Matthew Trueblood

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

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images It takes a lot of reps to become a good big-league outfielder. A good, instinctive athlete can go to those positions and avoid embarrassing themselves, using speed, leaping ability and/or that great eye for ballistic movement that every baseball player must have to get this far, but those only allow one to make up for mistakes and for slow first steps on ordinary plays. A good outfielder, of course, is one who can be acutely aware of the situation (where a throw should go in each of several scenarios in which they get the ball, for instance) and who can turn balls with a real chance to be hits into outs, but that takes time. With no fewer than a few hundred fly balls (and often, a thousand or more) can a player learn to anticipate and read swings, or to intuit the way spin and wind will change the trajectory of a ball. Those things make the difference between a tolerable outfielder and a genuinely helpful one. Unsurprisingly, Matt Shaw is merely the former, so far. He's navigated some cold, windy days during his first stint in right field in the majors, and no hit has fallen in on which it felt like there was even a remote chance of making a play. However, although it has sometimes looked like it, Shaw also hasn't been challenged. The Nationals and the Angels obligingly hit all their really dangerous fly balls out of the park, altogether. Every chance Shaw has had has been easy. We can't draw overly confident conclusions from those reps, because one thing any smart novice will do is avail themselves of their margin for error. Still, it's impossible not to notice the slow (and often mistaken) first steps and the meandering routes Shaw has taken toward every fly ball hit his way so far. He's done two things exceptionally well: Keep his feet moving, thereby letting him constantly adjust as he figures out the ball's flight plan and as it's pushed and pulled by the wind; and React and move at the end of plays, putting himself in position to catch the ball and sure-handedly spearing it. Neither of those things is to be taken for granted. More experienced outfielders often make the mistake of planting a foot too soon or stopping under the ball on a windy day; Shaw knows better than to trust his own eyes. Meanwhile, most newbies to the outfield will slightly panic or show less instinctive capacity to adjust their final movement, leading to bobbles and drops. Impressively, Shaw has actually used that final moment of flight to make up for mistakes, a couple of times, rather than to compound them. NXk5bk1fWGw0TUFRPT1fQlFkUUFBWUdYd1lBRFFRQVZ3QUhCdzlYQUFCV1dnTUFCbFFHQWxZSEF3VlFVUVJU.mp4 An underrated raw athlete, Shaw showed good late explosion here. Even as he jumped, though, he realized he still didn't have the ball judged quite right. His initial thought was to go straight up and catch the ball above his head, but it was carrying past him. With a subtle turn and good body control, he caught the ball behind his body, instead. It was a really good play, with the elements and his inexperience working against him. However, it also shouldn't have been necessary. Part of the reason he misread the ball as he leapt is because he leapt too soon, which was a means of recovering after a shaky route. For all but the very most routine play Shaw has made so far, I went to the video clip and captured the first moment after Marquee switched from the center-field camera to the one high and behind home plate. (Marquee is not especially good at doing this quickly. so we're often missing a blink's worth of extra time that another broadcast might give us to see how the fielder first reacts to the ball off the bat, but we'll do what we can with what we have.) I then traced, as best I could, the route Shaw took to the place where he eventually made the play. This route looks relatively direct, and it's far from his most adventurous of the season, as we'll soon see. Part of that is because it was hit hard and to his left, in a fairly obvious way. Shaw has, so far, thought just about everything hit to him was going to be more to his right (toward center field, that is) than it really proved to be. That problem was mitigated on this play, because even though he had to make a late adjustment to get far enough toward the line and far enough back, it was clear right away that those were the directions he needed to head. You've seen the result already, so we'll move on. Again, the leap wasn't quite timed right or oriented right, but only a part of that goes to Shaw's lack of nous for the outfield. Another, larger part must be put down to the wind. Here's another play from the same Opening Day contest. Arguably, this is the toughest ball hit his way so far, and he still caught it fairly easily. It, too, was easier than he made it look, though. Shaw is playing the outfield a bit the way he played third base, in that his first step is always in. At third, his signature move last year was to come in with an angled step, then give ground to stab a ball even as it passed him. Though it hasn't burned him yet, that won't work long-term in the outfield. On this play, he came in perhaps 5-8 feet before bending back as he chased the ball toward the gap. He also had to make a secondary redirection, because he'd been so focused on turning around from coming in to get deep enough that he hadn't angled enough toward the 'Hefty' door in right-center. He still flagged it down, though. In between those two plays came this one, which really helps one see how well he adjusts—and how much work lies ahead to reduce the need for adjustments. This ball was hit very high, so he had more than enough time to get beneath the ball, but look at the way he (again) starts with a step in, forcing himself to turn around when it's hit over his head, and the way he turns the wrong lateral direction and has to loop back toward the line. We can, again, ascribe some of that to the wind, and Shaw should be commended for taking a route close enough to correct to be able to scamper under the ball when the wind pushed it a bit. Still, a more experienced outfielder can anticipate some of this. Shaw is still learning. Let's be done with Opening Day. Here's a play from Tuesday night. Already, a little learning is evident, though it almost costs him this time. Shaw takes a long time to draw a bead on this ball, but holds his position while he does so, so he doesn't get going in the wrong direction. He comes in readily but soon realizes he needs to tack harder toward the line, and jogs under the ball. The wind did a little bit of redirection here, but this is a clear case of Shaw needing to read the spin of the ball better, too. He didn't have this one off the bat. If it were less of a lazy fly ball, it probably would have been the first should-be out to fall in against him. Finally, let's look at two plays from Wednesday's win. The first is another instance of Shaw taking a long time to get a first read and then having to adjust his route toward the line, though it's all in a smaller space and with slightly less hangtime than on the previous play. The second is more similar to the final play we studied from Opening Day. Again, Shaw's default step is in and to his right, and he eventually find that he needs to go back and to his left. Route efficiency is not all it was cracked up to be, in the earliest days of Statcast and before that. Just as catchers have found that a more kinetic, seemingly obvious and noisy set of mechanics are at least as effective a way to frame pitches as the old freeze-and-hold method, modern outfielders prize the ability to get themselves moving. Last summer, Brewers outfielder Isaac Collins (another diminutive converted infielder) found considerable success by hopping in time with the delivery of each pitch, as infielders do. He sometimes took the wrong first step, but his jumps were so good—that is, he got moving so effectively, sometimes before the ball even met the bat—that he was a plus-plus left fielder for much of the season. That's the goal for Shaw, too. Collins was a few grosses ahead of Shaw in reps even by this time last year, though, having played over 2,000 innings in the outfield during his long minor-league career. Shaw, then, is doing something that can work, even if he'll sometimes look a little bit lost or overzealous. He's not yet ready to convert those fledgling skills into real value, in the form of catching anything that isn't routine, but he's demonstrated a strong grasp of the rudiments. He hasn't actually helped the Cubs win any games with his glove, and that's probably months away from happening—but it's fair to be encouraged by what we've seen so far, anyway. View full article

One was a strike. "Definitely," from the perspective of Swanson in the moment, is far too strong. That was also the highest-leverage pitch of the four, which is why it was worth challenging. The model is useful; I love it. But it's not utterly exhaustive. I feel strongly that if you bake in how good Soriano is, the weather and the spot in the lineup, you'd get a recommendation of challenging all four pitches.

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images Dansby Swanson went 0-for-4 Tuesday night. The box score says he was 0-for-3 with a walk, but we're not counting at-bats here. Four times, Swanson unequivocally should have challenged called strikes against him. Four times, he accepted the call, instead, hurting his team in the name of either avoiding the risk of losing a challenge or demonstrating a resiliency that proved less valuable than flipping a strike to a ball. Swanson did reach on an error in the bottom of the second inning, the only time he came up in a relatively unimportant situation all night. Obviously, he got pretty lucky to reach base that time, when Jeimer Candelario made a bad throw on a routine ground ball to third base. He'd already made his set of possible outcomes worse, though, by not challenging a pitch that was clearly off the outside corner in a 2-0 count. To be fair, that was a spot where you'd need to be quite sure in order to lodge a well-founded challenge. According to Oyster Analytics's Challenge Dashboard, the break-even confidence rate in issuing a challenge so early in the game with some cushion in the count and no one on base is over 75%. Swanson should have been roughly that sure, but technically speaking, the location of the pitch called a strike against him didn't give him a great chance to be, and José Soriano was pretty nasty in the early going. Let's forgive him this one. In the bottom of the fourth, Swanson came to bat in a much more pivotal spot. The game remained scoreless, thanks to cold air, a stiff in-blowing wind, and Soriano's electric stuff. Ian Happ was on second base, though, so although there were two outs, Swanson had a chance to break the tie with a single. In a 2-2 count, he took a pitch right on the lower outside edge, which was called a strike to end the inning. In fairness to Soriano, it was stellar execution. As you can see, Oyster Analytics rates this as another near-coin flip for Swanson, but in a very different way. Whereas he would have needed to be 75% confident to be justified in challenging in the second inning, this time, the break-even line was south of 30%. Based on the location, Swanson could hardly have been more sure than that, but in this case, he should have issued the challenge, anyway. (In reading the evaluation panel at the right in these images from Oyster, you have to remember that the would-be challenger's confidence will vary somewhat from what they can estimate.) Given the margin of error in confidence for Swanson and the tenor of the game to that point—the latter of which the model doesn't address, so we're not adjusting for Soriano being on his game or runs being at a premium—it was a good challenge opportunity. Swanson was up again in the seventh inning with a runner on, though it was Hoerner at first base and there was only one out. Much had changed, by then. The Cubs had fallen behind 2-0, and they'd lost one of their two challenges, so the break-even rates were much affected. On 1-1, though, he took a pitch well above the zone, which was called a strike. As any Cubs fan old enough to remember the nuggets of wisdom supplied by Steve Stone knows, 1-1 is a pivotal count. Swanson fell behind 1-2, when he should have been ahead 2-1. He had to be a bit better than a coin flip to challenge, but he should have been quite sure of this one. The top and bottom of the zone probably still feel a bit less certain than the lateral edges, even for batters themselves, but Swanson had a chance to gain count leverage at a moment when he represented the tying run. He let that chance go by, and ultimately struck out. In the bottom of the ninth, Swanson came up once more, as the Cubs' last chance. They had only three strikes left to their name, so although Swanson batted with the bases empty and the team needed a baserunner to get any semblance of a rally started, he should have had a hair trigger on called strikes around the edges. Instead, on 1-0, he let one of his team's three remaining strikes be stolen from him. This time, the Oyster model gives him no quarter whatsoever. This was the most glaring of a series of examples of his passivity Tuesday night. He was lucky that a wild Jordan Romano walked him, anyway, giving the team at least an extra breath of a chance. Even if a couple of these were borderline calls, according to the math, the broader narrative matters. Swanson needs to be more proactive about ABS challenges. He had chances to give his team better scoring opportunities Tuesday night, and he missed them. It wasn't the difference between winning and losing; it's no more of a problem than some of his teammates' poor swings. The biggest individual mistake in losing them the game was Pete Crow-Armstrong failing to catch or corral Candelario's double in the top of the sixth; that's a bigger-magnitude play than almost any ABS challenge will be. These cases are more along the lines of a poor swing decision or bad location on a key pitch. Still, they can be decisive, and it's hard to refute the fact that Swanson cost his team expected offensive value in Tuesday's loss. Swanso didn't help himself all night. He didn't force Angels pitchers into the zone against him; he chased several pitches below the zone. He could have done a bit more to force their hand when he did lay off pitches at the edges, though. Though its novelty exceeds its sheer impact, ABS is a new place where teams can either accrue value or leak it. So far, the Cubs aren't using the system well. Only the Royals have challenged a lower percentage of called strikes against them than have Cubs batters. That needs to change, as Swanson's experience Tuesday illustrated. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images Pete Crow-Armstrong has yet to register a Barrel in the regular season, according to Statcast. All of his hits on the young year have been ground balls: two hit hard past the first baseman, two gorgeous bunts up the third-base line, and one seeing-eye bouncer the second baseman could only knock down in Monday night's win over the Angels. He's hit a number of pop-ups and lazy fly balls. He often still seems to be swinging too much, leading to unproductive contact. However, Crow-Armstrong has also drawn two walks in his 18 plate appearances so far, so he has a .389 OBP. He walked twice in 22 plate appearances in the Cactus League, and twice in 21 trips in the World Baseball Classic. For calendar year 2026, Crow-Armstrong has almost exactly a 10% walk rate—roughly double his career mark in the majors through 2025. He's seen 226 pitches across the three types of competition in which he's participated, and swung at 55.3% of them. That's down from a rate just over 60% in each of the last two years. By now, it should be clear that Crow-Armstrong will never be a patient hitter, in the style of Ian Happ or Alex Bregman. Even swing rates just below 50% and walk rates around 9%—the typical outputs of Dansby Swanson, for context—are probably too much to hope for. Crow-Armstrong will both create and waste offensive opportunities by swinging; he's going to be much more eager than the average batter. The relevant question is: If it's his hyper-aggressiveness that stands between him and stardom (and it is), how much must he mitigate it to get around the problem? In other words, at what swing rate can Crow-Armstrong be a reliably excellent overall hitter? The answer is much, much higher than it is for most batters. Guys who make a lot of contact (like Nico Hoerner) should err a bit on the side of patience, but Crow-Armstrong has a highly optimized power swing and is going to whiff at a fairly high rate. To make up for that, he needs to go to the plate ready to do damage—especially since he has the bat path to hit more home runs than his frame or his raw bat speed would imply. He also has elite speed, and a near-mad desire to use it. That makes it especially valuable when he reaches base, because he's very likely to steal a base (or two), or to do something similarly game-breaking. (On Monday night, he scored from first on a single when he wasn't even running with the pitch, although it was a high blooper that probably should have been caught.) Ideally, of course, such a player would draw a lot of walks and maximize their OBP, but failing that, putting the ball in play by swinging early in the count leverages his speed well. The bunts Crow-Armstrong laid down in the first two games of the year were exemplars of that, but he can also reach on unintentional infield singles, errors and fielder's choices, and stretch some hits by 90 feet. All of that makes it good that Crow-Armstrong swings more than most hitters. In the past, though, he's swung so much that he sometimes limits his ability to get a good pitch and put the barrel on it. Is ratcheting that baseline swing rate down from 60% to 55% enough to change that? Much depends on the shape of his added patience. Crow-Armstrong is swinging a bit less early in counts this spring, and then increasing his aggressiveness as he protects the plate late. His feel for contact outside the zone is better than one would guess, for a player so focused on that lift-and-pull swing, which allows him to foul off pitches until he earns either a mistake or a miss that doesn't tempt him. On Monday night, he took an 11-pitch walk in which the balls were pitches 1, 5, 7, and 11. None of them were close to the zone; he swung at everything that was. But because he fouled off enough pitches to stay alive, he did earn those bad and un-tempting misses. In his second at-bat against Angels starter Ryan Johnson, Crow-Armstrong took pitches 1 and 4, but swung at everything even remotely close. He fouled off four offerings, then hit the aforementioned, unimpressive single up the middle. Many pitches Crow-Armstrong will face have a better putaway pitch than Johnson. Falling behind and fouling off four or five pitches per plate appearance is no sustainable formula for success. However, these two at-bats are good glimpses of how Crow-Armstrong can swing a lot without giving away at-bats. If he can spoil some two-strike pitches, be smart about sitting on certain pitches when the situation demands it, utilize the occasional bunt, and be even an iota more patient than he's been in the past, he has the tools to be that 30-homer, 30-steal guy the Cubs saw him become last year—the one in whom they've now invested $115 million. The swing rate might have to come down a hair more, in order for him to continue actualizing his power. For now, though, Crow-Armstrong seems to have made some small modulations in his approach—and because he's a physical freak with plenty of value in his legs, his glove and his unconventional hitting profile, small modulations might beget big gains in consistency. View full article

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images No rain or thick, heavy gray coldness scumbled the skies as the Cubs played their first night game of 2026. In fact, the North Side of Chicago put on one of the great shows of which it's more capable than many people credit, proclaiming itself a four-season city with a gorgeous little summer preview. The outfield walls are still covered only in brown, but the skies were a soft, sometimes inscrutable purple-and-orange as sunset came Monday night, leaving Wrigley Field aglow in a way that often has to wait until nearly Memorial Day. Under such auspicious skies, Edward Cabrera clambered to the top of the cairn for the first time in Cubs pinstripes. Cabrera, 27, has become a bit less heralded an acquisition than it seemed he would be when the Cubs first pulled the trigger on a deal with the Marlins in January. At the time, he seemed a vital infusion of high-end stuff for the starting rotation, and there was little else about the team's offseason about which any fans were excited. Since then, the team has signed Alex Bregman to a five-year free-agent deal and extended both Pete Crow-Armstrong and Nico Hoerner through 2032, making Cabrera seem a bit less like a headliner. In truth, though, he might be as important as anyone to the team's pursuit of its first full-season division title in almost a decade—and he showed why on Monday. In six efficient innings, Cabrera struck out five visiting Angels batters and only allowed two baserunners: one walk, and one hit, a harmless single on a curveball he left up in the fourth inning. He wasn't razor-sharp, in terms of command, but his stuff overwhelmed his opponents. His fastball sat right around 97 miles per hour, and he got 15 whiffs on 40 swings, with most of them coming on his dazzling array of breaking stuff and his signature changeup. Let's take a moment, though, to talk about that heater. Cabrera made only very sparing use of his sinker Monday night, and threw 22 four-seamers out of his 80 total pitches. Only twice last year did he throw more four-seamers in a game. It seems clear, as we discussed early in spring training, that Cabrera will throw more heaters—and particularly more four-seamers, despite the lousy Stuff grades and generally tepid results that pitch has tended to get—this season than he did in his final campaign with the Marlins. That will continue to surprise some, who watched Cabrera enjoy a breakout in 2025 partially by throttling back on the usage of the four-seamer. Its share of his total pitch count Monday night was roughly double what he averaged last year. Again, though, the Cubs throw more four-seamers than any other team in baseball; it should surprise no one to see them work with a newcomer to find the ways in which that pitch will work for him. As the lineup turned over, he did lean more into his changeup, which is one argument in favor of throwing the fastball more. By forcing hitters—he used the heat especially often against Mike Trout and Jorge Soler, strapping sluggers known for their bat speed but never great high-fastball hitters—to respect that pitch, Cabrera can get more mileage out of everything else, up to and including right-on-right changeups, especially as he gets deeper into outings. Cabrera's slider also got five whiffs for him, on just nine swings. He threw the pitch exclusively to right-handed batters, and he had a new spin profile on it. Though thrown at the same velocity as it had last year, the pitch acted a bit more like a cutter, with less glove-side movement but more backspin, making it harder for the batter to distinguish from his fastball than it was last year. That pitch has been the subject of a bit of a quest for Cabrera over the last year. He had a home base to which he repeatedly returned in terms of movement, but four separate times in 2025, he had two-start stints in which he tired something new with it. In the plot below, the point highlighted with red text shows where Cabrera's slider was working in Monday's outing. Around that, I've identified where he most often worked over the last two years, as well as each of the excursions he attempted toward new slider frontiers. He might yet go back to what he was doing before, but the change to the spin characteristics of the pitch suggests that the Cubs view a more cutterish slider as worth a try. For one night, at least, it worked like a charm. The curveball was also working. Cabrera threw that pitch 13 times, and got three whiffs (on five swings) and four called strikes with it. The most important thing was that, in addition to being able to take something off and land it in the zone, he showed the ability to get the pitch up to 87-88 miles per hour at times. That's a level of power on the curve few pitchers can match, and last year, he was at his best with that offering when he threw it hardest. Velocity Band No. Horiz. Mvmt. IVB Whiff Rate RV/100 < 83 MPH 115 11.2 -10.5 36.1 0.89 83-85 MPH 280 11 -11.2 43.6 1.06 85+ MPH 157 10.6 -10.9 50 2.35 If a pitch isn't losing movement as it gets harder, it's little wonder that it generates more whiffs and better results. Cabrera did see the velocity on the curve decline sharply later in his outing Monday night, which is only logical. It might make sense, as he shifts to a more fastball-forward pitch mix, to blend the curve in with the heater early in outings, then go more changeup- and slider-heavy as the game wears on, since those pitches' effectiveness depend less on velocity than do his heat and his hook. Really, though, Monday night was about more than these nuts and bolts. It was a chance to celebrate (and fantasize about) the future the Cubs are trying to build. The offense put up plenty of runs, and the team won comfortably. More than that, Cabrera looked in control, and when he needed it, he got great defensive support from the defense behind him—a group that, like Cabrera, will be in Chicago for quite a while. The team dropped two games to a dreadful Nationals club to start the season, but in their two wins, Cabrera and Cade Horton have worked quickly, shown exceptional stuff and athleticism, and been surrounded and supported by what is now the locked-in core of what the team hopes is its next champion. Under the pale but pleasant twilight sky Monday night, it was easy to believe that that bright a day is dawning for the Cubs. View full article

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images Matt Shaw will never be the Chicago Cubs' starting second baseman, shortstop or third baseman. When the team signed Alex Bregman to a five-year deal this winter, Shaw was asked to start learning the outfield, and when they struck a deal with Nico Hoerner that will keep him in the fold at second base through 2032, that became the only imaginable way in which Shaw will find consistent playing time for the team, barring injuries. Of course, Pete Crow-Armstrong is also locked in as the team's center fielder for the foreseeable future, so Shaw essentially has to become a competent corner outfielder to be more than a utility man for the Cubs. That could, of course, mean that the Cubs will soon look to trade Shaw, who remains under team control through 2031. For the moment, though, let's focus on the implications of the team's recent moves should he stay in town, and let's further assume that Bregman, Hoerner and Dansby Swanson are healthy enough to force him to be an outfielder. That leaves two questions to answer: Can Shaw become sufficiently adept in the outfield itself to avoid causing major damage to the defense? Can he hit enough to justify giving him regular playing time in positions where the team will need significant offensive production? The first answer is likely to be 'yes'. Shaw is a good athlete, and though he's small and has a weak arm, he's shown decent aptitude in limited opportunities there this spring. With speed and skills, he should be able to offset his deficiencies and play average or better defense in (especially) left field. He played a couple of balls quite well in right field on Opening Day, despite gusting wind. Offensively, though, the standard in either corner is quite high, and Shaw hasn't yet shown the ability to meet it. He batted .226/.295/.394 last year. There was a prolonged period in the second half in which he tapped into much more power and it was possible to envision him being a valuable bat in a corner spot, but even then, his plate discipline was shaky and he was too whiff-prone. The big leg kick he brought with him to the majors had to be adapted, but even after he did so, he seemed to be overstriding. He wasn't well-balanced, and he wasn't keeping his head still enough to see the ball well. To be a useful right or left fielder, Shaw has to be better and more consistent at the plate this year. The league figured him out after his July/August power binge, and countered his adjustments; he'll have to adjust again. This spring, he hit .320/.417/.500 in the Cactus League, but all that matters is what happens once the games count—and that, in turn, will be determined by whether Shaw can make adjustments that yield better pitch selection, more contact, and/or more power. In that regard, there's good news and bad news, so far. Shaw has made a major adjustment this spring to shorten his stride and (thereby) improve his stability in the box. That should mean better pitch recognition and a better contact rate, over time. Here's a comparison of his stance and stride for 2025 with the one he's shown (in an extremely limited sample, of course, but the difference is real and intentional) in 2026. As you can see, he's dramatically reduced the length of his stride, and he's also a bit closer to the plate and a bit deeper in the batter's box. All of these things are good, in the long run, for his odds of making good swing decisions and making contact on swings. The sample is too small for the results to say anything meaningful about the efficacy of the changes yet, but for this, we don't really need stats. We just need proof that he's changing the math—the physics, the geometry, and the algebra—of his duel with opposing pitchers. We have it. For what it's worth, Shaw is also swinging a bit more steeply this season. That's a noisier thing, over a sample of a game or two, and it might not remain true, but it's noteworthy because his swing appeared to have that extra tilt even in the spring. A steeper swing would yield a greater amount of damage at the same bat speed. That, alas, brings us to the bad news: Shaw's bat speed so far is dreadful. On 14 competitive swings, Shaw's average bat speed is 65.8 miles per hour. Last year, his monthly bat speeds ranged from 68.4 MPH to 70.5. Again, it's too early to treat this as something lasting and real, but directionally, it makes a sad sort of sense. Shaw's highest bat speeds last year were when he was striding most aggressively; he got a lot of bat speed from the sheer momentum of his attack. Shortening the stride increases control but lowers momentum. Increasing tilt improves the chances of squaring the ball up but decreases sheer torque. Shaw will, surely, swing faster than this as he settles in and gets going this year. Still, if he doesn't get back up to at least that 69 MPH range, he has little hope of having average power. That applies extra pressure to control the strike zone well, minimizing strikeouts and increasing walks. He might well prove able to do that; those are the things his tweaks this spring should augment. It's just a troublesome signal, for a player whose value will have to come in large part from his bat for the foreseeable future. View full article

Image courtesy of © Rick Scuteri-Imagn Images We're seeing something special—something rare. Not since Ryne Sandberg, Shawon Dunston and Mark Grace have the Cubs had three key players spend the majority of a decade together on the field, at positions and in places in the lineup where their connectedness and mutual importance were obvious and determined the fate of the team each year. With Nico Hoerner agreeing to a deal Thursday that will extend his tenure with the Cubs through 2032, that's exactly what we're going to see, again. In fact, this core could be deeper and even longer-lasting than the Sandberg-Dunston-Grace group, to which Sammy Sosa was added late in a long run. Hoerner and Dansby Swanson have been teamed up around the keystone for the Cubs since the start of 2023, and Swanson's seven-year deal doesn't end until the fall of 2029. Pete Crow-Armstrong joined the mix at the tail end of 2023, but the trio only started two games together that year. Between Crow-Armstrong's inconsistency and some nagging injuries to Hoerner and Swanson, by the middle of 2024, they'd only played another 20 times alongside one another. From June 22 through the end of 2024, though, they made 76 shared starts. In 2025, they started together another 144 times, as Crow-Armstrong established himself and Hoerner enjoyed a career year. Already, then, they've made 243 starts as a group, counting Opening Day's lineup against the Nationals. Though injuries will surely intercede at some point in the next four years, there's a solid chance for these three to end up playing 800 times together as Cubs—especially if they make the playoffs multiple times in those years and make deep runs. Swanson and Hoerner are each notable for their willingness to play through minor injuries, and they're relatively good at it. Together, those three anchor the Cubs' elite defense, and they'll continue to do so for the balance of the decade. Look for more than two players showing up on the lineup card together, and the frequency of occurrences diminishes quickly. It's just the nature of baseball. Even in their first few years together, before Dunston's role changed and injuries began to limit Sandberg, the aforementioned trio of infielders usually appeared together only 120-130 times a year. Last season's incredible stability won't be the norm, but Swanson, Hoerner and Crow-Armstrong are all high-volume players. Remarkably, they're in position to spend over half a decade together as regulars, and Swanson and Hoerner could surpass Dunston and Sandberg in terms of their tenure together as a double-play combination. Just as notably, this essentially locks in the team's infield for the next four years. Michael Busch can't become a free agent until after 2029, like Swanson. He and Alex Bregman (under contract through 2030) are set at the corners, with Swanson and Hoerner up the middle. This will be the closest the Cubs have ever come to the famously long-lasting Dodgers infield of Ron Cey, Bill Russell, Davey Lopes and Steve Garvey. That group was intact for over eight years; this one won't get that far. Their overlap will be historic, though, within the context of the Cubs. It's also a bit of a balm to the hurt of many Cubs fans, who held out hope that the core of Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant, Javier Báez and others would stick around this way. Swanson, Hoerner, Crow-Armstrong, Bregman, Busch, and even Ian Happ (part of the last core, as well as this one, and likely to depart after this season), Matt Shaw and Moisés Ballesteros could form the remarkably stable group of good players that the last decade promised, but couldn't quite deliver. Of course, that Rizzo-led group did something this team has yet to do: win a World Series. For that matter, this group has yet to win their own division. Since Swanson's arrival, the team has not finished below .500, and it's increasingly likely that they'll remain a winning club for the rest of his contract, but they're yet to catch and pass the Brewers. That could change this season, but the front office didn't wait to see whether it would do so before committing long-term dollars to Crow-Armstrong and Hoerner, to go along with Bregman and Swanson. They've taken a leap of faith, just as the Ricketts family did by extending Jed Hoyer last summer. The players who will determine the success or failure of the Cubs for the next half-decade are all here, now. They're being given a chance to do something special together, and to build an unusually excellent bond with the fan base along the way. No one said it would be easy, though. View full article

Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images You can safely get used to this Cubs core. It's going to be here a while. The team agreed to a six-year extension with (formerly) impending free agent Nico Hoerner Thursday, according to multiple reports. Jesse Rogers of ESPN was first with the news, on Twitter. Hoerner, 28, was due to become a free agent at the end of this season, at the conclusion of the three-year extension to which he and the Cubs agreed almost exactly three years ago. Instead, he'll stick around through at least 2031, locking in a fourth member of the team's positional core for the medium term. Unlike the deal Chicago agreed to with Pete Crow-Armstrong earlier this week, this one is a major surprise, and a game-changer for the team's future. Hoerner was much closer to free agency, and his possible departure made it easy to see how a number of players' futures with the organization might go. Dansby Swanson could have moved to second base as soon as 2027. Jefferson Rojas, the team's burgeoning shortstop prospect, could have taken over at short. Alternatively, Matt Shaw could have taken over for Hoerner next year, since he's been displaced from third base by the arrival of Alex Bregman. Now, none of that is in play. Swanson's contract runs through 2029, as he heads into his mid-30s. Hoerner, Swanson, Bregman and Michael Busch are overwhelmingly likely to make up the team's infield for the next four seasons, which could get the trio of Swanson, Hoerner and Busch close to 1,000 games together before Swanson or Busch hits free agency. Meanwhile, the pathway to playing time for Rojas and Shaw just got murkier, and the likelihood of a similar extension for Ian Happ or Seiya Suzuki plunged toward zero. Hoerner is, by every account, a great fit in the clubhouse and an asset in the community. He plays with energy and smarts, and became the best version of himself last year, providing hope that he might be entering his prime as a perennial All-Star-caliber second baseman. This extension introduces some tough questions, since there will be defensive degradation to consider and the team needs ways to develop and install new blood, but it's an exhilarating moment, too. Hoerner, Busch, Swanson, Bregman, and Crow-Armstrong will be the spine of this team for the majority of a decade, by the time they're done playing together. Moisés Ballesteros could end up being a sixth in that collection of talent, and Cade Horton, Edward Cabrera and Daniel Palencia offer a pitching-side reflection of that abundance. Suddenly, the Cubs' future is much more clear, and even if there are some reasons to be wary of locking them all in, there is also much reason to celebrate. From a fan's perspective, keeping a group with such a history of and dedication to winning together for such a long time augurs well for the organization. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images The Nationals pulled off a shocking Opening Day blowout against the Chicago Cubs Thursday, winning 10-4. They chased starter Matthew Boyd in the fourth inning, and tacked on runs via late long balls to put away the much better Chicago club. For Boyd, the problem was not an inability to miss bats, but a fatal attraction to the Nationals batters' barrels. Five Washington batted balls against Boyd were 103.8 MPH ore harder, including three crucial hits that contributed to their scoring against him. He was a bit lucky that the line wasn't worse, given how hard the visitors were hitting him when they made contact. Some good defense and a bad baserunning play gave Boyd three of the four outs recorded on balls in play. That wasn't because of a lack of sheer stuff. Boyd's fastball was right in line with last year in terms of velocity, and his changeup, slider and curve all showed similar movement to their norms. In fact, Boyd got whiffs on over half the swings Nationals batters took against him, leading to seven strikeouts. Washington's plan was extremely guess-heavy; they were locking in and sitting on specific pitches in specific counts and situations. When they were wrong, Boyd fooled them badly and racked up whiffs. When they were right, though, they were all over him. Boyd got barreled up on a first-pitch fastball to CJ Abrams and on an 0-1 slider to Daylen Lile. He also got burned trying to sneak a fastball past Brady House on a 2-2 count, and Joey Wiemer took advantage of a good but guessable changeup in a 1-1 count to hit a long home run. Boyd doesn't have unusually intense stuff, but he's hard to read and his pitches have a wide variety of movement. What they don't have is unexpected movement. Thus, if you carefully plan to commit to a given pitch type from him and you get it—especially if it's roughly in the location you expect—he becomes hittable. Of course, if you're wrong, you won't merely slightly mishit the ball, but come up empty altogether. The gameplan worked for the Nationals Thursday. Boyd will have to make some adjustments for his next start, to be less predictable in both sequence and location. This problem isn't entirely new. In the second half of last season, Boyd ran into it somewhat often, and was vulnerable to just this kind of roughing-up. He and Carson Kelly might need to collaborate to develop a different strategy. Last year, opponents had a .620 OPS when either Miguel Amaya or Reese McGuire worked with Boyd, but a .673 mark when the southpaw was paired with Kelly. Opponents hit 16 oif their 22 homers on the year off Boyd in the starts in which he and Kelly worked together. It's just one game, and one loss. For Boyd and the Cubs, though, every game has to be precious this year. The loss Thursday served notice that while much of what he does still works, he'll have to make further adjustments to stop the league from guessing right often enough to hurt him. View full article