Matthew Trueblood

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images Yes, Matt Shaw hit four home runs in two games over the weekend. No, that is not why Shaw is coming back to the Cubs. Yes, he made some subtle but important mechanical adjustments during a one-month stint with Triple-A Iowa, during which he hit .286/.409/.560. No, that's not why Shaw is coming back to the Cubs. It's pretty simple, really: the Cubs just can't not try something new. As expected, Justin Turner is too decrepit to play third base in the majors at this point. (Despite a couple of thrilling flashes, he doesn't even look like he can hit in the majors anymore—but to whatever extent he can, he'll have to do so as a DH and/or backup first baseman.) As expected, Gage Workman's toolsy, loud spring training gave way to a regular season in which his bat made only whatever noise the wind makes. Much less expected, though, was Workman's utterly untenable glovework at the hot corner, and the fact that Jon Berti looks so out of position at third. Vidal Bruján was never likely to be good, exactly, but he's been surprisingly bad. Berti's bat is the kicker: Since May 2, he's 1-27, with seven strikeouts and only one walk. He was caught in his only attempt to steal a base during that timeframe. Workman is long gone, but Turner, Bruján and Berti will stick around, at least for now. The final impetus for Shaw's recall came when the team resigned itself to the fact that none of those three or Nicky Lopez would be able to stabilize the position. Lopez, always a glove-first guy and better cast up the middle, didn't play nearly good enough defense to make up for hitting a punchless 1-22 during his stint on the roster. It's he who will be jettisoned to make room for Shaw. Jason Ross did a fantastic job spotting the small changes Shaw has made since his demotion, and the numbers do look pretty. Color me unconvinced. I was skeptical of his leg kick even before he made his debut, and seeing how badly he struggled not only to be on time—that's the kind of thing one can easily fix—but to generate any meaningful amount of bat speed confirmed those concerns for me. It would be fair to hope that more distance from his oblique strain in February could unlock more swing speed, but it's worth noting that he only trended downward before going to Iowa. He's back not because he's swinging so much faster now (we don't have access to swing speed for the minor leagues, but his bat doesn't look any faster), but because all of the alternatives have proved themselves unable to top him—if not in raw bat speed, then in the utility thereof. The extra month of reps at third base should give us slightly better hope for his defense, which was disappointing in its own right on his first go-round. If he can merely bat ninth and make all the plays at the hot corner, that will be enough to help the Cubs. It might still not be the best thing for his development, because while his swing works against Triple-A pitching, it still doesn't look like one that will work in the majors. An overhaul is needed, but generally, such things must happen during the winter. The Cubs should have been more proactive with him last offseason, but the time for that has passed. They now need him merely to shore up the position, even if it's only defensively. His offensive floor and ceiling are each better than those of Lopez and Berti. Turner can't play third, and Bruján has not earned the team's trust in any facet. Shaw is left as the best of a bad set of options. Hopefully, he turns a corner after all, and they never need to think about this again. It's more likely that the team is shopping for help at third base this July, but before trying that, they'll give a second look to one of their best prospects (if that's still his rightful status). View full article

I wish I could say I feel confident this will translate back to the majors. I don't think this adjustment is sufficient, or that he's gonna end up being able to help the Cubs much this year. But good analysis, Jason. I do think this is what you can do in-season, and then if/when it doesn't allow him to rake in the majors, you can go to work on a bigger, overdue set of changes this winter. Still have some hope for him as a prospect, partially because of the adaptability and the swing properties you point out here.

Image courtesy of © Gregory Fisher-Imagn Images Now that he's matriculated to the majors, Cade Horton can be studied a bit more completely than he was at Triple-A Iowa. With cleaner spin data and his arm angle to study, it's clear that Horton's primary pitch—what has been called a four-seam fastball, until now—is really a hard cutter. It's very similar to the offering Justin Steele used to become a frontline starter for the team three years ago. Unlike Steele's version of the pitch, though, Horton's hums in at 95.8 mph. That's harder than any starting pitcher's cutter, this year, and is only topped by four relievers: Emmanuel Clase, Brad Keller (oh, hey!), Graham Ashcraft, and Porter Hodge (wait; whoa!). It's fair to say that the extreme cut-ride fastball the team began to emphasize years ago has become the signature of their organizational pitching philosophy. Horton is, in that way, the quintessential post-pandemic Cubs pitching prospect. He has a deep arsenal and plus overall stuff, but he also has the quirks that have made such success stories of Steele and Hodge. Horton's secondary pitch does behave so much like a sweeper that it almost has to be labeled that way, but he uses it more like a true slider. The pitch labeled above as a slider, meanwhile, is more of a curve. His high arm slot makes taxonomizing a pitch with as much sweep as his slider has somewhat difficult. The only pitchers who use a higher average arm angle on sweepers than Horton showed on his in his first appearance are Nick Pivetta, Yuki Matsui, and Danny Coulombe. Either way, the story is the same: that main breaking ball—we'll just go along with calling it the sweeper—is a plus pitch on which much of his success will hinge. Last time out, Horton mislocated two key sweepers. One went for a single by Mark Vientos: The other, far more costly, went over the wall, for a three-run home run by Brett Baty. The Mets didn't provide much margin for error, though. They're a good lineup. On Friday, against the White Sox at Wrigley Field, Horton will get to pitch against a team that offers much more of a cushion. He still must learn to execute more efficiently, but as he hones that feel, he'll get a chance to dominate a weaker batting order—and do it with a huge, roaring crowd at his back. Horton's importance to this team swells with each passing day. They probably intend to shield him from high pitch counts within games or innings totals over the full season, but with Justin Steele gone, Shota Imanaga temporarily shelved, Javier Assad struggling to get back from oblique trouble and Jameson Taillon regressing a bit, Horton needs to step up. Friday will be his first chance to prove he can handle that responsibility, as he certainly showed the potential to do last weekend in New York. View full article

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images All season, Justin Turner has only pulled three non-ground balls. Two of them came in the same game, way back on April 2. The third came last night, when the Cubs could not have needed it any worse. Turner's two-rund double into Wrigley Field's deep left-field corner turned a 4-3 deficit into a 5-4 win, and was the payoff the Cubs have been waiting for from a player they signed to be much more than a mentor and a mascot. Until Tuesday night, that was all the quadragenarian had been. Even now, Turner is only hitting .169/.292/.186. He's been used occasionally at third base, but he doesn't actually look viable there. As a mere right-handed complement to Michael Busch at first and a bat off the bench, or as the backup plan at DH when one of the outfielders goes down, Turner has been an abject failure so far. Hopefully, Tuesday night's huge hit signaled a turnaround. For the moment, though, he's already been surpassed on the depth chart. When the Cubs signed Turner after missing out on Alex Bregman late in the offseason, they envisioned using him as the fill-in DH when scenarios just like the one they're experiencing now cropped up. Ian Happ has a balky oblique. He missed a few days (while still active) and then went on the injured list Tuesday, pushing Seiya Suzuki out to left field. Turner did start the first two of those contests as the DH, but on Monday night, Carson Kelly got that gig, while Miguel Amaya caught. Tuesday, with Happ leaving the active roster, the team called up prospect Moisés Ballesteros and inserted him into the lineup. Ballesteros didn't blow any doors off in his debut, but he's ready for the majors, and he can really hit. He's barely half Turner's age. If he has a strong week-long audition (and if Happ returns early next week from his stint on the shelf, as he hopes), will it be Ballesteros or Turner who sticks around? For the moment, the answer is probably Turner. Because Ballesteros is a lefty batter, he can't protect Busch from lefty hurlers. He's not even nominally capable of playing third, and if he's ever going to be a viable catcher in the majors, it'll be at some point a year or two from now. Turner's veteran presence exceeds that of Eric Hosmer, Trey Mancini, Tucker Barnhart and Yan Gomes, the other superannuated position players on whom the Cubs have had to cut bait early in recent seasons. They'll want to keep him around, for a while, to avoid spoiling the vibes of the clubhouse or lacking even a vaguely viable collection of warm bodies on the bench. Even a month from now, however, that math could look quite different. Certainly, by the All-Star break, Turner has to be hitting much better than this. Otherwise, the team will need to replace him with someone who will. Ballesteros can't be the whole replacement for Turner, but he can be part of the solution. The clock is always ticking on a player Turner's age, in the modern game. Right now, it's ticking very loudly, indeed. Tuesday night was a thrilling moment, for the team and for the player. It might buy the player some time. The team, however, has to keep exploring options, unless and until Turner makes it easier to plug him in as a valuable bat on a semi-regular basis. View full article

Image courtesy of © Rick Scuteri-Imagn Images It wasn't easy for Moises Ballesteros to force his way into the 2025 Chicago Cubs' plans. He's not yet ready to contribute meaningfully as a catcher, and even if he were, the Cubs are very happy with their combination of Carson Kelly and Miguel Amaya. Meanwhile, the left-handed Ballesteros is a tricky fit for either first base or designated hitter, since he makes an imperfect backup to the lefty-hitting Michael Busch and since Seiya Suzuki has been excellent and durable at DH. Knock loudly enough and long enough on the gate, though, and eventually, the majors will make way for you. That's exactly what Ballesteros has done. He raked last year at the two highest levels of the minor leagues, and then went to the Arizona Fall League and raked some more. He showed up in Des Moines this spring and hit .368/.420/.522 over his first 150 plate appearances, which gives him a .311 average and solid pop across his first 435 PAs for the Triple-A Iowa Cubs. He put himself squarely at the front of the line for the next opportunity that arose. Unfortunately, that opportunity comes in the form of Ian Happ landing on the injured list. Happ's oblique has been bothering him for several days and kept him out of the lineup since Saturday, and the Cubs now feel they need to place him on the shelf. He could stay there for a few weeks, since oblique issues requires a player to wait until they can take each step of their rehab without pain or reaggravation. It's bad news, because Happ is such a vital part of both the team's defensive phalanx in the outfield and their lineup. However, the fact that they can slide Suzuki out to left field on most days and play Ballesteros in Happ's stead as the DH is a wonderful luxury. Ballesteros, a short and explosive 21-year-old, comes up looking to prove that he can generate consistent power against the best pitchers in the world. He's just 5-foot-8, but has a 106.5 90th-percentile exit velocity this year, better than almost 80% of his Triple-A cohort. He's an aggressive hitter, but one with a good feel for contact against soft stuff, and he hasn't been overmatched against mid- and upper-90s heat since reaching Iowa. That doesn't mean he'll be a star for the team right away. He might not even become a part of their long-term plans, given his defensive shortcomings and the risk that his size will make it impossible for him to hit for sufficient power to carry such a profile. For now, however, he's a very good bit of backfill for a lineup that has been one of the best in baseball already. Presumably, Justin Turner will start over Ballesteros whenever the Cubs face a left-handed starting pitcher, as they're slated to do Wednesday. Against righties, though, Ballesteros will join a cluster of lefty bats that will make life very difficult for opposing staffs. Ideally, the team would lean a bit less to the left, since Pete Crow-Armstrong, Kyle Tucker, Busch and Ballesteros now figure to be among the five best hitters in the lineup against righties for a while. Carson Kelly and Dansby Swanson have been good enough to slide up in the order a bit if needed, though, and if nothing else, Ballesteros will restore the feeling of depth and danger that leeched out of the team when Happ exited the lineup and Crow-Armstrong moved to the leadoff spot over the weekend. The exact role Ballesteros will fill and the length of his stay are hard to predict. To be sure, though, he'll get a chance to chip in over the next fortnight, as the team tries to take advantage of the soft stretch ahead in their schedule. He's not yet on the 40-man roster, so the Cubs will have to jettison someone therefrom in the process of promoting him, but they still have plenty of detritus on the roster. Although the team will miss Happ for the duration of his absence, this is an exciting way to stop the gap he leaves. View full article

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images Last year, Daniel Palencia had a sinker. This year, he doesn't, but Statcast still thinks he does. In the past, Palencia has tinkered with a curveball, as well as his slider. He's stopped, but Statcast still thinks he's doing it. There are multiple pitch-classification systems out there, and while the league's own official system is doing a poor job of distinguishing Palencia's offerings from one another, Baseball Prospectus's system is doing just fine. Here's what Palencia's pitch movement array looked like in 2024, according to Baseball Savant. Here's the same readout for 2025. There are a couple of important differences, here. Pretty plainly, the system was already misreading his softest sliders as curveballs, largely because of the velocity gap between that pitch and his fastball—which, admittedly, can be more akin to most pitchers' curves than to sliders. There have been more of those this season, but they're no less plainly sliders than before. He's just a guy who adds and subtracts significantly on his breaking ball; the system is missing that. Look, too, though, at the so-called sinkers he throws. That's really what they were last year, when he was not only getting more run on the sinker, but more depth, too, thanks to a slight difference in movement created by the grip (and resulting seam-shift effects), rather than spin direction. This year, there's still more run on some of his heaters, but none of them have substantially more depth than the others—and there's no discernible difference in the spin direction and the actual movement direction between the two, as there has been in the past. No, the truth here is that Palencia is down to three pitches: four-seamer (albeit with exceptional horizontal movement variation, based mostly on location), slider, and splitter. Baseball Prospectus, with pitch classifications powered by PitchInfo rather than automated by Statcast, has it right. The results speak for themselves. Palencia has strikeout (25%) and walk (11.4%) rates that are more good than great, but his 1.54 ERA and 0.77 WHIP aren't made of smoke and mirrors. His slider has taken a massive jump in pitch grades this year. According to StuffPro, which Prospectus offers in the form of run value per 100 pitches thrown for each pitch type (meaning that 0 is average and a negative number is better), Palencia's slider has gone from -0.7 last year to -1.4 this year. His splitter has also improved slightly, and his four-seamer has the same grade as last year's four-seamer—but that's misleading. Last year, the four-seamer was just part of his fastball mix. He also had that sinker, which rated very poorly. With the sinker gone from the mix and the four-seamer measuring as the same quality, the overall fastball picture is a better one. Streamlining his mix a bit has helped Palencia continue ironing out his delivery and throwing more strikes, which has pulled down his previously worrisome walk rate. He's still not missing bats at an elite level, but the strikeouts he's gotten are plenty, given the change in the quality of opponents' contact. Palencia's average exit velocity allowed in 2023 and 2024 was 91.8 mph, with a nightmarish 47.7% of opponents' batted balls topping 95 mph in exit velocity. This season, so far, those marks are 88.7 mph and 35.7%, respectively. Batters' swing speeds against him are down, and their average contact point is roughly four inches closer to their center of mass than in the past. In other words, they're just not getting the bat out to a dangerous point by the time the ball enters the hitting zone. Palencia is overpowering them, even when they do manage to put the bat on the ball. However you break down his arsenal, Palencia is enjoying his best stretch of sustained big-league success to date. It's coming from an honest improvement in pitch quality—driven not primarily by movement changes, but by the tougher angles he presents after a move all the way to the first-base side of the rubber. Here's his average release point for each of his major pitch types in each of his big-league seasons, with 2025's circled. From a new angle, Palencia's naturally intense stuff is playing up gorgeously. He might never strike out as many batters as you'd guess, based on all that velocity, but he's found a formula for consistent success. If he can repeat this delivery, maintain this mix and stay healthy, he could be the Cubs' relief ace before the All-Star break—let alone October, when he could also loom large. View full article

Image courtesy of © Sergio Estrada-Imagn Images In his first 150 plate appearances of the season, Michael Busch is batting .262/.360/.500, with seven home runs and encouraging underlying numbers to support the topline ones. He's benefited from seeing fewer left-handed pitchers, with 87.3% of his plate appearances coming against righties—up from 82.4% last year. Since all his power comes when he has the platoon advantage (.211 career isolated power against righties; .108 against lefties), that, alone, has made a significant difference. It's impressive how much power Busch has generated, too, because he's swinging the bat slower than last year—when he was already below average—and hitting more ground balls, too. Busch has traded a bit of the violence in his swing for a more reliable delivery of the barrel to the ball, and it's working. He's always been a guy whose swing was geared to generate the best contact when lifting the ball. This year, by getting a few more pitches concentrated in the launch-angle band where he does the most damage, he's tapping into more power, naturally. That's come with more grounders, because he's being more aggressive, but his grounders have been harder-hit and have had slightly higher launch angles. (It might sound silly, but unless you're exceptionally fast, launch angle matters a great deal on ground balls. Hitting it anywhere north of -5° is quite a bit more valuable than hitting it straight into the ground, especially if you can hit it with any pace to speak of.) Here's Busch's distribution of batted balls by launch angle for 2024, with the color of each bar indicating the exit velocity and the height indicating the frequency of balls in that band. Here's the same visual for 2025. Fewer pop-ups and fewer balls hit straight down have helped him significantly. To produce that more tightly clustered, valuable distribution, though, he's had to make adjustments to his swing path, especially up in the zone. Last year, teams hammered away at a hole in his swing, up and away. He could briefly cover it, but only by guessing and cheating to hit that pitch. Because he was so aware of that issue, he also developed a problem below the zone at times—in that, trying to spot pitches down in the zone on which he could feast, he would sometimes chase too much below the zone, resulting in whiffs or weak contact. That's changed this year. Busch's swing is shorter (averaging 6.3 feet from its start to the contact point, as measured by Statcast) than it was last year (6.5 feet) in the top third of the zone, and his whiff rate on swings in that area is down from 23.5% to a mere 6.3%. M3lxUjZfWGw0TUFRPT1fQkFaWVVRVURWd01BQ0ZwV1Z3QUhWd0VDQUFCUkFBUUFDbFVNQVFjR0FWWlZWVk5X.mp4 You can see the way he steps out to the space just behind the plate with his back foot as he finishes that swing. That's rare, for a left-handed batter, because it slows you down in terms of getting out of the box—but it's a sign that he's transferring energy from the back side to the front well, and that he's maintaining balance and control in his lower half as he does so. Busch has been so much better against high pitches this year that it's gone from the thing most teams attack to the last thing they want to ponder. Here's his expected weighted on-base average by pitch location for 2024. Here's the same graphic for 2025. (Keep in mind, xwOBA is scaled to on-base percentage, so a figure around .350 is good; .400 is All-Star stuff.) With the adjustments he's made to cover the outside pitch, the new way to go after Busch is to come inside, where the slight diminution in his swing speed is hurting him—but plenty of pitchers simply aren't comfortable living there, and if Busch lays off, he'll earn plenty of walks or mistakes by just not swinging when they do try to attack him in that spot. Low and in is, of course, the wheelhouse for most lefties. Color Busch an unusual case. Part of the reason for that: he's moved deeper in the box, but closer to the plate this year. He hasn't changed where he wants to make contact, within the context of his own swing, but the shape of the swing itself has changed, and so has his spatial relationship to the zone itself. Starting deeper in the box means a deeper overall contact point, but with his shorter stride and flatter swing, it doesn't actually mean letting the ball travel deeper. Here's his 2024 setup and contact point visual. Here's the same thing for 2025, as he's gotten on top of the plate and bought himself an extra eyelash of a blink by dropping farther toward the catcher. Busch is making more contact within the zone (mostly up top, as we've seen). He's still capable of driving the ball, despite a more controlled and (admittedly) slower swing. He's become more able to cover the whole zone, and he can generate power to all fields, while paring down his strikeout rate. He's always been a patient hitter, so when you mix these ingredients together, the result is a hitter with an All-Star-caliber package of skills. Busch will fall shy of actual All-Star status this year, but if he keeps proving to be this good at making adjustments, he could finish the season with 30 home runs and enter next year as a household name—if not because of those nice, round numbers, then because he's also likely to get a chance for some postseason heroics come October. View full article

Image courtesy of © Cody Scanlan/The Register / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images It's unfair and inaccurate to suggest that the Cubs have been totally incapable of developing starting pitchers over the last decade and a half. They can point proudly to the big wins of Kyle Hendricks and Justin Steele, and to smaller ones like Javier Assad. They're also good at the reclamation project, which is a form of development, too. Still, they've always ended up with players who had to succeed in non-traditional ways, or who took non-traditional paths to success. Steele was a very late bloomer, and has had to navigate the league as (basically) a two-pitch starter. When he first showed up, he did at least have plus velocity, but even that has been gone for two years now. Cade Horton is different. He had better be, I suppose, since unlike Steele or Hendricks or any other Cubs hurler in recent memory, he was a high first-round draft pick. He'll join the parent club in Queens this weekend when the Cubs take on the Mets, according to multiple reports, and when he does, he'll bring an unusually complete checklist of the stuff you look for with him. The funny thing is, in one crucial way, Horton is still very much the modern Cubs pitching prospect. Look at that fastball shape! He briefly got away from cutting it so much earlier this spring, but he's back to what is very much a Steele- or Porter Hodge-like cut-ride heater. His sinker is something much closer to what a hitter would expect his four-seamer to look like, but since he's likely to be throwing that new inclusion in his arsenal only as the occasional lane-changer, hitters aren't going to like seeing it, anyway. The breaking balls, here, are labeled as sweeper and slider. In truth, it's more of a slider and curve mix; the pitch-classification system is getting fooled a bit by the same dynamics of Horton's style that beget that cutting heater. Whatever you call them, though, the sweepier breaker is an immediate plus offering, especially paired with a fastball in the mid-90s (touching 97) that already has cut to it. At this stage, it's fair to call Horton a five-pitch guy, with a modicum of confidence in all those offerings. He's not going to throw the fastball and slider a combined 90% of the time, the way Steele does. He has several ways to get hitters out, even beyond a unique (and very lively) heater. The last Cubs pitching prospect with all this going for him was Jeff Samardzija. Like Horton, Samardzija came up to a Cubs team expecting to not only make the playoffs, but stay in them for a while. He didn't get his call until July, though, and then only as a reliever. In fact, Samardzija spent parts of four seasons in the bullpen, before an adjustment to when he broke his hands during his delivery and a refinement of his splitter turned him into a frontline starter with the team for two and a half years and made him about $100 million. That won't be Horton's journey. This version of the Cubs needs him to be a starter, or at least a scheduled long man fitting in with the starting rotation, so his stuff has to be ready much sooner than Samardzija's was. It sure looks like it will be, though. Unlike Adbert Alzolay (never healthy enough) or Caleb Kilian (never with enough depth in the skill set or enough good stuff between the ears), Horton has made it to the majors with a near-ace upside intact. He has his own significant health concerns, but the Cubs can't worry about that right now. We'll see the first 70 or 80 pitches of Horton's career this weekend. If he's the same guy in New York that he's been in Iowa, they'll be awfully impressive pitches, even to Francisco Lindor, Juan Soto and Pete Alonso. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images The big problem with baseball—the thing that convinces so many people (wrongly) that the game is less physically dramatic or demanding than other major team sports—is that, to the casual observer, it looks too non-confrontational. The loss of the collision between baserunner and catcher on plays at the plate is overblown, because those have always been rare plays, anyway. Most of the time, it looks too much like a game of skill and a battle with oneself. In basketball, football, hockey, and soccer, players use their bodies to block the progress of opponents, or at least to force them to move in very skilled, precise ways. The ball (or puck) in those sports is always being fought for, too, because it's the currency of the game. It must be possessed, in some sense, to score, and possessing it well turns it into a tool for your offense. One player passes to another or uses their fine control of the ball to advance past a defender or two. Those actions are all about helping the team in possession. In baseball, instead of physically preventing runners from rounding the bases to score or fielders from converting outs with their bodies, everyone on the field sends the ball as their emissary—and the ball, therefore, takes turns being the adversary of everyone within a play. When a pitcher winds up and fires home, they've done everything they can to constrain the number of valuable moves available to the hitter. They're trying to rush him, overpower him or fool him into messing up—the same way a good defender tackles a ball carrier, affects a jump shot, or forces a striker into a mishit shot on goal. The hitter, though, can cause plenty of problems themselves. With a hard-hit ball (or one to an undefended portion of the field, be it a bunt or a gapper), they force the defense to move and make a difficult play of their own, short not on physical space around them but on the opportunity to get themselves into a comfortable position for playmaking—and on time, of course. When you watch the game that way—thinking of the ball, in turns, as an agent of whichever side last asserted possession (pitcher; then batter; then defense, when the ball is cleanly held and can be thrown to the best base)—it makes more sense, as an analog to the other sports we enjoy so much. And one wonderful way to glimpse the game through that lens is to watch Pete Crow-Armstrong play center field, because of what you don't see when he's out there. In the top of the fourth inning on Wednesday, Ben Brown was in big trouble. In fairness, that was not entirely his fault. He'd issued a leadoff walk and allowed a single in the frame, but the big blow had been a double that didn't need to be one, by any means. Although LaMonte Wade Jr. struck the ball well toward Justin Turner at first base, Turner should have had a play on the ball. With each game the 40-year-old plays, it's increasingly plain that he's no longer up to the athletic demands of the league. That's a topic for another article, though. Sandwiched around the Wade double were a pair of strikeouts, so although the Giants led 2-0 and had runners on second and third, Brown needed just one more out to escape the jam with minimal damage. Unfortunately, he couldn't manage that. Christian Koss cracked a clean, line-drive single to center field, easily bringing home Wilmer Flores from third base. It was a no-brainer send for the third-base coach to have Wade try to score, too—but that fourth run would not go onto the board. Instead, despite giving up a hit, Brown did get out of the inning, right then and there. He owes the credit for that out to his center fielder. bmJNUTdfVjBZQUhRPT1fQndsWEJsQUZWMU1BWFFjQVZRQUhVQTRGQUFNRFZWSUFWd0FBQVZjTVZBY0hBbEVE.mp4 When we conceptualize the hard-hit ball as a challenge by the hitter directly to a fielder, this one looks like a firm and probing one. It left Koss's bat at 99 miles per hour, and Crow-Armstrong never had a chance to catch it. He had to go into damage mode immediately, running first to his left, then bending in toward the ball. It's easy for a fielder to end up waiting back for this ball a beat, without that inward bend of the run. It's even easier for them to field the ball a bit more tentatively than Crow-Armstrong did, or not to be able to square their body to the target of home plate. The ball was hit with pace. It didn't leave him as long as he made it look like he had to shape his response to it. Crow-Armstrong has a great arm, but whenever he makes a great throw, I find myself watching his feet. Here, notice the way he glides into position, slightly modulating his stride length and leaning his upper body to get himself squared up to the ball as it comes toward him, but not going from long and smooth to short and choppy. See the subtlety of his change of direction, coming to meet the ball on an arc that keeps his strides easy. Then, watch that crow hop. There is zero wasted motion from the time the ball reaches him to when he cuts loose his throw. He fluidly snaps up the bounding ball with his glove, and the transfer to his left hand is in progress instantly. His right foot crosses over one last time as he comes in, keeping his front shoulder in and giving room to his left foot for the quick step in behind. Then, the full stride into the throw comes, all without deceleration. That batted ball is a very difficult one on which to throw out a runner, especially with two outs. Wade didn't wait to see whether it would be caught, not only because it plainly wouldn't be, but because it wouldn't have mattered if it were. He was charging home right when the ball left the bat, and Koss placed a firmly struck ball on the opposite side of second from where Crow-Armstrong started, forcing him to begin his pursuit with a flat lateral run. That should have been enough to bring a second run home. Brown was unable to crowd or cajole Koss into a mishit. Koss left Crow-Armstrong no margin for error at all, to prevent the second run on the play. It's the equivalent of making a player hit a fadeaway from the baseline, over a 7-footer, with the shot clock running down, or of forcing a forward to take a clean touch off their chest and perfectly hit a ball to the corner of the goal with no room to wind up their leg for power. Crow-Armstrong made the play, anyway. He's also amid a hot streak at the plate, of course, but it's too early to say that Crow-Armstrong will be a consistently excellent run producer. What we can see for certain—what will be utterly inevitable, for as long as his youth and health hold up—is that Crow-Armstrong is a uniquely brilliant defender, capable of making plays even when the game steals space or time from him in a way that only a few players in each generation can. That makes baseball more fun. View full article

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images Some old dogs absolutely refuse to do anything but learn new tricks. They just keep learning new tricks, over and over, until even young dogs go, "Dude, chill." They're a rare breed, but when you're rounding out the pack of competitors in a modern playoff-hopeful bullpen, you badly need that kind of old dog. Caleb Thielbar is the alpha in that pack. Thielbar, 38, made it to the majors by way of independent ball. A Minnesota native, he went to South Dakota State University (hardly a baseball powerhouse) and was taken by the Brewers in the 2009 MLB Draft. He pitched for them at their complex in Arizona and in Helena, Mont., with their Pioneer League affiliate. In 2010, he split his time between Helena and High-A Wisconsin. After that year, the Brewers cut him, and at 24, he had his first chance to give up on baseball. Instead, he took up with the then-independent St. Paul Saints in 2011. The Twins spotted him while he was there, and signed him to a minor-league deal in August of that year. He steadily climbed through their system, and debuted in May 2013—more than three months past his 26th birthday. He was a solid reliever for his hometown team for the balance of that year and the bulk of 2014, but then things fizzled for him in 2015. He spent most of that season in the minors, and all of 2016 and 2017 back with the still-independent Saints. This was his second chance to give up on baseball. Thielbar got back into the affiliated ladder in 2018, though, signing with the Tigers. He spent all of that year and a chunk of 2019 in Detroit's system, pitching in Erie, Penn. and Toledo, Ohio, and then a bit of 2019 with the Triple-A Gwinnett affiliate of Atlanta. He put up some rather dazzling numbers, especially in the latter campaign, when he struck out 94 batters (29.5% of those he faced). He was less smoke-and-mirrors than he had been when he first scratched and clawed his way to the majors, by then. Counterintuitively, he was finding more and more raw stuff as he worked at his craft. He'd first come up as the guy wholly reliant on location and guile, and was tapping into nastier offerings in his early 30s. Still, he hadn't gotten back to the majors, and the time seemed ripe to hang it up. On the occasion of that third opportunity to give up on baseball, the 32-year-old was ready to do so. He had already taken a job as a pitching coach at a tiny Div. II school when he decided to take a last job as a doer of the job instead of a teacher, toiling for Team USA in a tournament in Arizona. He was so good there, though, that the Twins (and some other teams) wanted him again, after all. So, he came back to the game once more. Thielbar then hooked up with Driveline (only then, at 33), which helped vault his stuff even further forward. That's how, for instance, this happens. Because otherwise, to put it simply, this doesn't happen. Pitchers do not debut in the majors on the threshold of their late 20s, throwing 89-90 mph, and then steadily gain until they're sitting 93 and touching 95 at age 37. That's what Thielbar has done, though. It's how he carved out a slightly longer-lasting role in the Twins bullpen, and how he finally got to six years of big-league service time (yes, that's really all) at the end of last year, allowing him to hit free agency. It's not just the velocity, though. The remarkable thing about Thielbar is how willing and able he has been to adapt himself to pitching in different ways and different roles for so many years, and that's continued apace throughout the second act of his career. It's continued, and arguably even accelerated, since he joined the Cubs over the winter. Monday night was a bit of a crowning achievement. Yes, it was just an inning of work in a seven-run game, but Thielbar mowed down the Giants on 10 pitches. Half of those were curveballs, and his curveball was perfect. No, really, it was perfect. He threw five hooks. Three of them induced whiffs, and two went for called strikes. Since the start of the 2023 season, only three pitchers have used a curve at least five times in a start without any of them resulting in a foul, a ball, or a ball in play. Ronel Blanco and Nick Martinez each did it once last year, and then there's Thielbar. MTZxN3JfWGw0TUFRPT1fRGdaWkJWWU1BMU1BQzFOVVZnQUhBd0JYQUZrSFVsRUFVUUVDQ0ZZSEJnVUVWQUJV.mp4 It's not some galloping shock that Thielbar's curve is effective. It's the pitch that first got him to the majors, back when the fastball was nothing to write home about and there was nothing else worth mentioning in his arsenal, even if you were already writing home about something else. Thielbar's curve was a high-spin thing, back when spin rate was cutting-edge data, not even yet available to the public. It's waxed and waned over the years, though, and was less vital to his attack last year—partially because some of the spin on it dissipated with time. Well, the spin is back this year. Thielbar has cranked it back up from 2,487 rpm on average in 2024 to 2,621 rpm this year. It's also a whopping 1.5 mph firmer, and is dropping an extra inch en route to the plate. Put all that together, and it's little wonder it had such a good night Monday. In fact, it's not even surprising that the pitch has yielded a 50% whiff rate on opponents' swings this year. MTZxN3JfWGw0TUFRPT1fVkFRSEFGVUhBRlFBQ0FRSFZBQUhWMWRXQUZrRFZBUUFVd0FOVWxWVEJGVlZCVmRS.mp4 The tempting rise and hard bite of that pitch plays up, too, because Thielbar has also added an inch of carry to his fastball this year. Opponents can't as readily assume that if the ball appears to pop up out of his hand, it's going to be the curve; the fastball is doing more of that too. At an age when most pitchers lower their arm slots by several degrees, Thielbar has pushed his higher than ever—all the way to 55°. That makes the fastball-curve combination more deceptive, particularly given the spin profiles on each offering. By themselves, though, those pitches wouldn't be playing as well as they are lately. The heater isn't hot enough, and the curve separates from it so much that there should be some degree of diminishing return on their divergence. The breaking ball is clearly plus, but the fastball isn't, at least on its own. This is the part where we talk about Thielbar not quite adding a new pitch, but making a seldom-used one much more prominent in his arsenal this year. The slider you see depicted there is an offering he threw less than 1% of the time last year, and less than 6% of the time in 2023. He's had the sweeper (his best pitch, according to Baseball Prospectus's StuffPro) ever since returning to the majors in 2020, but the slider has been little-used and low-priority. That's history, now. Though classified as a slider everywhere I've checked, this newish offering is functionally a cutter, for Thielbar. Here's what his spin profile looked like in 2024, with measured spin direction on the left and observed movement direction on the right. The sweeper is a nasty pitch, but works mostly against lefties. Meanwhile, to get righties to offer at the curve more often and lefties to swing at the sweeper, he needed a pitch that would make it harder to distinguish the heater from the breaking stuff. Here's the same pair of charts for 2025. A pitch thrown with that kind of true backspin and just a bit of movement created by non-spin direction effects is almost always labeled a cutter. I can only surmise that Thielbar's tricks the system because of the depth he achieves on it, relative to his fastball, and because of his extreme arm angle, but the pitch comes in at almost 88 mph, too, so there's not much of a case to be made for calling it a slider. It's his cutter, and it helps him keep hitters on their back foot against the curve. MTZxN3JfWGw0TUFRPT1fRGdWWlhWWldWVllBWEZzRUFBQUhCQVJSQUZsUVVWVUFCQVpUQUFzREJBb0RCVk5m.mp4 Thielbar is also throwing the curve more than he has at any point in his career, give or take—and the fastball less than ever, unequivocally. With a true four-pitch mix for the first time in his life (at age 38), Thielbar can get very nasty with opposing hitters. Unlike most 38-year-olds, he's not just gutting it out on the ghost of his former stuff. He's throwing as well as ever, and it's harder than ever to figure out and hit his curve—which is bad luck for batters, since it's coming at them more than ever. MTZxN3JfWGw0TUFRPT1fQWdsWVZRRUZBRkFBREFFRlZnQUhCZ0JUQUFNQlZWQUFDZ01GQVZJRUNWQlFCMVpV.mp4 None of this should mislead you to think that Thielbar can be the Cubs' October relief ace, or anything. He's not that kind of acquisition. He'll either burn out before the postseason, or need a reset on the injured list at some point. Even the ageless lefty has to get old eventually, and for Thielbar, that's shown up over the last few years largely in the form of nagging injuries. Sometimes those have landed him on the shelf. At other times, they've merely led to inconsistent performances. Either way, there will be more adversity ahead for Thielbar. He got off to a rough start this year, but he's been thoroughly locked in over the last three or four weeks. With his widened arsenal and tweaks in spin and movement, he can still get outs—even high-leverage outs—for a World Series hopeful. Spamming secondary pitches often works even better in October than throughout the regular season, and Thielbar seems well-suited to that gambit. Monday night was proof of concept: Thielbar can be a devastating weapon in an improving relief corps for the Cubs. MTZxN3JfWGw0TUFRPT1fVlFFQUFRZFdWQU1BRHdZQlZBQUhBUUpXQUZnQUJWUUFDd01GQXdBTVZGQUhVd1pl.mp4 View full article

Image courtesy of © Cody Scanlan/The Register / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images Among Triple-A hitters with at least 60 plate appearances this season, Kevin Alcántara boasts the second-highest 90th-percentile exit velocity, at 110 miles per hour. The ball is jumping off his bat, as much as ever, and while he continues to strike out roughly 30 percent of the time, he's still hitting a solid .269/.346/.409 for the Iowa Cubs. He's cracked nine extra-base hits (including two home runs) and stolen five bases in six tries thus far. He's looked good in center field, drawn 11 walks in 107 trips to the dish, and even shown some facility as a bunter: he has two sacrifices. Why am I telling you this, though? Unlike Cade Horton, who now has a very clear path to some big-league playing time, there's no obvious need (or even an apparent opening) for Alcántara right now. Quite the contrary: the Cubs have the best outfield in the league. Yes, he's using the opposite field a bit better, and yes, he's lifting it a bit more often, but there's plenty of polishing left to do, for a 22-year-old who only has about 250 plate appearances at the Triple-A level and certainly hasn't mastered it. Here's the thing: Alcántara is a capable center fielder, and he's already on the 40-man roster. Earlier this spring, I wrote about the fact that the Cubs would need to use him as a de facto fourth outfielder, despite not carrying him on the active roster for long stretches. That's just the reality of the roster they've built. Now is the time to put that plan into action, and to leverage their fluid roster status and a soft spot in their schedule by giving starting center fielder (and budding star) Pete Crow-Armstrong a little bit of a blow. Thirty-five games into Chicago's season, Crow-Armstrong has played every defensive inning in center field. Even going that long between days off is rare, in this day and age, but admittedly, the schedule is airier than it used to be, and the Cubs' season-opening series in Japan in mid-March has left them with even more blank spaces on the calendar than most teams in the weeks since. It's not an emergency in need of remedy, and Crow-Armstrong has played so well for the second half of this stretch that Craig Counsell has felt little temptation to take him off the field, at any point. Still, we're seeing some cracks form, based on the heavy usage. One of the surest ways position players respond to the grind of the long season is by seeing their plate discipline erode, and sure enough, Crow-Armstrong is moving into one of those cycles right now: his swing rate is rising, which (as ever) means his production is tailing off. By no means does this yet constitute a true problem. That blue line is the one that matters, and while it's sagged sharply over the last week or so, it's not at all hurting the team. Not yet. Proactivity matters, though. You want to get him off his feet and out of the box for a day or three, over the next fortnight or so, to avoid having him fall into bad habits. It's also good to give players a break when they're playing well, rather than wait to do so until they hit a slump. That way, they can't misconstrue their sojourn to the bench as a punitive measure, or a sign of flagging confidence from leadership. Crow-Armstrong has to rest, because rest is not optional for the modern center fielder. He's on pace for somewhere around 1,450 innings in center this year, but in reality, only two players (Omar Moreno, in 1979, and Adam Jones, in 2012) have ever played that much in that demanding position in one season. In fact, there have only been 38 player-seasons of at least 1,400 innings in center. Some fast facts about them: They were amassed by just 29 total players. Moreno, Andruw Jones, Juan Pierre, Vada Pinson, Curt Flood and Dale Murphy all did it multiple times. Twenty-one of the 38 came before 1990, including 10 before 1980. This has really only been possible since the season lengthened to 162 games in the early 1960s, so that's telling. Only 13 have come since 1998, and the only player to get over 1,400 since 2008 was Adam Jones in that 2012 campaign. Many of the players who pepper this list (to name a few non-controversial ones, Tim Raines, Steve Finley, and Lenny Dykstra) were known users of amphetamines, performance-enhancing drugs, and/or cocaine when they achieved this feat of durability. Some of those substances were effectively legal at the time, so it's not necessary to comb through the list on a witch hunt, but the fact that only one player has gotten that far in the nearly two decades since amphetamines were banned (and begun to be tested for) speaks volumes. The modern game is exceptionally demanding, physically and mentally. A center fielder can't take that position every day without suffering some heavy effects from the workload, and Crow-Armstrong is no exception. The Cubs have to find a window to get him off his feet a few times. Alcántara will be the one to do that, and he's ready for the first of what is likely to be two or three stints in that role. Shota Imanaga is likely to be shelved by his hamstring strain, which paves the way for a move. The Cubs have the next four Thursdays off, plus Monday, Jun. 2, which could allow them to occasionally get by with just 12 pitchers and lengthen their bench. They probably wouldn't have a hard time finding a part of Justin Turner's body that isn't working right, if they wanted to shelve him for a while. Best of all, after a tough week against the Giants and Mets (in the middle of which comes a game that will be started by Giants lefty Robbie Ray), the team's schedule goes jelly-soft for a while: they play the Marlins (twice), the White Sox, the Reds (twice) and the Rockies in the final three weeks of May. Alcántara can and should come up to give Crow-Armstrong multiple days off during this stretch. It will take some careful roster management, but that was always going to be the case. The hour of the jaguar is here. The Cubs ought to pounce. View full article

Image courtesy of © Michael McLoone-Imagn Images The tragedy of Shota Imanaga's injury is that it didn't have to happen—but there was no way for him to know that, until it was too late. On a medium-speed ground ball by Christian Yelich in the sixth inning Sunday, Imanaga broke into a sprint toward first base, hoping to be there in time to complete a double play after Michael Busch fielded and threw to Dansby Swanson at second. The rapid acceleration, always dangerous in this way and especially so for a player who left his last start with cramping in that very leg, led to a strain of Imanaga's hamstring. He still made it to the bag, but Swanson's relay throw didn't reach him in time, and was never going to. Yelich was safe, and the trouble was just beginning. While the Cubs have yet to confirm that Imanaga will go on the injured list, they've already diagnosed him with a hamstring strain, rather than merely soreness or cramping. His gait was affected, at least in the immediate aftermath of the play. It seems inevitable that he will land on the shelf Monday, leaving the team without the two starters who headed their rotation coming into the season. That's the bad news. The good news is twofold. Firstly, this looks likely to be on the more mild side, as these injuries go. I did some analysis of recent hamstring injuries for pitchers after Twins ace Pablo López suffered a similar one early in April. In so doing, I found that injuries to a hurler's push-off leg—as López's was and Imanaga's is—tend to require less time for a return. López was back on the mound 16 days after landing on the shelf, and there's every reason to hope that Imanaga will be back by the end of May. Second, while Imanaga was limping off the field in Milwaukee Sunday afternoon, the Iowa Cubs' ace was having no such trouble. Cade Horton pitched six sparkling innings in his second start of the weeklong series against the Buffalo Bisons, giving up just one run on two hits and striking out five, against a lone walk. Six starts into his season, Horton has a 1.24 ERA. Opposing batters are hitting .129/.241/.204 against him. He's fanning 30.5% of them. The 2022 first-round pick is primed for a big-league debut, just when the team needs him most. He's yet to crack 80 pitches in any start, so don't expect him to come up and give them tons of length, but it would be a minor upset if he makes his next start with the scripted "Iowa" scrawled across the Cubs logo on his chest. He's made material improvements this year, with the zip back on his four-seamer and a full five-pitch arsenal. As that plot shows, Horton boasts two clearly above-average pitches, in his sweeper and changeup. His command of the latter is shaky, however, so he's thrown it much less this year. To make up for that, though, he's grown increasingly comfortable with his vertical breaking pitch (the one labeled above as a slider and lumped in with his sweeper under that label below, but which is just as much a curveball), and added a sinker to his mix. Horton has thrown slightly less hard in his last two starts than his previous ones this spring, but that's corresponded with introducing the sinker into his mix, and he's also tinkering with the changeup. Even down a tick from earlier this year, he's up a tick from where he was last year. He's in bully mode. Horton would need to have either a piggyback partner or a standard long reliever available in support. If the team calls him up, he's likely to pitch a Ben Brown-like number of innings in most outings at first, because he's been kept on such a short leash in terms of pitch count thus far. Bringing him up still makes a world of sense, though, because he was on the same schedule as Imanaga and because he's such an enticing prospect, so plainly ready for the next challenge. You can rule out Horton starting on Friday. Only once in his professional career—last April, with Double-A Tennessee—has he started on four days' rest. The Cubs have an off day Thursday, so Friday will be Jameson Taillon's turn, anyway. Horton could start Saturday, in the second of a three-game series at Citi Field against the Mets, but if the Cubs want a softer landing for him, they could prepare him for the majors by having him work on four days' rest for Iowa this Friday. Then, he'd be ready to pitch next Wednesday against the Marlins, at Wrigley Field—and his second start would also come against the Triple A-caliber Marlins lineup, on May 20. Then he'd get the Rockies and Reds at home, on Memorial Day and on Sun., June 1, respectively. That would be an awfully sweet way to start a big-league career. It's conjecture, for now, and when Imanaga (in all likelihood) lands on the injured list Monday, the team is likely to call up a reliever instead of Horton or any other starter. They don't have to reassign his rotation spot until Saturday. In the interim, plenty of options remain for them. Keegan Thompson, whom the team outrighted off the 40-man roster in March, has shown better command this year with Iowa than in his recent stints at any level and made some small but important gains in pitch quality. He's stretched out and could provide length out of the pen. Promoting either Thompson or Horton (or, for that matter, recent minor-league signee and former Cubs setup man Michael Fulmer) would require the team to open a 40-man roster spot, which they might prefer not to do any sooner than is absolutely necessary. If they do so, though, they could turn any of Tom Cosgrove, Drew Pomeranz or Chris Flexen from flotsam to jetsam. Otherwise, Ethan Roberts, Gavin Hollowell, or Cosgrove could return to the majors. Jack Neely, Nate Pearson, Luke Little and Jordan Wicks are all in a strange space, probably still too promising to be cut but too much of a mess to be called up right now. One way or another, very soon, Horton is coming to the majors. Imanaga's injury opens the door for that to happen immediately. The Cubs can't afford to keep losing key pitchers to injuries, but the depth they amassed this winter is paying off, and they might now be able to benefit from steady, solid development of their top pitching prospect. Although the losses of Steele and (hopefully, for a much shorter time) Imanaga make their success to date feel somewhat fragile, the team is quickly approaching a softer stretch in the schedule—and their early success has given them some margin for error. View full article