Matthew Trueblood

Image courtesy of © Brett Davis-Imagn Images Top Cubs outfield prospect Owen Caissie is having the kind of month that liberates even the most blocked prospects. He had five hits Tuesday night in Louisville, including two doubles and a long home run. The latter was his 20th of the season, more than he hit all year in 2024. It was just the latest big night in a string of them recently. Since June 1, Caissie is batting .339/.436/.740, with 13 home runs. He's struck out just 25.5% of the time and walked in 13.4% of his plate appearances. That kind of hot streak isn't so much a hot streak, as a completed practicum on the desk of one's adviser. It's Graduation Day in the form of a stat line. That doesn't mean that Caissie has a bulletproof claim to future All-Star selections or MVP trophies, of course. He's not old, even for a prospect, but nor is he all that young for his level. He turned 23 earlier this month. He's nearing 900 plate appearances at the Triple-A level, and that's after spending an entire year at Double A, too. After a patient and lengthy apprenticeship, he's ready for the majors, but teams have consistently downgraded him slightly on two bases: The slow pace of his progress up the ladder; most top-100 prospects figure out a level and get the nod from their organization to be challenged at the next one faster than Caissie has. His strikeout rate. For much of his pro career, he's flirted with 30% strikeout rates, and when any hitter whiffs that often in the minors, teams (and their evaluation models) take notice. Again, though, Caissie's power is starting to show up so consistently that strikeouts can be a welcome price to pay. Just as importantly: he's striking out less often lately, and dramatically so. Despite the reservations so many scouts and analysts have had, then, Caissie's stock is on the rise. He's about to break into the major leagues, one way or another, and his performance lately (paired with a good overall track record and his scouting report) has him trending toward a new echelon of prospect value. Even a few weeks ago, Caissie was not a viable centerpiece in a major trade. Right now, he might be. From the Cubs' perspective, the timing couldn't be better. It wasn't (and isn't) just Caissie about whom other teams raised real questions in early trade discussions, and some of Jed Hoyer's top targets seemed like they could be out of reach. Now that Caissie has scouts talking in more glowing terms ("he's turned a corner down there," said one evaluator from an interested team after seeing him last week), he gets a different set of conversations started. The most interesting of those conversations centers around Edward Cabrera. The electric-armed Marlins righthander made his first start since July 11 on Tuesday night, after his elbow barked a bit in his final start before the All-Star break. The Cubs had a scouting presence in Miami to see him, and Cabrera was superb, holding the Padres to one run on five hits in 5 2/3 innings. He struck out six and did not issue a walk. Chicago covets Cabrera, whom one league source called a "priority target" for them. The Marlins have long been interested in Caissie, whom they almost acquired in a one-for-one deal that would have sent Jesús Luzardo to the Cubs this winter. Both teams ended up uneasy with the medicals in that deal, and they couldn't circle back to an agreement at the time, but sources said the relationship between the front offices was undamaged by the collapse of that transaction. Caissie still wouldn't be enough to land Cabrera on his own. Whereas Luzardo was just two years from free agency and was coming off an uneven season last winter, Cabrera has three years of control beyond this fall, and this has been his breakout campaign. He's also made some major changes this year, which help explain his surge in success and which we can break down in greater detail here if the Cubs do end up acquiring him. For now, suffice it to say that Cabrera's stock has risen, too, and that any deal for him would need to involve both Caissie and either Jefferson Rojas or Jaxon Wiggins. That's a hefty price, of course. All three of those players are within the top five on our current Cubs Top Prospects list, and giving up two such players in a deal is hard—especially when one of them is already on the doorstep of the majors. A month ago, though, Caissie would not have been a sufficient headliner for a package to acquire a player with Cabrera's mixture of recent track record and upside. That he now gets you a foot in the door is a mark of important progress. Since we're here, let's discuss a few other pitchers whom various sources say are on the Cubs' radar, along with Cabrera. The name of Rays starter Taj Bradley has popped up recently in some rumors, but all sources I talked to were skeptical that any move is forthcoming there. Tampa reliever Pete Fairbanks is a much more plausible target. As recently as this weekend, sources close to the situation indicated that there was momentum between the Cubs and the Royals regarding lefty Kris Bubic. Right now, though, the team is doing more background work and waiting to see what Bubic's next start looks like, after his velocity was down substantially in his first appearance of the second half. The Royals are another team who has been on the higher end with regard to Caissie, so if the Cubs want to make their dollar stretch on the trade market this summer, talking to both Kansas City and Miami about him makes sense. Of course, some fans will hope that Caissie's breakout keeps him with the team, rather than shuffling him out the door. With Kyle Tucker hitting free agency this fall, there's a chance the Cubs will need to replace him in the corner outfield mix next year, and Seiya Suzuki and Ian Happ will both be free agents after 2026. Keeping Caissie would hedge some bets. If he stays hot and the right offer comes together, though, the safe bet is still that he's playing in the majors, somewhere other than Chicago, come mid-August. View full article

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images A little over three weeks ago, I made one of my occasional appearances on the excellent Wrigleyville Nation podcast. One thing I said during our conversation on that show was that if Ben Brown made another bulk appearance for the 2025 Cubs, it would mean something had gone horribly wrong. Monday night, they finally felt they could delay the inevitable no longer, and tried Brown again. Not only did they get blown out (thanks especially to Brown getting rocked by the historically inept Royals offense), but the Brewers won their late game, pushing Milwaukee into sole possession of first place for the first time this year. That was a fitting way for the transfer of power to happen. Ever since a day or two after I made that doomed pronouncement on the podcast, it's been increasingly clear that this would happen—the reemergence of Brown, in the wake of the injury Jameson Taillon suffered during between-starts work the same week of the aforementioned show, and the Brewers catching the Cubs. With Taillon down, keeping Brown away would have had to mean consistently starting Jordan Wicks or Chris Flexen until the team could find some reinforcement for the starting rotation. What they should have done, of course, was go get that reinforcement right away—and, to give the limited credit due in this case, they did try to do so. The Cubs have been one of the two or three most active teams in the league in terms of trade discussions, sources in front offices throughout the game agree, and that's been true since the beginning of this month—even while other clubs were more focused on the MLB Draft and were somewhat hard to engage. Nonetheless, the team's failure to get anything done reflects two real problems—one very specific, and thus relatively small, for it can't last any longer; and one very general, very big, and very troubling. The small, specific problem that's almost done being one is the misgiven confidence the organization has had in Brown as a starter. He won the fifth starter job over Colin Rea during spring, when he shouldn't have. He has been given more chances than either his performance or his arsenal merits, and because they were unduly confident in him, they didn't go and reinforce their starting depth in a meaningful way after Javier Assad and Justin Steele (then Shota Imanaga) got hurt early in the season. While the Brewers were making a sagacious little move to pick up Quinn Priester, the Cubs were still rolling loaded, snake-eyed dice on Brown and his two pitches—one of which just isn't very good, except in an aesthetic sense. Happily, they can't persist in that particular delusion any longer. Brown was farmed out to Iowa with a 6.13 ERA in 16 appearances and almost 80 innings. After a month's reset during which he only pitched in two games, he came back to the majors and watched that number rise to 6.48. His trade value is regrettably shot, but the team will surely wise up and move him to the bullpen (probably with another stint in Iowa to acclimate to that role) or throw him into a trade over the next nine days. It was foolish to have come into this season so ready to give him the ball for extended outings, but that error has become such a searing wound that it will probably cauterize itself. The much bigger problem, and the one that doesn't appear as easy to fix, is that Jed Hoyer (and, to some extent, the ownership and business operations staff supporting him) is bad at acknowledging when they're in a position of weakness and resigning themselves to making deals without leverage. Hoyer is so value-focused that he misses opportunities to make the team better, not once or twice a year, but six or seven times. We saw the team hold onto Willson Contreras at the 2022 trade deadline, rather than take the best deal they could make for him. We've seen them pull out of multiple trades based on medicals or final details (going all the way back to Hoyer's first offseason in charge, when a trade that would have sent Kris Bryant to the Mets was scrapped at the last second, and coming forward to this past offseason, when two different deals for young starters fell apart). We've seen Hoyer fail to manage upward and gain the flexibility needed to finish contracts for (among others) Alex Bregman and Tanner Scott, and fail in his capacity as a salesman to win over those players on the terms his bosses did authorize. Never for a moment would the Cubs have considered giving up what the Brewers did for Priester. They didn't have a tradeable draft pick, anyway, but that's not really the point. Milwaukee was in a tough situation, and when they got Priester from the Red Sox, most of the baseball world raised an eyebrow. Especially devoted Brewers fans nearly raised torches and pitchforks; the trade felt like an overpay. Firstly, though, the team badly needed some kind of competent starting pitching help. And secondly, they had chosen their target carefully, and they rapidly finished his development even while running him out every fifth game as a starter. Scouting, player development, and an aggressive, decisive executive netted the team a pitcher who has already given them 95 innings of a 3.33 ERA and is under team control through 2030. That Hoyer won't overpay, ever, is why the Cubs are in second place, and why they gave the ball to Brown again (behind the thin cover of an opener) on the night when they dropped from the top of the Central. It has to change, and fast, because the Cubs are in a position of weakness now. Nine days from the trade deadline, they're playing from behind, and the team they're chasing is hotter, deeper, and more well-rounded than they are. Chicago needs to make a major upgrade, and yes, Hoyer will have to overpay for it. Whether he has the stomach for that remains to be seen. What happens when he shies away from taking the necessary risks involved in running a winning team, we just saw. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images The moment when Cade Horton's potential first jumped up a level came last year with Triple-A Iowa, when he first began to find the changeup he now sports in the majors. Even by his own reckoning, though, the pivotal moment for him came when he found that he could trust that pitch against big-league bats, last month in Miami. "I thought it was in a good place in Triple A, and then got here, and it was really the Miami start where I got a good feel for it," Horton said earlier this month, during the Cubs' trip to Minnesota. "From there, it's just kind of taken off, to where I'm able to repeat that pitch. It's been huge for me." Since then, that pitch has been a staple in Horton's arsenal to lefties, and it hasn't stopped dominating opposing batters. On the contrary: an eye-popping 59.6% of swings at the pitch have come up empty. The changeup was virtually non-existent when the Cubs drafted Horton in the first round of the 2022 MLB Draft, but now, it's a vital weapon. Did that change how he has to think about himself as a pitcher, and how he operates? "Not necessarily. I think it's more, I just use the changeup more to lefties," he said. Indeed, 112 of the 116 he's thrown in the majors have been to left-handed batters; he's not (yet) the type of hurler who will go to the changeup right-on-right. "So that's been the big key, is being able to have that pitch that runs away from them. That opens up fastballs in and fastballs away. The slider's more for righties, and that's why I've been working on the sinker and trying to set up the pitch away from them." In other words, Horton prefers to use his fledgling sinker to attack righties inside, setting up the slider. The changeup, coming from his high three-quarters slot and with his natural tendency to supinate (the direction of forearm movement that better facilitates breaking balls, rather than arm-side movement), has more run than tumble, which makes it the type of change that's harder to throw with conviction to same-handed batters. As Horton alluded to, his slider (Statcast, as shown above, labels most of those as sweepers, but the ones labeled sweeper and slider are both what Horton calls his slider) is the go-to pitch against righties. However, he's not kidding around when it comes to making the sinker a meaningful part of his arsenal to them. In two starts this month, the sinker has emerged as a key third pitch to righties, with his fastball becoming less predominant. He's had to do that, of course, because his fastball isn't a traditional four-seamer at all. It's much closer to being a power cutter—and indeed, some classification systems call it one. Horton didn't set out to create this type of heater, but now that he has one, he understands the value of steering the sinker in on righties to set up both the fastball and the slider away. "I think it just naturally happened," Horton said of his change in fastball shape, which happened after the Cubs selected and signed him but isn't the product of conscious pitch design. "Just getting around the ball more and creating that cut action—which I don't think is a bad thing. I think it plays against lefties, and then it runs off the barrel to righties." The fascinating thing is that, now that he has the changeup (and his curveball, which stands in for the slider against lefties), he offers three different looks to hitters of each type—but they all come from one basic spin axis. Horton's changeup, sinker and slider each rely on considerable seam-shifted wake. They start on similar spin-based movement paths as his four-seamer and curve, but are deflected based on the orientation of the seams and the action of the air on the ball. The chart above shows, on the left, initial spin direction, meaning what the pitcher actually imparts on the ball. Bars at the top of the clock graphic indicate the frequency of pitches thrown with backspin, which will "rise" (drop less than gravity would normally dictate) en route to the plate. Bars at the bottom show the frequency of pitches with topspin, like a true overhand curveball. Bars on the nine o'clock side show the frequency of pitches whose spin would push them toward the first-base side of the plate, away from a righty batter; bars on the three o'clock side show the frequency of those with spin pushing them toward a righty batter. On the right, instead of spin direction, we see the actual movement direction of pitches. The difference between the two is explained by seam effects. Notice how, on the left, Horton's pitches cluster mostly around the 12:30 and 7:30 parts of the clock. That means that it's relatively hard for hitters to distinguish even between, say, his four-seamer and his slider, because they enjoy "spin mirroring"—the ball is spinning along very close to the same axis, so even though the directions of spin on the two offerings are opposites, it's hard to see the difference. A change in spin axis can make a visual difference for a batter, but telling which direction a ball is spinning along a similar axis is very hard. Compounding that difficulty, though, is that Horton also has pitches that diverge from each other in ways spin can't explain. Thus, even for a lefty batter (who rarely sees the slider and only needs to worry about the curve), there are mutliple layers of trouble. He could be throwing the fastball or the curve, and spin mirroring would make it hard to tell which. He could also be throwing the changeup, and because it has a similar spin axis to the fastball (and a near-identical arm angle; Horton has worked hard to match release points on those two offerings) and the two pitches veer opposite directions due to release angle and seam effects, they end up in very different spots. That's how you miss bats with your changeup almost 60% of the time, without elite movement on the pitch. The slider is an especially nasty version of the same problem, because for a righty, it's like dealing with the curveball problem and the changeup problem for lefties, rolled into one pitch. It's shielded by spin mirroring, especially now that he has the sinker working, but it also has the seam-effect sweep that mirrors the changeup's run. Unlike the changeup or the fastball shape, the slider has been like this since Horton was an amateur. "It's kind of always been that way," he said. "I don't think too much about metrics. I think more about executing a pitch. I know where my slider works, and it's down and away, so it's just about executing to that spot." That's really what it comes down to, for him. He's only gotten hurt in the majors when he's made mistakes over the heart of the plate. With that blooming movement spread from such a tricky set of spin orientations, he's one of the game's more deceptive hurlers, and he also happens to throw 96-98 with life on the fastball. "It's just all about executing: Where are my misses? The hits I'm giving up, where are the fastballs?" he said. To him, the next step is simply to eliminate those, and to continue honing his feel for putting batters away with the heater. "Just execution. Two-strike execution is big, maybe getting to the top of the zone, making quality pitches." Over time, if he can sharpen his command a bit, Horton could jump another level and become an ace by learning to use all of his pitches to both left- and right-handed batters in certain situations. For now, though, if he can avoid the worst of the missed locations he's had over his first two and a half months in the majors, he can be a solid mid-rotation starter on a playoff-bound Cubs team. For a rookie, that's plenty. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images The third Wild Card berth is becoming a blight on the trade deadline—perhaps more with each passing year. As teams wrestle with the question of whether to buy or sell, many stay astride the fence (or refuse to consider relocating to the selling side) much longer than they did under any previous playoff format. Purists are well within their rights to rebuke the new system as one that treats middle-of-the-pack demi-losers like champions, but teams know that the playoff dollars still fill up the coffers either way—and that most fans aren't purists, anyway. Thus, as teams like the Chicago Cubs scour the trade market in search of help in multiple departments of their roster this month, the pickings are slim. By any reasonable reckoning, the Twins need a bit of a shakeup, and they're not in any position to hope for more than a road Wild Card series this fall. Yet, they're not fully committed to selling, thanks to a string of three series wins before the All-Star break. The Royals just traded for Adam Frazier, which more assuredly reflects a general confusion within the organization than signals either a buying or a selling posture, but they certainly haven't declared themselves open for business. The Rangers, the Guardians, the Reds, the Diamondbacks and even the Angels remain in various states of self-delusion; the number of teams who are ready and willing to talk about trading present value for the hope of more in the future can be counted on one hand. We knew it would be this way; this is the new annual dance. Even 13 days before the deadline, clarity is promised to no one, and easy, early-2000s-vintage buyer-and-seller trades aren't in vogue anymore. The Cubs, however, are among the handful of teams who can't afford to simply hope the right such deal burbles up by accident in the shadow of the deadline near the end of the month. They've already begun engaging teams about trades that would break out of the traditional box for July moves, by doing some one-stop shopping and/or by swapping current big-leaguers out for others. Sources familiar with talks identified the Diamondbacks and the Athletics as teams with whom the Cubs have discussed multi-player deals in which they would check off more than one box on their shopping list. All permutations of such moves differ from one another, but the broad rationale for this approach is as follows: The Cubs have spent the last four years trying to build a sustainable winner, which means not mortgaging the farm every time they're in a winning position. They have money to spend at this deadline—perhaps as much as $15 million they can add to the payroll, which is the equivalent of about $35 million in full-season salary for the players in question. By bundling a veteran on an expensive deal with another player on a cheaper contract or with more team control, the Chicago front office is hoping to find a discount on the players they acquire. Taking on two players in a trade makes it incrementally easier to send back prospects who require 40-man roster spots, and taking on money always greases the skids. Other front offices are aware of those reasons why the Cubs might prefer such deals, too, of course. Trades like those have become very rare over the last decade-plus, because many front offices believe they get more for players by moving them individually in almost all cases. If the needle could be threaded, though, it could be a game-changer in the NL Central. The obvious names who might be involved in a deal like this with the A's are Luis Severino, Luis Urías and Mason Miller. Two-thirds of a year into a three-year deal worth $67 million, Severino has become a distraction in West Sacramento, not by being a bad guy, but by not shutting up about how lousy the conditions and circumstances of the team's extremely temporary home are. Though the Athletics need to keep their payroll above a certain threshold to avoid a bare-knuckled fight with the MLB Players Association and the loss of their revenue-sharing recipient status, Severino has begun to look like an unappealing way to spend those dollars. His surface-level numbers look ugly this year, but the Cubs could happily slot him into the back half of their rotation if they got a little bit of cash in the deal to offset his salary. Urías, of course, is a former Brewers infielder who played under Craig Counsell for multiple seasons. He's made a significant swing change since then, though, and is hitting .239/.320/.363 this year. That would be underwhelming for a third baseman, but the Cubs are already getting very underwhelming output from Matt Shaw and from similar bench pieces Jon Berti and Vidal Bruján. The big catch, of course, would be Miller. One of the hardest-throwing pitchers in the sport, he also sports a wicked slider and has struck out over 40% of opposing batters since the start of 2024. He's issued a few more walks this year than last and his ERA isn't as pretty as it was in the past, but Miller belongs on any list of the 10 most dominant relievers in the league. He's under team control for four seasons beyond 2025, though he'll be arbitration-eligible for all of them as a Super Two player. Teams are calling about Miller, and don't feel as roundly rejected as they were last summer. A multi-player trade with Arizona, meanwhile, would almost certainly center on Eugenio Suárez, plus either Zac Gallen or Merrill Kelly. It's been a brutal season for Gallen (one reason why Arizona is even leaning toward selling at the deadline), but his stuff is still interesting and the remnants of the great pitcher he's been for much of his career still peek out from time to time. He would be one solid potential addition to the Cubs rotation, and Kelly (by means of having had a better year thus far) might be an even more exciting one at this point. Meanwhile, Suárez would be a major offensive upgrade over Shaw at the hot corner and would make the team's lineup almost impossible to navigate. A deal combining any two of Gallen, Kelly and Suárez would cost the Cubs a heavy prospect price, but the one-stop shop could be worth it. Right now, that kind of deal feels more far-fetched than a multi-piece swap with the A's, but if the Cubs were willing to deal one of their top tier of young non-stars (Cade Horton, Owen Caissie, Shaw, or Kevin Alcántara), that could change. Similar deals bundling Jhoan Duran or Joe Ryan with Willi Castro or Chris Paddack, of the Twins; Seth Lugo and Carlos Estévez or Jonathan India; and Mitch Keller with David Bednar or Ke'Bryan Hayes make varying levels of sense, too. However, there's no indication yet that the Cubs have found traction with Minnesota, Kansas City or Pittsburgh on this kind of trade. Trading for multiple players from one team (each of whom would individually improve the Cubs' chances to reach the World Series) would make even trading Caissie, Moisés Ballesteros, Cade Horton or Jefferson Rojas palatable, while for the sellers, getting access to that caliber of prospect has been a priority in all talks with the Cubs. Something big will happen before the July 31 trade deadline. The big question is what shape the Cubs' biggest move will take. Since their needs exceed their means, creativity could be in order. View full article

Image courtesy of © Gregory Fisher-Imagn Images "At the end of the day, hitting the ball hard is obviously the goal every time you have an at-bat," Dansby Swanson said last Thursday in Minnesota, before the final game of the Cubs' series against the Twins. "If I had a joystick, probably, things would look a lot different." In other words, Swanson, 31, knows his process has been better than his results this year. He enters the second half batting a respectable .253/.301/.429, but those numbers aren't massive improvements on the .242/.312/.390 line he posted last year. That's a bit perplexing, because Swanson is achieving his goal (hitting the ball hard) on 47.8% of his balls in play this year, which would be a career best. He's already matched last year's total of 16 home runs, and his expected numbers are well ahead of his actual ones. If he could get that joystick out and move the ball around a bit more, he'd be enjoying plenty of extra singles and doubles, but as we all know, that's not how it works. Two things about Swanson's season are particularly interesting, though. Firstly, there's the fact that he does have more of a joystick to hand than he has in the past, in a way. He also has his turbo button back. Plagued by a knee sprain that lingered and a sports hernia he played through all year, Swanson lost a step last year, and his swing was a bit more rigid than usual. His sprint speed sagged from a four-year baseline of 28.4 feet per second to 27.8. That could have turned out to be age-related decline, but unsurprisingly, he's bounced back to 28.3 feet per second this year. His bat speed is actually down, relative to last year, but that's because he's exercising more bat control late in his swing than he could muster in his compromised state in 2024. At times, his barrel was out of his control last year; his core muscles weren't strong enough to give him smooth command of the whole movement. This year, that's changed. Here's a Statcast visualization of his swing at the contact point, for both 2024 and 2025. These are composite images, so they don't tell the story of any one swing, but they're pretty good illustrations of what's different. Note the cleaner transfer of weight happening in the image on the right. Swanson hits off his front foot, when he's right; he strides open but then pushes hard off his back foot and lunges into the pitch to generate rotation. That movement has been much more stable and smooth this year, with both the knee and the muscles in his lower abdomen (which absorb and transfer lots of energy during the process of the front foot landing and the hips and shoulders rotating) stronger than they were before. He's actually caught the ball slightly farther in front of his center of mass this year, but with less extension of his arms at the contact point, which means he has more margin for error with his timing. One reason for the subtle change in contact point is that his swing is a bit flatter through the hitting zone, but Swanson said that was just what happened when he started locking in on the ball better. "Your body's really smart," he explained, "and it unfolds how it wants to unfold in order to get to certain pitches. It's not necessarily anything that I've consciously put any thought into. [It's] just kind of trusting athleticism." The results, then, will come, if Swanson just keeps contacting the ball the way he has all season. He doesn't need to sweat the batted-ball luck. Expected batting averages (xBA) and slugging averages (xSLG) can be misleading, but in his case, his xBA of .272 feels fairer than his actual figure, and so does his xSLG of .481. If he can sustain this process, he'll collect hits at a higher rate in the second half. More mysterious, perhaps, is the fact that Swanson is also drawing walks at the lowest rate of his career. He's also striking out more this year. We've seen him get to more power this year, and we know that Seiya Suzuki has undergone a similar transformation (more slug, less on-base skill). Is Swanson a similar case? No. And here's where things get odd. Whenever a batter is drawing fewer walks, you can ask a standard set of questions to determine why. Let's run through them. Is he simply seeing more strikes? This happens often. Pitchers might decide they no longer fear a hitter, or that they have a particular plan to get him out within the zone, or they might be desperate not to put him on base for free. It would be a neat narrative fit if the presence of Kyle Tucker and the breakouts of Pete Crow-Armstrong and Michael Busch had left Swanson (who often bats between two of the three) seeing a ton of strikes from pitchers, especially right-handers. Surely, though, you didn't think it would be that easy. Swanson saw 52.7% of pitches in the zone in 2024. It's down to 51.6% in 2025. Is he chasing more often outside the zone? That's the natural second thought, right? Is the approach just getting raggedy? Is hunting pitches to hit leading a hitter to expand the zone? In fact, this is more like question 1A than question 2. But it's also not where we're going to find our answer. Swanson chased 24.0% of pitches outside the zone in 2024; it's 23.9% this year. Is he swinging more inside the zone? Another common issue, which isn't even always an issue. A player might decide not to miss their pitch in the zone so much, and start swinging more when they get that meaty offering. Often, that means more hits; it just means fewer walks. But, there's been no meaningful change here. Swanson swung at 71.0% of pitches inside the zone in 2024, and has swung at 72.5% of them in 2025. Is he whiffing a lot more? This actually isn't a very reliable indicator—whiffing more means deeper counts, so if you maintain a disciplined approach, you're likely to walk more often if there's some swing-and-miss in your game than if you're a great contact hitter. Still, it's worth checking on, and there's a little bit of signal here. Swanson's overall rate of whiffs per swing is up from 28.7% to 29.9%, and since (as we've seen) his swing rate has held pretty static, that does mean more strikes that can end an at-bat. His contact rate within the zone is identical to last year's, but he's coming up empty considerably more often when he chases. That does matter, but it's not enough to explain a drop from a career walk rate of 8.9% to 6.8%. Is he being more aggressive early in counts? Sometimes, a hitter isn't swinging more in total, but they're swinging more at the first pitch or two in a plate appearance. Normally, for this to have any impact on walk rate, those swings should result in more balls in play, which would also mean a lower strikeout rate. We don't see that in Swanson's case, though—which shouldn't surprise us, because he's not getting more aggressive early. Swanson's 40.5% swing rate on 0-0, 0-1 and 1-0 pitches this year is the same as his rate for 2023 and 2024. Those are the big five questions, and their answers don't really give us satisfying insight into why Swanson hasn't walked much this year. Swanson was at a loss to explain it, too, other than to note the importance of sequencing. "Chase rate doesn't always indicate whether you're walking or not," he said. "It's when those chase things happen, because if you're chasing with two strikes, obviously, that's when strikeouts go up. It really depends on what counts, and what you're not chasing. Part of it, too, is if you get good pitches, you want to be able to hit them." All fair, and maybe there's something there. Swanson's personal Put-Away Rate (the percentage of two-strike pitches that resulted in a strikeout) is up this year, from 20.4% in 2024 to 23.8%. Before he can draw a walk, sometimes, he's punching himself out by chasing inopportunely. Meanwhile, although the frequency with which he's reached advantageous counts (2-0, 3-1, 3-0) is noticeably higher this year than in past campaigns, his swing rate when ahead in the count is up, too, from 51.8% to 53.1%. That's not a bad thing, per se—although, by the numbers, swinging when way ahead is a losing proposition. If Swanson is putting good, aggressive swings those pitches in counts that already favor him, the result should be more power, and we've seen plenty of power from him this year. Remember, though, that his bat speed is down this year. That's true even if we isolate hitter-friendly counts; he averaged 72.4 mph on swings in those counts last year but is down to 71.2 this year. Swanson's bum luck on batted balls is just that. His swing is in good shape, and he's recognizing hittable strikes well. His SEAGER rating this year is a robust 21.1, right back where it was in 2023 after a troublesome dip in 2023. (SEAGER evaluates the balance between selectivity and aggression for hitters.) If he keeps doing everything exactly the same way, he'll put up better numbers in the second half, and he seems very confident about that. To reach another level, though, he could (and perhaps should) change his mental approach to counts in which he's earned the advantage. Accepting a few more walks from those positions of strength would make him more productive, and force the next adjustment from opposing pitchers. View full article

Image courtesy of © Brad Rempel-Imagn Images It's never a bad thing to enter the All-Star break in first place in one's division, and that's where the Cubs are this week. They had to scramble for two straight wins in New York to stay ahead of the Milwaukee Brewers over the weekend, but they managed that, and they get a chance to reset the odometers on some of their higher-mileage players with four days off before they resume play Friday afternoon against the Boston Red Sox. They're clear sellers in good position to make the postseason. On the other hand, by now, it should be clear to all involved that this team is not a juggernaut. Unlike past years (when, for instance, the Dodgers routinely won 105 or more games), there might not be a juggernaut on the major-league landscape this summer, but if there is one, it's not the Cubs. Some version of this team—with Seiya Suzuki's power exploding onto the scene the way it has; Pete Crow-Armstrong enjoying the biggest star turn in the big leagues; and Matthew Boyd staying both healthy and excellent to date—might have cruised to a division title, but that version of the team also would have needed Ian Happ and Matt Shaw to be consistently productive and their top three starters (Justin Steele, Shota Imanaga and Jameson Taillon) to rack up healthy innings. As things stand, the fight for the NL Central will be a brawl settled only in the final week, and any deep playoff run depends not only on winning that fight, but on getting reinforcements between now and then to deepen multiple thin places on the roster. The Cubs started 38-22; they're just 19-17 since. A fairly soft schedule should give them room for error over the final two months, but they have to earn that by getting better, too. They have needs in all four key demographics of the roster—rotation, bullpen, lineup, and bench—and beyond. Let's rank those needs, from most dire to most manageable, so we know where to direct the bulk of our energy and attention in the fortnight to come. 1. Starting Pitching Few fan bases love to nitpick the notion of a playoff-caliber starter more than Cubs fans—which is particularly odd, given that the Cubs are not a team who routinely even makes it to October. The idea that anyone should feel nervous about giving the ball to Imanaga or Boyd because of their lack of overpowering sheer stuff, or to Cade Horton because of his lack of experience, is foolish. Still, this comes in as the top need for the team, and it's not even especially close. One reason is obvious: the Brewers are mounting a serious challenge, there's a long stretch without off days coming for the team in August, and the Cubs can't afford to be short on rotation depth. Ideally, they would go to a six-man rotation for a good chunk of the second half. Right now, that's a logistical nightmare even in concept. In practice, it would be impossible. They need at least one good buttress at the back end of the rotation, and they would do very well to acquire two capable starters, one of whom is more of a frontline arm. Ideally, that pitcher would have team control beyond this year, since it's not at all clear that the team will be able to count on more innings from Boyd, Imanaga, Taillon and Steele in 2026 than they're getting in 2025. Of course, what I'm describing is wildly expensive. The team could use two good starters, and might even want to get that done, but there's virtually no chance that they will, because they have other needs to fill. Craig Counsell will, in all likelihood, have to settle for one new arm and hope it's of the higher-echelon variety—or at least that whoever it is can take the ball whenever injury or exhaustion catches up to Boyd or Horton. 2. Relief Pitching For the umpteenth year in a row, Jed Hoyer has proved that he knows where to look to cobble together a solid relief corps from scrapheap scoop-ups and under-the-radar homegrown hurlers, even after Opening Day. You remember Tyson Miller and Jorge López from 2024, and Michael Fulmer and Julien Merryweather from 2023, but it goes back much farther than that. This year, it's been not only offseason additions Caleb Thielbar and Brad Keller, but on-the-run minor-league acquisitions Drew Pomeranz and Chris Flexen. The thing is, that particular brand of bullpen magic doesn't even last a full season. Fulmer got hurt. López got hurt. Adbert Alzolay wore down at just the wrong moment in 2023. The cracks are already showing in this year's group, and even where cracks aren't showing, they're forming. The cumulative age of Ryan Pressly, Ryan Brasier, Thielbar and Pomeranz (147) is greater than the length of time since the mound moved back to 60 feet, 6 inches. As good as they've been, at times, they're all significant risks for injury. Keller and Flexen, meanwhile, are candidates for significant regression, even after we acknowledge that Keller's stuff has ticked up tremendously after his winter transformation and a spring transition to the bullpen. With Daniel Palencia anchoring the unit, the temptation to slide this need further down the board is there, but it's important to resist it. The Cubs need bullpen help, if they want to hold enough leads to get to the finish line in front of the pack in the Central. They just can't afford to pay much for it. 3. A Competent Third Baseman This is where the real trouble starts, because in July, it's never your top need that derails you. You can address that, even if it ends up feeling like a watery solution. It's when you get this far down the checklist and you still feel like the need is pressing that there's a real problem afoot, and that's the case right now in Chicago. Matt Shaw was probably overrated by prospect hounds this offseason. In fairness to the Cubs, they seemed to know that even coming in; that's why they bid heavily for Alex Bregman. In the end, though, neither the front office nor ownership were willing to flex on the structure of their offer enough to entice Bregman to choose them over the Red Sox, and they're paying a dear price for that now. Shaw might yet turn into a good big-league player—there's plenty of reason to worry about that, but it's far too early to rule out the possibility—but he's not ready to be that kind of player yet. The team needs to upgrade that position, because they're not getting enough offense from second base or left field to stomach a .556 OPS at the hot corner. Nor does Shaw look ready to turn the corner. Unfortunately, this might just not be in the cards. The Cubs have traded for third basemen at each of the last two deadlines, and Hoyer's track record with those moves is brutal. Shaw is almost exactly the player Nick Madrigal was two years ago, when the team traded for Jeimer Candelario to rotate Madrigal out of the spot—but Candelario played so poorly that the team often ended up sticking with Madrigal and his stellar glove, anyway. That was when they had a healthy Steele, Taillon, and even Marcus Stroman; they didn't need to go make a splash on the pitching side. Now, they have a thinning farm system and two more pressing needs. Shaw might just have to keep sucking up precious outs at the bottom of the batting order, because the team can't afford to replace him. 4. A Bench Overhaul If anything, Hoyer's track record with building or upgrading the bench is even worse than that with trades for third basemen in July. The team is barely out of the shadow of the Trey Mancini and Tucker Barnhart calamities, and they're staring at a bench that has managed to be even more dysfunctional: Justin Turner, Jon Berti and Vidal Bruján have been a combined 11 runs worse than average, according to Baseball Reference, even as Craig Counsell has done everything in his power to limit their playing time. You can't truly hide players on benches as shallow as those run by every big-league team, at this point, and the Cubs need players their manager feels less compelled to hide. The good news here is that checking this box should be easy. It's hard to find a frontline starter, an ace reliever or a solid third baseman whose team is willing to trade them at this time of year. It's relatively easy to be a more useful player than Berti has been this season. Throwing a little money at the problem might help; plenty of bad teams are looking to get a few million dollars cheaper as they slog toward the end of lost seasons. The Cubs have room to absorb some money and acquire a good bench piece without giving up much talent. 5. Organizational Depth at Both Ends of the Battery This feels like a mere bonus item, but it's not. The Cubs are too thin at the upper reaches of their farm system, in terms of reliable, big-league-caliber pitchers and catchers. That could bite them even down the stretch, but it's a problem that will linger into the offseason, too. They should try to find an optionable arm or two and a castoff or blocked catcher whom they can snatch up cheaply, to head off this issue before it becomes a truly glaring problem at a terrible time. There's good news about all of these needs: the Cubs are proving to be very good at coaching players at the big-league level. Suzuki, Crow-Armstrong, Carson Kelly and others demonstrate the team's savvy with hitters, who have tapped into more power under the team's coaching infrastructure this year. Tommy Hottovy is widely respected throughout the game for his work with pitchers, and Boyd, Colin Rea and Keller are just a few of his success stories this year, alone. Quintin Berry and Jose Javier have them running the bases as well as any team in baseball and positioning themselves quite well afield. Counsell's coaching staff is doing its thing. That means that, for instance, one should hold out some real hope for a player like Ryan McMahon, should the team acquire him to stop the gap at third base. Chris Paddack of the Twins is a good candidate to be that secondary starting pitching acquisition, using money more than prospect capital, and he would do well under Hottovy. However, these needs are real, and they've shown up on the field recently. The Cubs have the lead, but the Brewers have the momentum in the race for the Central division crown—and if you don't believe in that kind of thing, then substitute 'depth' for 'momentum'. It comes to the same thing. The Brewers also have a deeper farm system, which gives them more ways to improve between now and the end of the season than the Cubs have. That's why it's important for Chicago to nail this deadline, by knowing how to order their priorities and where to allocate their resources. View full article

Image courtesy of © Eric Hartline-Imagn Images Though losing Miguel Amaya for two months to an oblique strain was a major blow to the Cubs, they've been very, very lucky. Plugged in to fill the gap left by Amaya, Reese McGuire has been everything they might have fairly hoped he would be. He's only running a .246 on-base percentage in his limited playing time, but he's run into five homers—and, much more importantly, he's been a defensive stalwart. In fact, he's been a revelation behind the plate. McGuire has played relatively little—some 60 catchers have been behind the plate for more opponent plate appearances—but made a huge impact. Runners have 12 steals against him, but have been caught seven times. In total, McGuire has 11 Runner Kills, adding a few plays like this one to those thwarted thieves. V0FkOFlfWGw0TUFRPT1fVXdKVlUxSU1Wd1VBWEZvTEJRQUhBUVlDQUFBQ1ZsTUFBMWRRVkF0UkF3ZGRBbEJm.mp4 That was the third Guardians runner McGuire had thrown out in that game, alone. The first came in the heels of a leadoff single by Steven Kwan in the first inning: V0FkOFlfWGw0TUFRPT1fQUFOWlhBQUZCUW9BWFFkVUF3QUhWd2RSQUFNR0FGQUFVUVpXVVFkUUFsSURVUVJV.mp4 And the second via disguised pitchout in a key spot with runners on the corners in the fifth. V0FkOFlfWGw0TUFRPT1fQVFRQUIxUlNVZ3NBV1ZZRFhnQUhWQWRlQUFNQlVWZ0FVMXdFQ1FBR0ExVUJCd29D.mp4 His arm has been plus. So have his blocking skills been, behind home plate, such that his pitchers know they can afford to bury one even with a key runner on third base. TDZXMWJfWGw0TUFRPT1fQVFnRFZsQUhBZ3NBQUZVTFZnQUhCUU1DQUZsWFV3VUFWMVlHQkZjQVVGWlJBMUFB.mp4 Give him special credit, on that one, for the awareness it took to keep the ball in front of him, then force the runner back to the base—then still turn and make the throw in time to convert the strikeout. Later in that same game against Pittsburgh, he called (and Drew Pomeranz had the conviction to throw) another ball in the dirt, which he blocked with aplomb. TDZXMWJfWGw0TUFRPT1fQmdsWVZGY0dWd1VBRFZJRkJRQUhDUUFEQUFOV1Yxa0FWRkpYVmdwWEExY0JWQU5R.mp4 The Cubs still lost that game, of course, but they had a chance to win it in the bottom half of the frame, thanks to the double play Oneil Cruz hit into on the pitch right after this one. McGuire's presence behind the plate has meant fewer bases gained for opponents, in addition to more outs. And finally, he's also been the only Cubs catcher who's framed pitches with above-average aptitude this year. Here are the numbers, according to Baseball Prospectus. (Statcast is even more in favor of McGuire, relative to the other two.) McGuire: 0.6 FrmR Amaya: 0.0 Carson Kelly: -3.5 Combine his good framing with the ability to stifle the running game and the confidence he inspires in his batterymates, and Cubs pitchers have a 3.60 ERA with McGuire behind the plate this season. That's better than either Amaya (4.37) or Kelly (3.72). Opponents' OPS (.672 with McGuire back there; .710 for Amaya; .729 for Kelly) throws their effects on run prevention into equally stark relief. Thus, while McGuire's offensive contributions have been relatively limited, he's a key cog in the team's machine; he makes them better at run prevention. That makes for an uncomfortable looming decision. When Amaya does return from the injured list, the team will have to make room on their 26-man roster for him. The natural way to do so is to designate McGuire for assignment, because he's their current backup catcher and the nature of the modern bench is such that carrying three backstops is virtually impossible. McGuire can't be sent to the minors without being offered to the rest of the league via waivers, and could elect free agency even if he clears—which, at this point, is unlikely. Picking McGuire over Amaya certainly isn't a viable path, with Amaya also being out of options and having both youth and longer-term team control on his side. He's a better offensive player than McGuire, too. If nothing else changes, the Cubs will have to waive (and surely lose) McGuire. That comes with its own problems, though. To wit: they'd be down to two trustworthy big-league catchers in their organization, and would have no good way to backfill if either Amaya or Kelly got hurt later in the campaign. This is why teams are always hunting catching depth, and especially catching depth that can be sent to the minors without being exposed to the other 29 teams. Chicago does, of course, have Moisés Ballesteros, who came up briefly earlier this year to fill in as the DH and who has continued to catch in about two-thirds of his games since returning to Triple-A Iowa. However, if they really trusted Ballesteros behind the dish, he'd have come back when Amaya went down. He didn't. Ballesteros will still be (will have to be) a sufficient emergency option for the final two months, if and when Amaya returns and McGuire goes elsewhere. Since the Cubs plainly feel he needs more seasoning (or that his future is as a DH, anyway), though, they won't sleep especially well on any day that includes a hard foul tip off the mask or the bare hand of either Kelly or Amaya. It might also be that, because Ballesteros is important as their only real catching depth at this stage, they feel unable to pull the trigger even on an otherwise strong trade offer that would include sending him elsewhere. That's the bad news. The good news is, given how good he's been behind the plate and the fact that he still has one year of team control remaining, the Cubs might be able to include McGuire in a trade somewhere right as Amaya returns. Sure, his offense has been lousy, but that's been in limited playing time, and he's showing the well-rounded defensive competence teams crave from their catchers for two years running. He wouldn't fetch any major piece, of course, but he could be thrown in to sweeten a deal with a team in need of some stability beyond 2025 at the catcher spot—or in a swap with a club who could send the Cubs a less accomplished or helpful spare catcher, but one who can be optioned to Iowa unless and until needed. The downside of that strategy is that unless it's the second type of move, you're ensuring the loss of McGuire and merely hoping to either stay healthy or survive with Ballesteros late in the season. It's possible the team will feel obligated to simply pick a moment of roster bloat for other teams at which to bring Amaya back, and try to sneak him through waivers—the risk of losing him being worth the chance that they wouldn't, as opposed to taking any action that guaranteed the former. McGuire has added significant value for the Cubs over the last two months, giving their run-prevention some needed help. His days in the organization are likely dwindling, but hopefully, the team will find a way to maintain some depth behind the plate—and perhaps even extract one final drop of value from a very successful minor-league signing. View full article

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images In his last two seasons with the Brewers, Colin Rea was almost a fixture in the starting rotation all season. His improbable success—he entered 2023 having pitched just 20 innings in the majors over the previous six campaigns—kept an injury-riddled pitching staff humming. Milwaukee couldn't have won those division titles without him. By the end of each year, though, the team quietly nudged Rea to long relief, and/or left him off their playoff roster. He didn't pitch in the postseason for them in either of their unceremonious first-round exits. The classic "get-you-there guy," Rea ran out of steam down the stretch in the process of helping his team get there. He's a selfless contributor, but once the league starts to adjust to him, he does sometimes struggle to counteradjust. This year, he's hoping to change that. Rea started hot as the Cubs' fifth starter this spring. They won eight of the first 10 games in which he appeared, and six of his first seven starts. In mid-May, he owned a 2.38 ERA. Thereafter, though, he endured a six-start stretch in which opponents hit nine home runs and his ERA was 7.11. By the reckoning of most Cubs fans (who didn't watch closely, over the two preceding seasons, as he dealt with similar problems and made his next round of replies), he's slipped into the melange of options on which the team must keep trying to improve—another starter with underwhelming stuff who can't set the club up for success. Quietly, though, Rea has averted outright disaster, and in fact, his last two outings have been terrific. Against the Astros in Houston and at home against the Cardinals, Rea combined for 11 2/3 innings pitched, giving up just three total runs on seven hits. He's still finding plenty of ways to get outs. To understand how, I think it's time we develop a comprehensive theory of Colin Rea. First, we'd better establish the basics, because even those are changing all the time. Rea lived on a three-fastball mix with the Brewers; they like guys to mix all three looks for opposing batters. He used six pitches last year, and the balance of his arsenal was notable. This is what most kitchen-sink guys look like; hitters see four different pitches quite often. This year, Rea is a very different kind of pitcher. He's added a seventh pitch, creating a true distinction between his cutter and a slider that he grips slightly differently and which has more depth. He's throwing a bit harder. The huge change, though, is the fastball mix. Instead of throwing the sinker and cutter just as much as the four-seamer, he's suddenly heavily featuring that four-seamer. In fact, everything else in his repertoire—the hard and the soft stuff—has taken a backseat to that true heater. In a conversation inside the Cubs clubhouse at Target Field Wednesday Rea said the changes are partially the product of the team proposing changes, and partially his own sense that changing approaches made sense. "A little bit of both," he confirmed. "I think over the past couple years, my four-seam has played pretty well. So coming in early, spring training and early in the season, it was an easy adjustment, but as you go along, the league kind of adjusts to you. So you’ve gotta make those in-season adjustments as well." Rea said that when the Cubs signed him this winter, they made a presentation to him to show where he tends to have the most success within the zone. Once he embraced that study, the switch from a three-fastball hodgepodge to the four-seamer leading the way "just kind of happened," he said. With the team's help, he realized that the locations where his stuff thrives tend to be "four-seam dominant". Meanwhile, he also moved across the rubber, from the third-base side to the first-base side. The Brewers almost universally nudge their hurlers toward the side of the rubber that creates a steeper horizontal angle for batters, and that did work for him, but once Rea moved on from the organization, he switched lanes. "I just felt like on the third-base side, it gave the chance for the hitter to kind of see the ball a little bit earlier, whereas on the first-base side, I stay more closed, more direct toward home," Rea said. "Therefore, I can hide the ball a little bit longer. And I like to work to the glove side, anyway, so that just gave me a more direct path to that side." While hitters might be fooled more by (for instance) a cutter-sweeper sequence toward the glove side of the plate if a pitcher releases the ball from way across the rubber, that movement pattern also introduces hurdles for the hurler. "Sometimes when you’re on the third-base side, you have to kind of clear your shoulder to get to that glove side, which can create some bad habits," Rea said. Switching from the sinker-forward fastball trio to the four-seamer as the primary weapon makes that switch more viable. So does the slight mechanical change he's made this year, lowering his arm slot. As he mentioned, he's already on the right line to throw a glove-side four-seamer from his new location, whereas if he wanted to be filling up the arm-side sinker space, he'd need to be really making it run from this side to avoid leaving the pitch in the middle of the plate. Last year, with a higher arm angle, he would only have found trouble in trying to push the sinker to the arm side, so it worked much better to start there. With the migration across the rubber and the lower slot, his four-seamer and sinker both run more to the arm side, and the sinker has room to do that without losing the plate. That mechanical change was only possible because he no longer had to force that front shoulder open, as he mentioned above. Remember, too, that the Cubs talked to Rea about changing up some of the locations he emphasizes and how they play off each other. Changing position on the rubber affects that, too. "On the third-base side, I threw a lot more backdoor cutters, backdoor sweepers, because that was the angle that I was at," Rea said. "On this side, I haven’t thrown as many, just because that’s a little bit harder a pitch to execute on that side." Let's take a quick look at that in action. Here's a pitch Rea threw to Michael Busch, when the Brewers visited the Cubs last year. It's a sweeper, from his position toward the third-base side of the rubber. NU53dzBfVjBZQUhRPT1fVUZBRkJnQU1VRkVBVzFjQlh3QUFCQU5WQUFOUVcxRUFBQUJVQTFBQkJnc0hVZ3RR.mp4 That pitch still worked well, as you can see. But note the shape and location. It spends a lot of time over the white of the plate, and though it dips below the zone, it doesn't sweep to the glove side very much. Now, here's Rea throwing a sweeper to punch out Michael A. Taylor this year. ckQ4M1BfWGw0TUFRPT1fQmxCVFZWQUdWVk1BRHdNR1ZBQUhCUVJSQUZoV1dnVUFDZ1lBVmxJQkJRY0VVZ3ND.mp4 Both of those pitches are properly executed. You don't want a sweeper to a lefty to do what the one to Taylor did, or at least, you're less likely to risk throwing it that way. But that's the point. His change to a new mound position has informed a change in how Rea attacks hitters, because of what it's allowed him to do differently with his arm. You can really see that sweeper take off laterally this season, whereas last year's offering was a pitch that relies more on depth and can thrive on the arm side of the plate, if well-executed. Ok, you say, but that example against Taylor is from back when Rea was great. We've already talked about how, since then, he's nosed steeply downward, then back up. What's going on there? As Rea alluded to, it's a matter of making adjustments within the season. Overall, yes, he's throwing far more four-seamers than sinkers or cutters this year—but now that hitters are hunting it, he's switched that back up. "The last few times out, I’ve gone more three fastballs—four-seam, two-seam, cutter—with still my four-seam being the more dominant pitch, but mixing those in a little bit more," he said. "Teams, it seems like especially this year, they’re on the fastball from Pitch 1. So just a way to keep them off that pitch a little bit." With the four-seamer leading the way, Rea can use his splitter and sweeper to chase swings and misses. However, at times, it makes more sense to take advantage of hitters who appear to have timed up the heat, by creating some wiggle they're not expecting. "When you can see that they’re on time for the four-seam, they’re barreling it up, that’s a good time to go to the two-seam," Rea said. Getting early, weak contact can be just as valuable as working one's way to a strikeout, in multiple ways. First, inducing that kind of contact quickly means more efficiency within the outing, because one's pitch count stays lower and the opponent has to wait longer to get looks at the secondary stuff in one's arsenal. Second, sometimes, a misexecuted breaking or offspeed pitch to a hitter who's sitting on a heater in that zone can make them early in a good way—good for the hitter, that is. As a pitcher, if the opposing batter is looking for a four-seamer, the surest way to disrupt them is to give them a version of that same pitch that attacks an unexpected part of the zone and has late movement they don't expect. Since Rea has used the four-seamer so much more heavily this year, he said, hitters sit on it and think less about the sinker and cutter. That makes it easier for him to get mishit balls with those altered flavors of the heat. You just don't see pitchers fill up a movement plot this thoroughly very often. From the side of the mound on which (at least for now) he's more comfortable, Rea is using the four-seamer as the focal point, but he can move it a whole lot, vertically and horizontally—and he can do so throughout a fairly wide velocity band. True kitchen-sink starters are rare, anymore. Throwing hard enough and having sharp enough command to succeed in the majors while maintaining four different glove-side pitch movement shapes and two to the arm side (plus the four-seamer itself) is excruciatingly hard. Rea has ridden a bit of a roller coaster of late, as he tries to harness that wide arsenal and make up for the fact that he doesn't have any one true out pitch. Because he's exceptionally open-minded and has the gift of manipulating the ball this way, however, he's already felt his way through a tough stretch and back to a good place. View full article

Heh. I think it's the same way pitchers aim for the outside corner, at the knees: you don't always hit that spot precisely, but aim small, miss small, and all that.

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images The power binge that has turned Pete Crow-Armstrong from a glove-first player into the starting center fielder for the National League All-Stars certainly didn't catch him by surprise. "I always knew it was in there," he said Tuesday, inside the visitors' clubhouse at Target Field in Minneapolis. "Maybe not before I got drafted. In high school, I did not know how to move properly. But even the first couple years in the minor leagues, I saw some power and whatnot. I would attribute that to just reps. And now we’re definitely learning how to pull the ball in the air—true spin, not so much topspin, sidespin. Yeah, I’m definitely surprised at the amount in the timeframe, but I always knew it would come." Having the tools for power production—his bat speed, which is still increasing almost week by week, and the natural uppercut plane in his swing—is one thing, but weaponizing it and being able to access it is another. Crow-Armstrong's breakout has been defined by the latter, and fueled by his self-knowledge as a hitter. It's also been a product of the team's coaching staff finding good ways to communicate with Crow-Armstrong (and several others on the team) about the value of catching the ball farther out front and creating that true spin, in the air to the pull field. Batted-ball spin is one of the (few) things the public still doesn't get to see on websites like Baseball Savant or Statcast clips via the MLB app. Teams do have it, though, and while it's not a primary focus for most hitters, spin off the bat can be used to reverse-engineer some insight into the swing. Are you on time, and on plane? Are you catching the ball squarely, with the head out around it just so? Often, if you are, the spin will be what Crow-Armstrong referred to as "true". That's not only good for carry on the ball (backspin keeps it in the air longer, so it can fly farther before it lands), but a good sign that your swing is working. As Crow-Armstrong alluded to, sidespun, sliced liners or topspin one-hoppers to the pull side can tell a hitter they're slightly missing their target in terms of timing or barrel accuracy. Lately, Crow-Armstrong and Cubs coaches have used another indicator to spot trouble in his swing, proactively working to solve it before a long slump could ensue. Around the middle of June, he got a bit more upright in the box and brought his feet closer together in his stance—but that's led to a longer stride that was not intentional, and has not been beneficial. "I was absolutely overstriding," Crow-Armstrong said. "We looked at numbers, we broke it all down. The stride was actually eight inches longer. And that creates some disconnection." He's right, of course. To take as clean a snapshot as possible, here's Crow-Armstrong's stance and stride pattern from May. Here, by contrast, is the same visual for July, entering Tuesday night's game (in which he went 0-for-4). That is, indeed, a big change in stride length, and it hasn't been good for him. It's a sign of how well he's been living at the plate that, even if you take the least flattering snippet of his recent run you can (his last 17 games, dating to June 20), Crow-Armstrong still has a .265/.292/.485 batting line. At this point, though, he and the team want to aim higher than that. He was out doing early work five hours before Tuesday night's game, along with some teammates. "I can still be moving on time, but I’d end up backing the ball up a lot," Crow-Armstrong said of his swing when the stride is too long. "The goal is to always hit behind the front side, and if you’re overstriding, then you’ve gotta really fight to get through there. So you were seeing a lot of deep-caught, jammed ground balls. Not working under my front side." When he talks it through, you can picture what Crow-Armstrong is hunting, and what's frustrating him when he can't connect on time. Overstriding, in effect, lengthens and flattens his swing. Indeed, his swing tilt is the flattest it's been all year thus far in July, so despite his bat speed being better than ever he's been late on fastballs. His attack angle and direction on the sinker and four-seamer show him not catching it while working uphill as much, and pushing it to the opposite field more. He also articulated why it hurts to overstride both on the fastball and on spinning or offspeed stuff. "I think, if anything, the overstriding is just a disservice to the visual, for me as a hitter," he said, "The depth perception just changes. If you’re overstriding, heaters probably look a little harder and the spin probably presents itself better when it normally wouldn’t, and I could probably shut down." In other words, because he knows he has to rush his barrel to get out around the longer frame he's made of himself by striding long, he's more prone to chasing non-fastballs, even while fastballs can still beat him. Crow-Armstrong did say he and the team have worked some of that problem out, and that "it's felt better" for about the last week. He still went 0-for-4 Tuesday night, but he had a great weekend against St. Louis. Having identified the problem and acted on it, he feels confident about returning to the level of production he so enjoyed prior to the recent downturn. It's easier said than done, but if nothing else, Crow-Armstrong's intimate understanding of his swing and what it's meant to accomplish provides reason for optimism that he can do it. As he noted, there's no longer any doubt that the power is there. 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Image courtesy of © Rafael Suanes-Imagn Images For the balance of this week, expect the Washington Nationals (and interim leader of baseball operations Michael DeBartolo Jr.) to focus tightly on the 2025 MLB Draft. It kicks off Sunday, and the Nationals have the first overall pick. Though the scouting department that will drive key decisions during the draft is largely intact, for now, the team is pouring all of its resources into making sure they complete the unwieldy job of assembling a top-tier draft class amid a major shakeup for the organization. After the All-Star Game, though, the team is expected to listen to offers for ace lefthander MacKenzie Gore, according to a source with knowledge of their thinking. It would be a surprise if ownership allowed Gore, one of the jewels of the Juan Soto trade and a 2025 All-Star, to be dealt by an interim executive, but with just two and a half years of team control remaining, Gore could be hard to extend, expensive to keep on year-to-year arbitration-fueled contracts, and insufficient to get the team back into contention by the end of 2027. That's before considering the possibility of a work stoppage that could truncate that season, and before accounting for the risk of an injury to Gore. They might never get a better package offer than the one DeBartolo will hear this month, if he can work the phones well. At 26, Gore doesn't quite qualify as a late bloomer, but he took a long time to find the level of performance he's attained for much of this first half. In 104 1/3 innings across 18 starts, he's struck out 131 batters, with an arsenal powered by a mid-90s fastball from the left side. He's slightly lowered his arm angle this year, tapping into more lateral break on his curveball, a slider he trusts much more, and a slight, salubrious change to his fastball and changeup shapes. Gore entered this season with three full years of service time, so unless he's sent to the minor leagues at some point this year or next (very unlikely, of course), he'll be eligible for free agency after 2027. He's making $2.89 million this year, but that salary will more than double for 2026 if he stays healthy. When he's right, though, he's worth all that and much more. His strikeout rate has jumped to 30.5% this year, while his walk rate has dipped to its lowest rate ever (7.9%). Contenders would line up to offer Washington a windfall for Gore, who pitched 166 innings in 2024 and won't run into an innings limit or (hopefully) even wear down at the end of this year. Initially, few within the game believed he would be available, but after Rizzo's firing, the team has indicated they will at least explore their options in the second half of this month. The Cubs implications are obvious. If dealt, Gore will be the prize acquisition of July, throughout the game. His combination of affordability, team control and playoff upside will push his price tag into the stratosphere—start with Owen Caissie and Jefferson Rojas, much the way A.J. Preller started with Gore, C.J. Abrams and James Wood when trading for Soto in 2022. However, no player could more obviously or substantially increase the Cubs' likelihood of playing deep into October. Gore is the perfect target, because while he might require almost all their top available talent from the farm, he wouldn't rob them of the financial flexibility they need to make other moves. They could trade for Gore and still supplement their lineup and/or bullpen, or even add another starter for depth and insurance—as long as they're comfortable taking on some money in the process. A trade for Gore is a longshot. The Cubs might decide they can't afford to risk as much talent as the trade would demand on one pitcher, or they might simply be outbid. Since the odds have shifted and a deal is at least vaguely possible, though, expect to hear the team and the All-Star southpaw linked in rumors at least a time or two between now and the end of the month. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jordan Johnson-Imagn Images, © Katie Stratman-Imagn Images By the time the Minnesota Twins visited Wrigley Field last August, Pete Crow-Armstrong had begun the breakout that has made him one of the main characters of Major League Baseball in 2025. He wasn't yet the player he's been this season, but he'd made an important change to his mechanics that had unlocked some power, and that made it easier for him to stay in the lineup—where his defense and baserunning could lend him major value. That week, though, Byron Buxton was sidelined by back tightness, after he'd slammed into a wall making a catch in the previous series. The Twins' star center fielder missed the whole series. Thus, Tuesday night will be the first time that the same center field is graced by both Crow-Armstrong and Buxton on the same day. It's an exhilarating moment, for fans of each of the teams involved and for the game itself. When the All-Star Game begins in Georgia one week from now, Crow-Armstrong will be in center field for the National League. It's very likely that, before that game is over, Buxton will take over in center for the American League, the local product made good. This week, however, the two get to put on their own exhibition, taking center stage in one of the game's most dazzling jewel-box ballparks. Not only are these baseball's two best center fielders so far, but any argument for anyone else feels a bit faint—a bit pale and silly. Julio Rodríguez and Jackson Chourio have the kind of talent to keep pace with these two, but neither is having that kind of season. Jackson Merrill has been diminished by injuries after an extraordinary rookie season, but his tools don't match those of Crow-Armstrong and Buxton. If you buy unreservedly into the defense of Ceddanne Rafaela or Jake Meyers, you can put them almost on the same level for this year, alone, but eventually, you have to reconcile the numbers with what you see when the players all take the field. Nothing any of these others have done, this year or in the past, quite allows you o do that the way you can with Buxton and Crow-Armstrong. The version of the game these two play is pulsing, sizzling, searing. It transcends their numbers—although, this year, their numbers are sterling. They take over games in ways no other players seem capable of, thanks to a rare combination of tools, skills, and baseball IQ. In many ways, they're mirror images of one another, sharing obvious similarities but defined by some of their differences. Buxton is a strapping 6-foot-2, listed at 189 pounds (but probably lighter) when he came up in 2015, but now a sturdy 210 pounds (probably heavier, though only slightly). He's a Black man from small-town southeast Georgia, and a right-handed hitter, wearing No. 25 on his back. Crow-Armstrong is a flat 6 feet, and is listed at 190 pounds. Unlike the version of Buxton who weighed that much a decade ago, though, he looks almost maxed-out at that weight; his frame doesn't imply forthcoming growth the way Buxton's did. The son of two actors, he's a White man from a wealthy section of Los Angeles, and a left-handed hitter. He switched to No. 4 this year, but came up wearing 52—Buxton's number, flipped. Once the game begins, though, their similarities take over. Both have the same, lonely rough edge on their games: an extremely aggressive approach at the plate. Both have major power, beyond what you'd expect—especially from Crow-Armstrong, but even from the broad-shouldered Buxton. Both have explosive speed, which shows up in the near-impossibility of turning double plays against them and in their ability to steal bases almost without risk. (Indeed, their efficiency on steal attempts is as notable as the volume of bases they take.) Both also have the rare gifts that make up an exceptional defensive center fielder. There's the speed, of course, but also great arm strength, tremendous reads and the ability to adjust in whatever way is necessary to make the play at the last moment. Each player takes pride in their glovework, but each also takes such immense pleasure in a clutch hit that they neither can nor attempt to hide it. Each plays with an intensity and a fearlessness that occasionally imperils them, but that also colors in their game with the detail and dimension that turns a very good player into a great one. Buxton has stretched his body past its breaking point many times, either by colliding with things too recklessly or by moving so ferociously that his ligaments and tendons simply couldn't keep up. At times, it's looked like Crow-Armstrong would do the same thing, but his great jumps in the outfield have gotten him to most balls with time to spare, and he's been wise enough not to try to run through the bricks and ivy at Wrigley Field. Playing every aspect of the game well. Pushing the capacity of one player to become the focal point of an entire game past its usual limits. The frisson of danger that runs up your spine each time they vault themselves after a drive into the gap; the shockwave they send through the ball when they catch it clean. Although Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani are the best players in baseball, and although it might be wiser to invest in Bobby Witt Jr. or Juan Soto than in either Buxton or Crow-Armstrong, none of those players are as vividly great—as sparking with ways to win games that don't both to hide themselves—as these two are. Buxton leads MLB with six games this year in which he's both hit a home run and stolen a base. Crow-Armstrong uses his balletic footwork to stop and thwart baserunners, turning a strong arm up to maybe the game's most useful. Buxton robbed White Sox outfielder Andrew Benintendi of a game-flipping gapper and sealed a Twins win in April, on a play even the other center fielders all around him marveled at. Crow-Armstrong created a run last month when he stole third base, then caught the third baseman in a tractor beam, froze him and beat him back to the base on a ground ball, setting up a rally. Each player had a sequence in mid-June in which they made a rally-stopping, diving catch on a play in left-center field, then hit their longest home run of the season in the next half-inning. Buxton did it on June 11, taking runs off the board for the visiting Rangers with a catch to end the top of the third: ek1MajlfWGw0TUFRPT1fQWxSU1hGMVJVVkFBQ0ZwV1VBQUhWUWRWQUFBQ0FBVUFVMTBDQkZZRFZBRUdCRmNE.mp4 He then hit a ball 479 feet with two on in the bottom half of that frame. ek1MajlfWGw0TUFRPT1fQmdKUVYxd01VbFFBWFZFR0J3QUhDUVJmQUZsV1ZsQUFBRkJUQmdFRlZRZGNWVkZm.mp4 Six days later, Crow-Armstrong turned a hit that would have put the tying run on base in the top of the eighth into an out. akQ5Z0FfWGw0TUFRPT1fVjFKV1VnQUhWMVlBV2xjRVh3QUhBRlVDQUFOUVV3TUFDMUlIVVFkVVYxWUVDQUlD.mp4 Leading off the bottom of that frame, he hit one high off the video board above the right-field wall. Each of these two can turn a run or two for the opponents into none, and then create runs for their own team in the blink of an eye. Each has a good chance to hit 30 or more homers and steal 30 or more bases this year. Crow-Armstrong and Buxton are superstars, at their best. This might be the end of Buxton's prime, and Crow-Armstrong might go through plenty of rough patches in years ahead. That's why this matchup is so special. Two uniquely brilliant players will take the field in turns this week, at their absolute best. More than just a trailer for it, this could be the game's best center fielders' own private version of the All-Star Game. View full article

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images The first duty of the big-league batter is to be on time for the fastball. That's the ante; that's how you demonstrate that you deserve at least a brief look in the majors. It's much easier said than done, of course, because modern pitchers throw so hard and have such devastating secondary offerings, but you can't really move on to doing anything else well until you're consistently on time for heaters in the upper 90s, with life and location. Michael Busch produced fairly well against fastballs last year, but this season, he's taken another big step forward. Busch whiffed on 21.3% of swings against fastballs in 2024, but that figure is down to 12.3% this year. Since he crushes the heater when he makes contact with it (92.2 mph exit velocity and a 17° launch angle), that extra helping of contact on the heat goes a very long way—sometimes literally. A more selectively aggressive approach has unlocked Busch's power this year. He's swinging at 37.4% of first pitches within at-bats, up from 32.2% last year, thereby giving pitchers no quarter if they try to sneak a strike past him. Teeing off more early in counts means pulling and lifting the ball better, but not necessarily pulling off the ball more. Indeed, though his pull rate is up significantly in 2025, he's also figured out how to use the cozy dimensions of left-center at Wrigley Field to greater advantage than he had in the past. Here's his spray chart for 2024. Here's the same chart for 2025. Note how he's traded in a lot of outs down the left-field line (although some of those were somewhat promising line drives, and not every hitter would have recognized the need to sacrifice them for a different kind of contact) for more balls to left-center and harder, deeper flies to the pull field in right. Always having had a discerning eye, Busch is spitting on pitches outside the zone and accepting his walks just as well this year as last year. Within the zone, on the other hand, he's much more dangerous. His contact rate within the zone is up from 79.6% to 84.4%, thanks to staying closed with his front shoulder longer and accelerating later within the hitting zone. With a strikingly similar swing path and ideal timing zone to Pete Crow-Armstrong, Busch can feed off what Crow-Armstrong does and sees from opposing pitchers, usually batting a spot or two behind Crow-Armstrong in the lineup. He doesn't have Crow-Armstrong's bat speed—not by a longshot—but his swing is much more compact. Each of them swings with a steep tilt of the bat and tries to catch the ball while going uphill with the barrel. Each generates their best contact when they pull it in the air, which might sound obvious but isn't true of all batters. Busch's keen eye more than offsets the lack of relative bat speed, and while he and Crow-Armstrong are very different in offensive production profile, they're playing off each other wonderfully. On a team chock-full of offensive stars—with Kyle Tucker having his customary superstar-caliber season; Crow-Armstrong enjoying a dazzling breakout; Seiya Suzuki tapping into his power for the first time since coming to the United States; and Carson Kelly hitting like Johnny Bench—Busch has the best overall numbers. It's never a good idea to evaluate a player when you know they're at a local maximum or minimum; he obviously isn't better than Tucker on a true-talent level. After the weekend he just had against the arch-rival Cardinals, though, Busch has announced himself as a legitimate slugging star. View full article

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images Matthew Boyd hasn't made more than 15 starts or reached 100 innings pitched since before 'social' and 'distancing' ceased to be antonyms. This season, however, he's not only held up (under a carefully managed workload, but no insignificant one), but pitched so well that there was little doubt he would be named to the National League All-Star team when it was announced Sunday evening. Now, it's official: Boyd, at 34 years old, has earned that recognition for the first time in his 11-year career. Ruthlessly efficient and consistent, Boyd is running a career-low 5.6% walk rate, and has 12 quality starts in his 17 turns in the rotation. Among National League starters, only Spencer Schwellenbach, Zach Wheeler and Logan Webb have more. Boyd has never even reached 100 pitches in a game and has only bequeathed three runners to his bullpen all year, even as he's been asked to soak up an extra out or three in games at various points during the team's injury-ravaged season. He's made myriad small adjustments—a lower arm slot, which has begotten more run on his fastball; a firmer, tighter slider, some shifts in how he mixes and sequences his five-pitch arsenal—but there's no grand reinvention here. Boyd has merely benefited from the coincidence of being healthy and enlightened by age and experience, and he's finally getting the chance to show how good he has often been at points in his past. Had injuries not derailed his career for half a decade, he might have gotten this good long ago. Boyd was almost at this level of performance in 2018 and 2019, but fell victim to bad bouts of go-feritis, fueled by a breaking ball he didn't yet have good command of and a lack of feel for the changeup that has become his best secondary pitch. He's matured and improved, even though it was often hard to see it happening between trips to the injured list. The Cubs were excited to land him on a two-year deal this winter, even though the price tag ($29 million) made several other front offices raise their eyebrows and clutch their purse strings tighter. Now, Boyd is the linchpin of the Cubs rotation. Shota Imanaga is still better, when both are firing on all cylinders, but Imanaga is just making his full return from a hamstring strain that sidelined him for nearly two months. Justin Steele is out for the season; Jameson Taillon won't be back until at least mid-August. Ben Brown is in Iowa, and Colin Rea and Cade Horton look serviceable—but only just. Boyd is holding together a rotation that needs reinforcements, and while the team will surely look to make those additions over the next few weeks, Boyd's performance is how they can so confidently assert themselves in those pursuits. He's been a godsend, and in all likelihood, the Cubs have been the right place for him, too. He won't fly to Atlanta alone, of course. Already named starting outfielders on the NL squad, Kyle Tucker and Pete Crow-Armstrong will join him at the midsummer festival. The Cubs are no juggernaut, but the collection of players who will represent them in the league's jewel event—two offseason pickups, of very different scales and sensibilities, and their homegrown could-be superstar—speaks to the potential of this team. View full article