains real. So far, though, he's batting a stellar .333/.455/.467, in 55 plate appearances. Over the last two seasons, he was not only superficially usable at catcher, but genuinely above-average at the plate, according to Baseball Prospectus's DRC+. He ran a 106 in his 2024 season, divided between the Detroit Tigers and Texas. In 2025, that figure held firm, at 104. This season, that figure is up to 118. He's been a weapon in a lineup that has needed him, as some of the players on whom the team expected to rely more heavily have gotten off to slow starts. Shortening his stride unlocked some power for Kelly, but the bulk of his changes came in 2024, before the Cubs got ahold of him. He got more aggressive in the strike zone, without chasing more, and he made more contact on those in-zone swings, to boot. He's held onto those improvements in his first year-plus with the Cubs, taking his offensive game to a new level. Kelly has always had a good eye at the plate. His 10.1% walk rate since the start of 2024 is the same as the one he posted from 2021-23. His strikeout rate has come down, though, from 21.4% to 18.1%, even as he's hit the ball harder. Now that we have bat-tracking data, it's fairly easy to see just how well Kelly's hand-eye coordination serves him. It's not just about making contact; he's squared the ball up on over 28% of his swings since the start of 2024. (The definition of squaring a ball up, for these purposes, is getting at least 80% of the possible exit velocity out of a given swing, based on the velocity of the incoming pitch and the speed of the swing.) This year, although the sample is far too small to assume it will hold, that number is over 38%. The league averages just under 26%. Kelly's bat speed is nothing special, but because he consistently hits it solidly, he doesn't need that lightning-fast rotation. As he's come to understand that about himself, he's gotten better at making good swing decisions and putting the ball in play. He's also been a star behind the plate. Last season, he excelled at blocking pitches in the dirt and preventing runners from advancing on them. He doesn't have an especially strong arm, but as is true of his lack of plus bat speed, he makes up for deficient talent with a surfeit of skill; he's one of the most accurate throwers in the game. He's a slightly below-average pitch framer, but this season, he's found a way to overcome that—and then some. Kelly has challenged nine called balls behind the plate this year, and gotten seven calls overturned. Statcast's model gives him 13 expected challenges, meaning there were some called balls (because he's not a great framer, especially along the lateral edges and at the top of the zone) he could plausibly have also challenged. However, the same model only suggests he should have won 7 of those challenges, so he's merely saved four expected confirmations (and four lost challenges for the Cubs) by being judicious. When hitters have challenged calls against Kelly, meanwhile, they've paid a dear price. Opposing batters are just 3-for-12 when challenging called strikes with Kelly catching this season. In one knot at the very bottom of the zone, he's induced five bad challenges by hitters. The Pirates wasted their challenges as a team on Sunday by challenging two near-identical pitches on which Kelly caught the ball somewhat snatchily, but which turned out to be legitimate strikes. Here's one of them, right away in the first inning: NnlNNzNfWGw0TUFRPT1fVWxCUVZWUlJVRkVBRGdjS1VRQUhDQVJXQUZoUVV3TUFCQVlNQXdSUUFBWUhCQW9B.mp4 And here's the other, in the seventh, just before the Cubs got some momentum and came back to win the game. NnlNNzNfVjBZQUhRPT1fVkFCVEJnRUVYd0VBWEZJQ0FnQUhDUUJTQUFCV1dsa0FWd2NIVVFzQUJGRlhVVkJm.mp4 It might look inelegant, but this style of framing works, and this year, it's become even more valuable than it was in the past. When Kelly catches a ball like that and the umpire makes the right call, there's still one party left who might be fooled: the poor hitter. After what they felt was an especially good take, watching the ball almost into the mitt, many hitters feel overconfident about their own zone judgment, especially when a catcher moves their mitt in an obvious way. Coaxing batters into bad challenges that cost their team the right to appeal decisions later in games is one new way catchers can create value under the ABS system, and lo, Kelly is doing it. He'll be most productive if the team continues to use Amaya as close to half the time as possible. Even if that does continue, he won't have an OPS near 1.000 all season. Kelly has made real and tangible improvements, though, and he's one of those players whose makeup and a key adjustment or two allows them to enjoy a later prime than others. You'll never hear him talked about as an All-Star, let alone an MVP candidate, because constraints on volume make him more effective. Like the 6th Man of the Year in the NBA or the Relief Pitcher Award coming to the BBWAA awards suite this season, though, an award for players who provide value by giving a team length, strength and depth while also playing at a near-elite level during their limited time on the field might ought to exist. If it did, Kelly would be a candidate for it. He's been that good since joining the Cubs, and he has a chance to be even better in 2026 than he was in 2025. View full article

I've written about Nico Hoerner's grip position (and the way it changed throughout his swing at the time) before! You're late to the party, fella! 😄

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images Last season, no team in baseball topped the Chicago Cubs when it came to lifting the ball to the pull field. The North Siders pulled and elevated 21.8% of their batted balls. It's their signature skill, because they don't like to emphasize raw bat speed and the line-to-line lethality that comes with it. Always focused on controlling the strike zone and accepting their walks, the Cubs preach a swing designed to lift and pull, so that batters can live with a bit less bat speed than their counterparts elsewhere in the league and (hopefully) focus more on building a successful approach. (It doesn't hurt that a lineup full of such players is likely to be at least a little bit cheaper than one filled with similarly talented but toolsier sluggers.) That plan comes with drawbacks, though. The team right behind the Cubs in terms of pulling the ball in the air most often in 2025 was the Cleveland Guardians—hardly the best company one could hope to keep. It's good to pull the ball in the air, but the more you zero in on doing so, the greater the tradeoffs you make along the way. A team with an average rate in that respect might do much more damage than the average club when they do so, or much less, and that will determine whether they're good at that aspect of offense or not. The Cubs are playing a numbers game, filling the sky with pulled hits and relying on plenty of them falling or carrying out of the park. That probabilistic approach makes sense, but one more focused on payoffs might be equally productive. In small segments of a season, the variance of a concerted effort to hit pulled fly balls becomes more obvious. The Cubs trail only the Diamondbacks and the Twins in the share of their batted balls that are pulled in the air this year, but they're much less productive than they were in 2025—or, perhaps more saliently, they're equally as frustrating and unproductive as they were in their worst stretches last year. It's not that they're not able to execute their offensive gameplan; it's that that execution isn't paying off. The Cubs rank sixth in MLB in the percentage of plate appearances ending with a pulled batted ball with an exit velocity of at least 90 miles per hour and a launch angle between 0° and 50°. We're eliminating softly hit balls and pop-ups here, and still, the Cubs are sixth in baseball at producing them. Now, here are the Run Value figures for those batted balls for each of the top 10 teams in that frequency. In other words, this is the number of runs above average (for all plate appearances) produced by well-struck, pulled batted balls for the teams who hit the most such balls. Dodgers - 44 Diamondbacks - 28 Padres - 31 Guardians - 34 Angels - 35 Cubs - 21 Royals - 26 Rangers - 29 Rockies - 33 Yankees - 33 Chicago stands out like a sore thumb. The Cubs just aren't getting results when they hit these balls, on which the expected level of returned value is quite high. To visualize it a different way, here are all 30 teams plotted by the percentage of plate appearances ending in this type of batted ball, and per-100 run value thereupon. The Dodgers are the best in the league at hitting those high-value balls, and they get above-average bang for their buck, too. That's no surprise. The Cubs have been doing a slightly watery Dodgers impression, offensively, for at least three years now. The Astros lead the league in rate of return, without regard to how often they produce pulled air balls; we can partially chalk that up to their short-porched home park. The Reds, clearly, need to rethink their offense. They don't hit nearly enough of these balls, and they don't get as much value per pulled air ball as they should, given that it should only be their very best contact that looks like that. The Cubs, though, are arguably the anti-sweet spot. They're spending a large share of their plate appearances in pursuit of the rich rewards of pulling it sharply, but they're not getting juice from the extra squeezing. Their weighted on-base average on these batted balls (.682) is the lowest in baseball. Again, you still want to pull the ball with authority, as much as you can. A .682 wOBA means ending a plate appearance with the same expectation of contribution to scoring as if you took a pitch outside the strike zone. Trying to do this as much as they do comes with costs, though, and the costs the Cubs are paying are outweighing the returns they're enjoying—because those returns have been, in the peculiar relative sense we're talking about here—are paltry. No team in baseball is getting less from pulling the ball hard and on a line. Is this just bad luck? Is it the pitcher-friendliness of Wrigley Field, especially in the cold weather of March and April? Or is this team too focused on producing a particular kind of batted ball, at the expense of producing lots of hits and runs? The answer is: all of the above. The ball is relatively dead again this year, as it was in 2025. It's not a great time to be an offense dependent on hitting fly balls to the pull field. Nor is the modern Wrigley a good place to be doing so. It's still, in an important and overriding way, a good strategy, but the Cubs are executing it under conditions—and perhaps with personnel—ill-suited to let them get the most out of it. There's a lot of season left, and this devotion to the objective of producing high-expected value batted balls should be good for the team over the balance of it. For now, though, it's part of why they've been frustrating, and why they're losing games. Approaches unusually focused on pulled air balls lead to more easy outs than others, when things are going wrong. That can narrow your path to victory. For three years in a row, Cubs teams trying to get back over the hump have been easily outpaced by Brewers teams with less offensive talent. Those teams had more ways to spark rallies and score runs than this team has. It forces Cubs fans to be patient, but the team can't afford to just wait for things to change. They need to think about how to be more flexible and resilient, even as they anticipate the positive kind of regression. View full article

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images The first problem is that Tyler Austin got hurt. That's outside Jed Hoyer's control, except in that signing a player who was compelled to seek his baseball fortune on another continent half a decade ago and who's now well into his mid-30s was an embrace of some injury risk. Austin's knee injury in spring training left the Cubs without the backup first baseman Hoyer thought he'd provided to Craig Counsell, and Jonathon Long's minor injury during camp was enough to scupper the option of bringing him north when the season began. Hoyer continues to build bad, dysfunctional benches, and the lack of a true utility man—Matt Shaw fills that role on a healthy version of the roster, while Scott Kingery does so for this injury-diminished one, but neither is quite as versatile as the ideal do-everything guy—is on him. However, he caught a bad break with Austin going down, and the best management of his young bats and his two incumbent catchers was the way he did things this winter. Let's assign him just 10% of the blame for the Cubs' needless and costly loss Saturday at Wrigley Field, and move along. Counsell was left without great options, too. He faced a situation in the seventh inning of that game for which the only reasonable response was the move he made. The Cubs were rallying. After starting the game by falling behind 3-0, they'd battled back to make it 3-2, and the tying run stood at third base with two outs. Michael Busch was due, but the Pirates went to lefty reliever Gregory Soto, a brutal matchup for the platoon-vulnerable Busch. Moreover, Busch was mired in an 0-for-30 slump. You can't ask a player fighting his hitting demons that hard to try to win a left-on-left battle with the game on the line, when you have a competent alternative on the bench. Counsell went to Carson Kelly, gaining the platoon edge, even though Kelly is not one of those catchers with much experience as a first baseman. Kelly didn't cash in the chance, but that was the right call by Counsell. Kelly looked fine while he remained in the game as the first baseman, too. The trouble really began in the ninth, when Kelly drew a two-out walk. He represented the winning run, so Counsell pinch-ran for him with Shaw, gaining much more speed. This could have come into play even in a small way, like beating out a would-be fielder's choice on a slow ground ball, so it was a worthwhile risk. Again, though, it didn't pay off. Alex Bregman extended the game with a tying single, but Shaw was stranded at third and had to take over at first base on defense in extra innings. We can assign some blame to Counsell and his coaching staff, because somewhere during the spring—especially after the relatively early injury to Austin—they should have gotten in lots of extra work with Shaw or one of the other members of the bench corps at the cold corner. Kelly took most of those reps, but there are lots of ways a catcher can end up being unavailable in a moment like that. One option for the staff should have been to bring Conforto or Ian Happ in from the outfield to play first, with Shaw taking over an outfield corner. Failing that, Shaw should have gotten many more reps on the not-so-basic basics of first base. None of that happened. I assign 20% of the blame for Saturday's loss to the coaching staff. The rest, though, must be divided between Caleb Thielbar and Shaw. The Cubs did a marvelous job in the top of the 10th inning, holding the visitors scoreless. They missed their chance to walk them off in the bottom of the 10th, but they were very close to getting out of the top of the 11th unscathed, too. With two runners on and two outs, Thielbar induced a dribbler from Pirates infielder Brandon Lowe, who looked overmatched in the left-on-left matchup. It should have ended the inning and set up the home side to even the series with a walkoff victory. Instead: calamity. Everything two players can do wrong on a routine play, Thielbar and Shaw did wrong on this one. To start in a good place, though: they both had excellent initial reactions. Shaw, playing an unfamiliar position and surely positioned farther from the base than was comfortable with a lefty batter at the plate, broke quickly toward first on contact. This is actually a good chance to heap another 5% of the blame on the coaching staff. With a lefty batter up and a key run at first base, playing the first baseman that far off the line is almost never correct. Maybe, with the lefty Thielbar on the mound, Lowe's spray chart told them to move the first baseman toward the hole, but Shaw is not 'the first baseman' when you're drawing up those spray charts and positioning plans. He should have been told to play closer to the bag. We'll soon see why that matters. Thielbar fielded the ball cleanly, and although it meant turning his back to the runner, he was in position to make a throw with plenty of time. Shaw, for his part, found the bag fast. That's your job, on a play like this, as the first baseman: get to the spot quickly and have your head up, ready for the throw. Look at all the time Thielbar has. There's no need to rush here. There's also plenty of time for the move Shaw still needs to make. A highly seasoned first baseman might have aimed to get their right foot onto the base right away, but this is a perfectly acceptable way to do what we discussed a moment ago: find the base without staring down at the ground. You angle toward the bag, let your left foot locate the pillow, then quickly turn to put the right foot there instead, setting up to receive a throw by putting your left foot forward. That's where the trouble starts. Shaw has his moment to get the feet right, but he doesn't take it. He's not used to being at first, receiving this kind of hard, time-pressured, high-stakes throw, and he's not comfortable turning his hips and shoulders the way a first baseman must, to be ready for a throw that's anywhere but right at you. It's easy to see some of that in the way Shaw freezes and carries his weight as he braces for the throw. It's harder to see this, but I think it also becomes a problem for Thielbar, right about here. He's already rushing a little. He didn't appropriately calm himself in the moment it took to scoop the ball, and he's more worried about getting the ball there on time than he should be. But now, he's also looking at an unusual target. Shaw isn't set up correctly, and visually, it's much harder to pick out where you want the throw to go. A better first baseman is already bringing the glove up to set a target, but even without that, his body is telling Thielbar he's ready. Shaw's positioning is sending the opposite message. Perhaps because of that (or perhaps just because he hurried it), Thielbar will drop too low with his arm slot and throw wide. This is a guy who comes way over the top, off the mound. Dropping down to throw like an infielder isn't usually a problem for him, but here, it becomes one. The ball is running away from Shaw, and the inexperienced infielder's footwork is going to cost him everything, now. Here's the last frame before the ball skips in the dirt, then off his glove. It's a bad throw. I'm not sure he could have gotten the out if he'd set up better, except by inducing a slightly better throw. I think he could have, because he'd have been able to stretch diagonally toward the ball and cut it off as it tailed away from him. He'd have had a much greater range with the stretch, in general. This is why first basemen stretch with their non-glove foot anchored to the bag in almost all situations, in a nutshell. But certainly, it would have been a tough and impressive play to snare this ball and get Lowe. Take note of his foot being on top of the base, instead of shoved up against its edge, and you can also see that he had a bit more stretch available than it appears. What should have been easy, though, was stopping the ball. If he has the right foot on the base, it's routine to come off the bag and collect the throw, even if he's ultimately unable to hold the base. As it is, the reach across his body necessitated by having the left foot there means he's going to fall down as he tries for this, no matter what. His stretch radius is cut way, way down, so he needed to give up the base early here and just snatch the ball up like a grounder. Out of position and out of his depth, he failed that, too. The ball skipped away and the winning run scored. Even having made multiple layers of excuse for his being forced into duty at an unfamiliar spot and placed in the wrong spot to start the play, I have to give Shaw 40% of the blame for this loss. He had a difficult but doable path to getting the out on this play. He had a much wider and easy path to keeping the ball with him and holding the go-ahead run at third base. All it would have taken was better fundamental play, and a big-leaguer shouldn't have to be told which foot to place on first base when readying for a throw. He failed a simple test of either poise or baseball IQ, at a crucial moment in a divisional game. The rest of the blame—25%—goes to Thielbar. It was a bad throw. He's an asset to a team battling major pitching injury trouble, and he made the first half of a fine play, but it was a bad throw at a dreadful time. Losses like Saturday's are symbolic of the team's failures on multiple levels, but ultimately, you have to leave most of the blame at the feet of two players who have to be better than that. If the Cubs want to get back to the postseason this year, they need to spend the summer building a more functional roster and getting healthy. They have to put their players in better positions to succeed. But most of all, they have to get these things right. They're not nearly good enough to go anywhere worth going while flubbing the fundamentals. View full article

Image courtesy of © Ken Blaze-Imagn Images Hitting is problem-solving. After all, you're standing there in a box, not allowed to move beyond it, armed with a seemingly powerful but unwieldy club, and you've got a projectile coming at you at bone-breaking speed. You can't be sure where it'll be when it passes you, or even that it won't come find that spot between your third and fourth ribs that leaves you wincing every time you run for a week. You can't do more than guess (albeit in an educated way) which way the thing might swerve en route. If you don't find ways to consistently whack that projectile off into corners and empty spaces, you lose your job. You've got a problem, all right. You'd better have some ideas to solve them. The above are some of the problems of sheer difficulty in hitting well. The reactive nature of the exercise, the excellence of modern big-league defense, and the nuances of situations pose plenty of difficulties. There's another problem every hitter eventually runs into, too, though: to attack pitches and be as dangerous as possible in the box, eventually, you have to risk hurting yourself. In fact, as the league has become increasingly fast and ferocious, those types of injuries are becoming more common. Higher pitch velocities mean that hitters have to swing faster, too, and for many, rotating fast and explosively enough to win your showdown with a pitcher eventually means losing a battle with the integrity of your own muscle tissues. Over the last decade, strains to key muscles in the torso have become much more common in hitters. Last season, in fact, was a bonanza for these things—oblique strains, intercostal strains, abdominal strains, and so on. In May 2025, Miguel Amaya became one of the victims of that trend. He was hurt, by coincidence, on a throw in Cincinnati, but the way he pushed his limits with his swing speed contributed to the damage. That injury derailed Amaya's season. He missed nearly three months, then sprained his ankle in his first game back in August. It was a disaster—not just because it stopped him cold during a great season, but because it's had a noticeable, even eye-popping hangover effect this spring. Last year, Amaya's average swing speed was 72.2 miles per hour. That's above-average, especially for a catcher—those guys are selected for defense, after all. It formed a downward trend, from 73.7 MPH in 2023 and 72.9 in 2024, but it was still a strong number. Of course, nearly all of the swings making up that average came before he suffered that oblique strain. This season, Amaya has served in a similar role as the one he had last year, splitting time with Carson Kelly. He's been very patient—much more so than in the past, with his swing rate nosediving from 54% to 38%—so he's only lodged 29 competitive swings on the season. In them, though, he's averaging just 68.4 MPH of bat speed. He's topped out just over 76 MPH. Every possible sign says Amaya has gone from a plus to a minus with regard to bat speed. He's lost a ton of it. Obviously, that doesn't mean he can't be at least somewhat effective. Firstly, to support that claim, we can point to the fact that he's batting .294/.400/.529 this year. Swinging less is as good as swinging slower is bad; it can produce walks and put you in hitter-friendly counts. Once you have the advantage on the pitcher, maybe you can sit on a certain pitch type, and the feeling that the pitch might swerve in the wrong direction on you goes away. If Amaya squares the ball up much better because his swings are more on target, he can make up for this big loss of bat speed. Slower swings are also, by and large, more likely to result in contact, as are shorter ones. Amaya's bat path has been flatter and more direct this year, so he's found some hits in two-strike counts. He's not hitting the ball hard as often, but he can make up for that with a better-organized approach. The other caveat that matters is that Amaya might yet recover the lost bat speed. The samples here are tiny; he could warm up with the weather and get back to cutting it loose. However, for any catcher moving into their late 20s and for any player coming off a severe injury to their torso, a loss of bat speed shouldn't surprise us—and it's best to assume that it will be at least partially permanent. Amaya can still be a very useful player for the Cubs, but he might have to learn to do it as a slower swinger. It's just the next problem to solve. View full article

Image courtesy of © Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images Back in May 2024, I wrote about Nico Hoerner's potential (or, as I myopically believed back then, lack thereof) to hit more doubles. The issues I noted at the time are still real and salient: that hitting the ball to center and right field, while good for a batter trying to maintain a high contact rate and make good swing decisions, tends to come with limits on sheer exit velocity; and that defenses have gotten better at taking away extra-base hits on balls directed toward the gaps. Here's a chart from that article that's worth reproducing. It shows the league-wide trends in outcomes on line drives hit to the gaps from 2016-24. Without updating the visual itself, let me assure you: the trends have continued apace. Hoerner hasn't tapped into some new source of raw power. He has, however, slowly developed a bit more practical power. Without generating more extra-base hits (he had 37 in 2022, 40 in 2023, 43 in 2024 and 40 in 2025), he's maintained his rate of compiling those and increased the rate at which he hits singles. I chronicled the changes to his batted-ball profile that facilitated that increase last fall. In short, he figured out how to start pulling the ball on a line, and while that didn't lead to a sudden surge in isolated power, it augmented his slugging average, because it buoyed his batting average and the slugging rose with it. This year, he's made a further, subtle change that might just allow him to hit for (a little) more extra-base power without sacrificing his elite contact rate or singles rate. It looks like this. Hoerner has moved slightly off the plate this year. He's also widened his stance slightly. According to Statcast measurements, the distance between his feet in his stance is up to 32.8 inches in 2026, from 28.9 inches in 2025 and 26.7 inches in 2024. That means a shorter stride to what is an almost identical ending position. These numbers are my estimates, because Statcast doesn't report them officially, but Hoerner's stride (the distance his front foot moves from his initial stance to its position at contact) is down from 24.2 inches in 2024 and 19.2 inches last year to 15.5 inches. A wider stance and shorter stride allow Hoerner to stay slightly more upright, and to flatten his swing more easily when needed. His swing speed is actually down this year, but he's creating more sharp contact down the lines. It comes from this change, because this change lets him hit with a stronger base, so he can let the ball travel or go get it as pitch type and location dictate. The adjustment that changed everything for Hoerner last year was to catch the ball out front a bit more often. He's always capable of letting it travel deep into the hitting zone, which means contacting the ball when his swing is still leveling out or just beginning to rise. In 2024, 38.0% of his swings had an attack angle of 2° or less, and just 27.8% of them had an attack angle of 10° or more. Last year, he shifted those numbers to 34.6% and 33.9%, respectively, which led to all those line-drive singles to left field—and began to open things up for him to hit more doubles. He's doing that same thing this year, with one new wrinkle. While his distribution of attack angles is the same as it was in 2025, the results on the balls he hits at very low attack angles have improved dramatically. Already, he's poked four doubles down the right-field line this year, but 'poked' is perhaps the wrong word. More of his opposite-field contact this year looks like this: WnhxdjlfWGw0TUFRPT1fRHdZSFhRWlJVUW9BV2dNS0J3QUhWQTVXQUFNRkFGVUFCbFZRQVZjSEJBcGNVVlpY.mp4 From the center-field camera, that looks a lot like the quintessential Hoerner swing, and again, he's not generating better bat speed or anything. However, he's hitting the ball much better when it gets deep on him, because that wider stance and shorter stride mean earlier stability and greater strength in the back half of his hitting zone. For as long as I can remember, old-school baseball people have repeated the maxim that a good hitter uses the big part of the field to find hits. Maybe so, but to find extra-base hits, a hitter like Hoerner needs to use the small parts. He hit a home run Wednesday night in Tampa on a hanging breaking ball by Joe Boyle. It was a pitch on which he could flatten out and get his arms extended more than in the past, because of his slight stance and stride alteration, but it was also a rare feat. He hit it out on a swing at just 67.8 miles per hour. Since the start of 2025, only 141 home runs have been hit on swings slower than 68 MPH, and only 20 batters have hit more than one such dinger. Hoerner hadn't done it in that span, until Wednesday. The guys who do it even semi-regularly—Wilmer Flores led the way with six of them last year; Isaac Paredes is tied for second—do it by pulling the ball a ton. Hoerner won't and shouldn't lean all the way into that kind of approach, but he does need to be able to shoot the corners for extra-base hits—be they those doubles to right or the occasional homer to left. Changing the way he sets up in the box has helped him move closer to that goal. There will be more adjustments, of course, as the league tries new ways to pitch to this new version of Hoerner, but for now, he's enjoying the fruits of a cleverly improved style of hitting. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jonathan Dyer-Imagn Images The fastest player in the league hit a sharp one-hopper, almost perfectly placed. With a runner going and Nico Hoerner breaking toward second base to cover a potential throw Tuesday night, Chandler Simpson hit behind the runner. It was still (more or less) up the middle, but Hoerner was moving away from the play. He changed direction gorgeously and speared the ball cleanly on a dive. However, his internal clock got overwound, as he processed the way he'd had to arrest his own momentum and the fact that Simpson gets up the line better than almost anyone else in the league. He rushed and bobbled the exchange, and wasn't able to get the out. It's too bad. He had time, after all, but no way to know that. That play is notable in only one way, really: It's the only hit Javier Assad gave up on Tuesday night. In his first start in the stead of injured Cubs ace Cade Horton, Assad got 17 outs, issued two walks and allowed Simpson to collect that one infield single. With slightly better luck—or if the Cubs had played things more traditionally, with Dansby Swanson covering second with a left-handed batter at the plate—he could easily have gotten through at least six innings without giving up a knock. That's how good he was. Assad only struck out three Rays batters, and the Rays are a team prone to a fair number of whiffs, so don't get ahead of yourself. However, in addition to showing great command of his sinker and feeling out the whole seven-pitch mix that makes him effective in multiple roles, Assad broke out something especially intriguing Tuesday night: a better changeup. Though I can't fully confirm this, it sure looks like Assad has gone to more of a kick-change, after being a standard-issue circle-change guy in the past. The pitch has about two inches more depth than it did in the past, despite being slightly firmer. He throws it with similar initial spin to his fastball, but it deflects more than it used to from that flight plan. This wasn't an anomaly born of pitching in the dome at Tropicana Field, either. He's shown this pitch and its movement profile all spring, including during his stint with Triple-A Iowa. He just got a chance to put it on full display Tuesday. TUFYS05fWGw0TUFRPT1fQVFGUlhBQldWQVFBWGxzTEJ3QUhWMUpUQUFBSEJRSUFWbEFDQUFvRVYxWlFWQXRW.mp4 A changeup that good would be a difference-maker for Assad. He's an adroit, fascinating pitcher who manages contact by surprising opposing batters constantly, but he's never really had an out pitch against hitters on either side. If the changeup can develop into that caliber of a weapon—especially given the way he leans on a sinker, which isn't a pitch you want to feature too heavily against opposite-handed batters. A changeup with enough separation from the sinker to miss bats would be huge for him; it could make his mysterious brand of success more conventional and sustainable. Though Statcast erroneously tagged them all as cutters, Assad also showed feel for his cutter-slider slurry Tuesday. He has both of those pitches, at this point, taking a bit off to achieve more movement at sometimes and speeding it up to get in on the hands of a lefty or freeze a righty sitting on his sinker. He's become a true seven-pitch guy. His sweeper and curveball are virtually show-me pitches, forcing hitters to cover a wider velocity band and a larger hitting zone but rarely serving as out pitches. He'll try to use his sinker, cutter and four-seamer to get most of his big outs, but bringing along the changeup could turn him into a reliable mid-rotation stud. Unexpectedly, the Cubs need that kind of step forward from him pretty badly. Therefore, while it was just the first step of a long journey, Tuesday felt like movement in the right direction. View full article

Image courtesy of © Andrew Dolph / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images The news is bad. The news, by now, is barely news, but that doesn't make it any less bad. Four days after Cade Horton left his start against the Guardians in the second inning, the team announced that he will undergo season-ending elbow surgery. He flew to Dallas to consult with Dr. Keith Meister, who recommended the procedure. Whether the operation will be the modified version of Tommy John that involves placing an artificial internal brace or a full-fledged Tommy John isn't immediately clear, and doesn't need to be decided until the time of the procedure. Either way, though, Horton will pitch again no sooner than June of 2027. It's a devastating blow for the Cubs, who had penciled Horton in as one of their top two starters for this season. It's also a major setback for Horton himself. A second Tommy John surgery is not terribly uncommong in the modern game, and pitchers return to at least their previous level even after a second operation about two-thirds of the time. In fact, the Cubs were set to face Rays right-hander Drew Rasmussen Tuesday night, before he left the team to be at the birth of his daughter. Rasmussen has undergone three major elbow procedures—two Tommy Johns and an internal brace variant. Jameson Taillon has had the surgery twice. So has Justin Steele, whom the team hopes to see return to the mound by the early part of June. Needing the operation twice in as short a span as Horton has, though, is especially worrisome. He had Tommy John in college at Oklahoma. He also suffered a significant shoulder injury in 2024 and lost the end of last season to a ribcage injury. It's possible that Horton will simply never be able to withstand a full season's workload in a big-league rotation. At the very least, the Cubs will have to wait until 2028 to try to get him there. The setback is huge, not least because the Cubs have few similarly intriguing pitching prospects on whom to next pin their hopes. Instead, they'll have to hope they have better luck avoiding the injury bug the rest of the way, with one of their best options crossed off before Tax Day. Until two years ago, the Cubs believed they had an edge on the rest of the league when it came to averting Tommy John. If that had been true, it would have been a valuable advantage, to be sure. Instead, though, it seems that they enjoyed only the watery protection of having a bunch of pitchers selected for durability and without ligament-vaporizing velocity. Now, they've been dealt a series of big blows, from the depths of the farm system (teenage prospect Nazier Mule) to the most important arms on the parent club (Steele, Horton, Adbert Alzolay), in a sobering lesson: The Sword of Jobe eventually falls on a large and growing share of big-league pitchers. Horton is the latest victim, but he won't be the last. The Cubs will have to start acquiring and developing more pitchers of a caliber near his, to position themselves better to weather the inevitable losses. For now, they'll hope the return of Steele and the depth they'd stored up for this season (Colin Rea, Javier Assad and Ben Brown, plus (perhaps, eventually) prospect Jaxon Wiggins) can keep them afloat without their ace. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images Cubs fans everywhere are spending their Mondays with a weekend-long case of the Sunday scaries that won't go away. Cade Horton walked off the mound Friday in the second inning, with what has been dubbed a forearm strain—but until the team reveals the results of the imaging Horton underwent Monday morning, the specter of that preliminary diagnosis being upgraded to a torn ulnar collateral ligament and a prescription for season-ending elbow surgery hangs grayer and gloomier over the team than the roof of Tropicana Field will throughout the next few days. To add injury to injury, the team placed left-handed starter and Opening Day assignee Matthew Boyd on the injured list Monday, with a biceps strain. Those are less likely to turn into season-ending tsuris than what Horton is dealing with, and there's no indication that the team is worried about the structural integrity of Boyd's arm. On the other hand, though, this is no minor malady. Over the last 10 seasons, biceps strains suffered during the season (eliminating those so late in the year that there were few games less to miss and those to a pitcher's non-throwing arm) have usually led to an absence of a month or more. Boyd, 35, has a long injury history and has missed long stretches during the last several seasons, so he's not a good candidate to come back on a faster-than-average timeline. Unfortunately, the Cubs should brace for at least six weeks without the starter who gave them nearly 180 innings of stellar work in 2025. Anticipating some of this trouble, the team retained Colin Rea and Shota Imanaga this winter. They also traded for Edward Cabrera, a pitcher one tier better in terms of stuff and ceiling than Rea or Imanaga, which cushions the blow of losing both Horton and Boyd at this early stage a bit. Rea and Javier Assad now step into the starting rotation, and each is likely to be there for at least a month, because that's about as soon as we're likely to see either Horton or Boyd. It's just as likely that only one of the two is back before, say, June. Rea and Assad are better depth options than many teams have, in the event of such a double-whammy. However, tapping both to join the rotation this early was miles from the planned route through the 162-game gauntlet. Rea's move to starting thins out the team's bullpen. Assad's arrival in the majors leaves only Jaxon Wiggins as a starter in Iowa about whom anyone might feel excited, and he comes with huge question marks. That's not to mention the even more daunting concern: that Horton and Boyd were the members of the initial quintet about whom one might typically have had the least worry a few weeks ago. Jameson Taillon suffered multiple injuries last year. His arm's odometer shows a higher number than anyone else on the staff, and non-arm injuries are an ever-present threat at this stage of his career. Imanaga wasn't the same pitcher after suffering a hamstring strain last May, and statistically, pitchers who suffer a hamstring strain are about 25% likely to suffer another. Cabrera's health history is perhaps the biggest reason he was available to the Cubs this winter, via trade. Ben Brown is still in the bullpen, and could be called upon if and when the team needs to plug yet another hole in its rotation. Justin Steele is on track to return some time around Memorial Day, barring a setback. The Cubs are in real jeopardy now, though. They've spotted the deeper Brewers three games in the NL Central, and Milwaukee has won those games despite dealing with injury issues of their own. More losses almost certainly lie ahead for Chicago, and their patchwork rotation has to support an offense that hasn't found its groove through the first nine games. Lucas Giolito remains available in free agency. Consider the Cubs a prime candidate to sign him, if he's healthy and can ramp up quickly this spring. That's an expensive and high-risk solution to a problem the team didn't want to be dealing with, though—so it might have to wait. Unhappily, it feels increasingly likely that the moment will come when they need to make some form of semi-desperate addition, be it Giolito or a trade acquisition. Boyd and Horton are a brutal first two dominoes to fall in the rotation, not least because they won't be the last. View full article

Image courtesy of © Allan Henry-Imagn Images It's not that Kevin Alcántara is guaranteed to succeed in the big leagues. That's a mile from being true. Alcántara came to the Cubs in the Anthony Rizzo trade with the Yankees in 2021, and in the years since, he's climbed the minor-league ladder impressively enough to get his hands on the final rung a time or two. In both 2024 and 2025, he got late-season cups of coffee with the parent club, and he's gotten more than a full season's worth of plate appearances at Triple-A Iowa, despite injury interruptions. If he were a can't-miss guy, though, he'd already have landed a spot in the big-league lineup. Instead, in addition to those injury problems, Alcántara has battled inconsistency born of an aggressive approach; too much swing-and-miss against top-tier pitchers; and a tendency to hit the ball on the ground too much. He has very impressive bat speed, but doesn't apply it all that well. He's a good athlete and a fine corner outfielder, but he looks a bit stretched in center. No, Alcántara hasn't proved he can be a big-league regular. If he pans out, he could still be a star, but it's gotten very difficult to buy into that vision. He's spent too long struggling to clear the final hurdle posed by the minors, let alone hitting in the majors. The chances that he ends up as a complementary piece, rather than a key contributor, have risen significantly. Because the Cubs want to give him whatever time remains to find his way to his ceiling (and need to keep his trade value up), they've eschewed opportunities to bring Alcántara up for any extended period in less than a full-time role. Instead, they keep asking him to work through things in Iowa, where it's easy for him to play wherever and whenever he needs to, as long as he's healthy. Understandable though that impulse is, though, it's becoming increasingly self-defeating. It's time for the team to shift their mindset when it comes to Alcántara, for the mutual benefit of player and team. Once they make that mental change, the next step will be a change to the roster makeup—facilitated by a new and vital developmental tool. The Cubs need an outfielder who can both hit and field well. Specifically, though, what they need is a righty bat who can mash lefties for them. Michael Conforto doesn't fit the bill. Neither does Matt Shaw. So great is Craig Counsell's trust in Scott Kingery and Dylan Carlson that in the first week of games, the two combined for zero plate appearances. Once Seiya Suzuki returns from the injured list, there will still be room for a player with the right skillset. They can play center field against some lefty starters, and right field against some others, with Pete Crow-Armstrong getting occasional days off and Moisés Ballesteros getting others (with Suzuki sliding to DH). Alcántara could be that guy, and he'd do it well. Since the start of 2024, he's taken 224 plate appearances in the regular season against left-handed pitchers, and he's batted .286/.383/.510 in them, with 10 home runs. His worst showing in that span was in 2024; he's thoroughly bashed lefties since the start of last year. There are two problems with calling up a player like him to fill a part-time role, as a platoon player. One is that it might blunt his development, but again, Alcántara is reaching the point where that consideration needs to be set on the back burner. He's trending toward being that kind of player anyway, and the team has a short-term need that supersedes the long-term goal of making this one player a star. The other is that, if we grant the premise that this role is an important one for the team to fill better than they currently can, it's nonetheless a difficult role in which to thrive. In other words, even if you're willing to subjugate Alcántara's development to the roster value of having him in the big leagues, you're left with the dilemma of getting him ready to succeed in uneven playing time. One object addresses both problems: the Trajekt machine. Like almost every other team in the league, the Cubs have a Trajekt setup in their hitting cages at Wrigley Field, where players can take what amount to live reps against pitchers. Using data to inform spin direction, speed and location and video to mimic the visual experience, Trajekt lets hitters simulate actually facing the pitcher to whom the machine is tailored at a given moment. Players and teams swear by the technology. It makes practice much more valuable as preparation for games. Here's what you do: call up Alcántara, and give him a full-time job—just not on the field. He'll play there once or twice a week, when the Cubs face a southpaw, but the rest of the time, his duty will be to simulate playing. Trajekt systems don't travel with teams (yet), so he'd have to get through road trips with standard work against a batting practice pitcher, but during homestands, he would take several at-bats against big-league lefties each day; they just wouldn't all count. In fact, he'd get more exposure to the pitching the team should most want him to get ready to face as a big-leaguer than he does in the minors, where Trajekt machines are just fond memories from spring training. If the tool is as powerful as everyone says it is, the Cubs should leverage it this way. Alcántara should be able to stay in rhythm (more or less) as well as any other player. He should be able to hammer left-handed pitchers when the right opportunities arise. He'd pile up service time and the team might lose Carlson as they move him off the active roster, but with the assistance of Trajekt, they should be able to extract on-field value from Alcántara and lose very little (if any) developmental momentum. All teams are reluctant to bring up a player with the upside of being a full-time player to fit a part-time job, but they should be less so. The Cubs, in particular, should jettison one of the low-ceiling veterans they don't trust anyway and call up Alcántara to get 150 or so plate appearances over the balance of the season—and another 300, all simulating the ones for which they want him to be most ready, in the tunnel before and during home games. View full article