Matthew Trueblood

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images Since his blowup in Miami 10 days ago, Daniel Palencia has locked things down at the back ends of games. He collected his fourth save Wednesday night, and with each chance to secure a save, he looks a bit more confident—a bit more secure. Palencia seemed a bit too tightly wound for high-leverage work at times over his first two seasons, but he's settling into a role that typically defies settling. Palencia still cuts loose with his roaring exuberance once he records the final out, but until then, he seems to have figured out how to slow things down and keep his heart rate under control. The result has been better control, and with better control, Palencia could emerge as an irrefutable relief ace. That's because his fastball shape, which is becoming more consistent this season, is as rare as his velocity. Now that he's learning to pump it into the zone, he's blossoming into a unicorn. In the Statcast era, no pitcher has had quite the combination of movement and velocity Palencia is demonstrating, and it seems likely that no one's thrown quite this type of fastball, ever. Palencia's four-seamer is averaging 15.9 inches of induced vertical break (IVB) and 12.6 inches of arm-side run this year. With a slightly lower arm slot, he's found more of that horizontal movement, without giving up any significant amount of ride. Vertically speaking, it's a pretty flat fastball, but the run on the pitch is much greater than most fastballs, especially those that manage to maintain average vertical movement. Equally importantly, though, of course, is the fact that he throws the pitch nearly 100 miles per hour, with above-average extension, to boot. A triple-digit heater with that kind of run overpowers hitters. It's almost impossible to catch up to, let alone to hit while working uphill at all. The Cubs like fastballs that can do that. Justin Steele, Porter Hodge and Cade Horton all throw cut-ride fastballs that work in on the hands of opposite-handed batters and away from same-handed ones, with much more lateral than vertical movement. Palencia's is just the mirror image of theirs. It runs in on same-handed batters and away from opposite-handed ones, but unlike most hard pitches with plus run in that direction (the lion's share of which are sinkers), it rides like a four-seamer. That's why Palencia can induce similarly flattened, late swings on his heater to the ones Hodge, Horton, Steele and Brad Keller have drawn. Living on either end of this graph is better than being in the middle. Caleb Thielbar's fastball has elite vertical movement, but little horizontal wiggle. Hitters can get around on his 92-mph heat, but are usually underneath it. Palencia, Keller, Hodge, Steele and Horton force hitters to swing late and flat, thanks to that great horizontal movement. It's when a four-seamer moves more predictably that hitters tend to square it up best. The only pitcher whose fastball has held a shape similar to Palencia's current one at a velocity north of 97 miles per hour is the Reds' Hunter Greene, and even he rarely gets so much horizontal movement on the offering. In effect, Palencia throws a fastball no one else in the majors has, because he can get up to 102 mph and still has such lively movement. Palencia's slider is the pitch that will consistently miss more bats for Palencia, and because hitters have to respect his velocity so much, they also don't hit the ball hard against it. His slider is the out pitch in his arsenal, in the long term. Nonetheless, after making that change to his slot and getting himself a hair more under control on the mound, Palencia's fastball has gone to a new level. It's a monster of a pitch, and armed with three offerings that work, he's become something better than the highest-upside pitcher in the Chicago bullpen: the best one. View full article

Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-Imagn Images It took a combination of good things for Kyle Tucker to race all the way around and notch that first tally for the Cubs. With one out in the bottom of the first, the first responsibility of the runner there is to make sure the ball is going to get down. Tucker made an immediate read. To give himself a good chance of getting the green light from Quintin Berry at third base, though, Tucker also had to be confident in that read and keep running, rather than freezing to watch as the line drive sailed toward the fence. He did. Finally, with his acceleration uninterrupted and the ball safely down, the race was on. Tucker's final challenges were to cut the bag smoothly and sharply at third, and to maintain his pace all the way to the plate. He did so, and easily beat the relay toward home. Seiya Suzuki had his RBI, and the Cubs had most of what they'd need for a fourth straight win and a sweep of the Rockies. That was the first time Tucker had actually been on first when a double was hit, all year, and he scored. He's been on second for singles 10 times, and scored six. He's not excelling at taking the extra base on balls in play, because he doesn't have high-end speed. However, he hasn't made an out on the bases all year, because when he does go, it's after making a strong read and it comes with excellent efficiency of movement. Tucker also has 15 stolen bases, in 15 tries. He's been all over the place for the Cubs, after reaching base—and, of course, he's practically always on base, with a .388 on-base percentage. He's notched four triples, too, and one of his nine doubles required him to get out of the box quickly and think double right away. Despite being a markedly below-average runner, Tucker adds a lot of value with his legs. It's a matter of great instincts and technique, and a bit of opportunism. He's on pace for more than 40 steals. He hasn't been caught stealing since Sept. 11, 2023, which was 28 thefts ago. As a team, the Cubs rank third in baseball with 72 steals, trailing only the Rays (76) and Brewers (74). They're 16 ahead of the Pirates, who rank fourth in the league, and they've been caught fewer times than anyone else in the top seven. Tucker is at the forefront of their plan, which is to keep pressure on opponents at all times. He takes 4.5 seconds to get from the left-handed batter's box to first base, and he's slow enough to be persistently stretched thin as a right fielder. When action is afoot, though, Tucker is making plays, and not just when it's his turn to swing the bat. View full article

Image courtesy of © Gregory Fisher-Imagn Images It's been a while since Génesis Cabrera flashed the relief ace upside that made him a hot commodity for a year or two around the time of the pandemic. Part of the trade that sent Tommy Pham to the Rays, Cabrera, 28, spent a few years as part of a fearsome but erratic knot of leverage relievers in a chaotic Cardinals bullpen. He was part of an even smaller trade in July 2023, heading to the Blue Jays, but they cut him loose at the end of 2024. Cabrera signed with the Mets, but made just six appearances for them before being designated for assignment. Once he cleared waivers, Cabrera had the right to elect free agency, and did so. The Cubs signed him to a one-year, big-league deal, and he'll now join a bullpen that already has two established lefty arms (Caleb Thielbar and Drew Pomeranz) but can always use more depth. He's still an intriguing arm, with a sinker that sits on the high side of 96 miles per hour; a hard, cutterish slider that isn't what it used to be but works in the right sequences; a curveball with more depth; and a high-riding four-seamer that occasionally straightens out on him too much. It's a fine mix, and deeper than you see from most hard-throwing lefty relievers. His biggest problem, historically, has been controlling it. For his career, he's walked 11.3% of opposing batters. The good news is that Cabrera does seem to be getting more comfortable with a reengineered version of himself, centered more around the slider and sinker and less around the four-seamer that was never especially well-controlled. He's taken good advice in his last two stops, with the Blue Jays and Mets, and might be on the verge of unlocking something that would let his arsenal play up nicely in the short term, given wise usage. Cabrera is ineligible to be optioned to the minors, so he doesn't bring roster flexibility, but he's a more obviously tough matchup for (especially) lefty batters than some of the softer tossers the team has used. If he quickly makes it into a game, he'll be the 25th pitcher the Cubs have used already this season. Until 2012, the only seasons in their history in which they'd used 25 pitchers were the first two years after the last expansion, in 1998 and 1999. The team record for pitchers used in one campaign is 43, set in 2022. With any luck, these Cubs won't break that record, but they're going to use somewhere near 40 arms before the season is out. Cabrera, with his remaining upside, is a nice addition—but he's unlikely to become a staple. View full article

Image courtesy of © Katie Stratman-Imagn Images We talked a lot about Matt Shaw's struggles during the first few weeks of the big-league season, before he was optioned to Triple-A Iowa for five weeks. His leg kick didn't seem to work especially well against big-league hurlers, which was predictable. Less predictable, though, was that he didn't give himself a chance to work around that limitation—literally. By setting up farther from the plate than all but a fistful of other hitters in the majors (most of them a good five or six inches taller than he is), Shaw made it almost impossible to reach the ball on the outer part of the plate with his barrel. With an overlong stride that carried him out of the hitting zone too soon, he often couldn't even touch those pitches. Reaching that ball on the outer third has been much easier for Shaw since coming back, though. Why? He's gotten deeper in the batter's box, but closer to the plate—and his stride is much more controlled. Shaw's front foot is actually traveling about as far as it did before, but that's because he's starting with his feet closer together. Overall, his feet are ending up closer at contact, meaning he has more of his weight beneath him. He's closer to the plate, so he can deliver that barrel to the ball even on the edge. On pitches away from him, he's swinging 1.5 miles per hour faster (68.5 MPH vs. 67.0), but whiffing far less often (20.8%, down from 37.9%). That's how he's produced the opposite-field doubles that are the symbol of his renaissance, so far. That doesn't mean Shaw will be slotting back into the middle of the order any time soon. The Cubs' offense still depends on him only to keep the line moving and create jams for opponents against the better hitters at the top of the order. Now that Shaw has moved closer to the plate and shortened his stride a bit, though, he can actually accomplish that. He's in a stronger position to hit, and he's also benefiting from improving confidence on the heels of those adjustments. For the balance of the season, he looks like a viable (if not yet star-caliber) component of the team. View full article

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images Quietly, without making a grand show of it (or, perhaps, going as far as they should have, if this was the goal), the Cubs have spent the last two seasons stacking a lot of chips onto the table for 2025. This is the hand on which they were ready to go all-in, and not just because they might only have Kyle Tucker for one year. Indeed, Tucker was as much capstone as cornerstone, in their eyes. Their big expenditures on Seiya Suzuki and Dansby Swanson; the extensions they gave to Ian Happ and Nico Hoerner; and their steady investment in the pitching staff (bringing in Marcus Stroman, Jameson Taillon, Shota Imanaga and Matthew Boyd in successive offseasons) have all led them in this direction. When Jed Hoyer felt the pressure beginning to mount at the end of 2023, he got more willing to trade the future for a better present, dealing Jackson Ferris and Zyhir Hope for Michael Busch and Yency Almonte; then Christopher Morel, Hunter Bigge and Ty Johnson for Isaac Paredes; then Paredes, Cam Smith and Hayden Wesneski for Tucker. At each turn, he's tried to slightly mitigate the way those moves have drawn him toward commitment to this single campaign, with fringe maneuvers like swapping out Mark Leiter Jr. to restock the team with upper-level reliever depth last July and spending a rare Rule 5 Draft selection on the upside of Gage Workman this winter. That was also one motivating factor for the Cody Bellinger trade: to get back a pitcher whom the team felt would offset the loss of Wesneski. Here's the problem: the other half of the motivation for the Bellinger deal was to free up money to be spent on high-profile supplemental talent. Then, Hoyer couldn't get anyone to take his money. He made offers with higher net present value than the ones the players eventually signed to both Tanner Scott and Alex Bregman. He had two trades that would have supplemented the team's starting rotation at the goal line, but each was thwarted by medical concerns. The Ricketts family should be more willing to let Hoyer get irrational in bidding wars for key free agents, but Hoyer had enough freedom to land either Scott or Bregman. He simply didn't get it done. He also couldn't scramble well enough to complete a more robust upgrade of the team's starting rotation. Having to settle for Colin Rea, Ryan Pressly, Ryan Brasier and Justin Turner was not Plan A, or even Plan B—though, to various extents, those guys have been ok, and the players who might have held their jobs in alternate universes have had their own travails. Now, with Justin Steele out for the year and medium-term injuries really piling up, Hoyer is in a pickle. Trading Hope, Ferris and the rest over the last two years has thinned the farm system, especially in the middle levels. So has drafting in the middle of the first round each year, after too many respectable but unexciting seasons and without the benefit of any extra picks from the competitive-balance pool. Re-signing Bellinger (although to a deal that had little chance of actively hurting the team) cost them a chance to get a pick and restock themselves a bit last year. This year, they'll have a below-average bonus pool yet again. This roster is good enough to win the NL Central, but they need to do more than that to get the lasting surge of fan engagement (and the attendant revenue) the Rickettses crave. To make a deep run in October, they need outside help, which Hoyer has already acknowledged—but it's not clear that they can actually execute their plan and acquire that help. Hoyer's track record for pulling the trigger on the big move in July is spotty. He doesn't have a deep farm system from which to trade, and some of the pieces he might be willing and able to move would erode the team's depth even as it raised their ceiling. Already, they're seeing the dangers of diminished depth, anyway, with the likes of Reese McGuire and Chris Flexen having been called upon to take on significant roles as the guys they thought they'd be leaning on have gone down. Hoyer said last week that reinforcements would have to wait, because moves involving notable players simply don't happen very often before mid-July. That's true, to some extent, but if the team were in a stronger overall position, they could force the issue. If Brandon Birdsell were healthy, or if they were having more success with the final polish on Kevin Alcántara, Owen Caissie and Moisés Ballesteros, or if their big-money international amateur free agents didn't have a nasty tendency to run into a wall when they get to High A, the Cubs might be able to make a June trade, be it for a big name or for someone they merely believe they can turn into a star in short order. Instead, they'll have to sit patiently at their table, seeing what's on offer when the auction begins. Even when that happens, they won't have the heaviest purse in the room, so they're unlikely to bag the most coveted items. The 2025 Cubs are all-in, but they probably also have to get as far as they can with (more or less) what they already have. It's exciting that they're in position to make the postseason for the first (real) time since 2017, but they've had to stretch themselves thinner than they meant to to get this far. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images How many times have you heard a color commentator say it, over the years? It was a favorite saw of Steve Stone at the peak of his considerable powers, and the holster is always unfastened so that Jim Deshaies can whip it out when needed, too, so if you're a Cubs fan of almost any recent vintage, it's probably very familiar: If pitchers could master the backup slider and reliably reproduce it, they'd do it all the time. Well, maybe Matthew Boyd has cracked that code. After a full decade in the majors and through several iterations, he's meandered right into an awfully interesting slider this season. That pitch has, at times in the past, been his signature, anyway, but it's fascinating to see the way the pitch has changed in 2025. It's firmer, and it's moving less, and it's really sort of a cement-mixer. Hitters, however, can't do a blessed thing with it. Last year, there was far more active spin on Boyd's slider. A solid 53% of the spin on that pitch helped create movement, which is why it got a little sweepy and began to resemble his bigger, much slower curveball at times. This season, that active spin is down to 28%. He's spinning the ball right through the heart of the zone, too. This is not, ordinarily, where you want a red spot to show up on the location heat map for a breaking ball. Yet, Boyd is thriving with the pitch, getting righties and lefties out with it, just spinning that backup slide-piece into the heart of the zone without repercussions. How? Well, for one thing, he's dropping way down on it, which seems to be throwing people off. With almost a sidearm slider, batters are expecting way, way more horizontal movement than they're actually getting. As a result, they're either locking up on it or jumping at the ball—and now, we can document that in a neat new way. Baseball Savant's new suite of swing detail metrics give us insight into the shape and timing of batters' swings. It's obviously of the greatest use when analyzing hitters, but we can also use it to examine the way hitters react to particular pitchers and their offerings. For instance, we can take all pitchers and their individual pitch types, and plot the average attack angle (the upward angle of the sweet spot of the bat, relative to the ground, at the intercept point for that swing) and attack direction (the horizontal angle of movement of that same spot on the bat at the same moment) against them. Aha. We've got something interesting here. Because looking at attack angle and direction from the pitcher's side eliminates the quirks and quiddities of any given hitter's swing, the two metrics move in almost perfect unison for hurlers. If guys tend to have a greater pull-side attack direction against a given pitch type from a particular pitcher, they almost uniformly also have a steeper attack angle. It's just the nature of swings, if you take them as a composite. There aren't many things in baseball that are as tightly correlated as attack direction and angle on specific pitch types. There are three truly notable exceptions, here. One is Fernando Cruz's splitter, which we've long known is a unicorn of a pitch; he kills spin on it so well that it's almost a knuckleball. Another is Tyler Rogers, whose dirt-scraping release point just plain weirds people out. The other is Boyd, on his slider. Look at how far he lies outside the very tight cluster that is all these other pitchers and their pitch types, including the rest of his own. Even if you isolate sliders, Boyd stands out. There just aren't other pitchers who tamp down the average attack angle on their slide-piece while inducing hitters to get so far around the ball. The low release angle and the funky movement—the lack of movement, really—has lefties surrounding the ball, by accident. It has righties trying to flatten out their swings to find what they're reading as something more like a sinker. It has everyone swinging just a little bit wrong. That's helped Boyd miss more bats with the pitch than you'd expect, based on the attack angle hitters are reaching: But it's also just forcing a lot of weak contact. The average exit velocity against Boyd's slider this year is 77 mph, an anemic number that reflects the confused swings it's drawing from batters. Can he keep this up all season? That's impossible to guess, just by using these numbers. The dropdown angle is an interesting wrinkle, but as the scouting reports get updated league-wide, hitters might lock onto it a bit. They might even be able to train their eyes not to expect the big sweep implied by the spin they see and the arm angle. For now, though, Boyd is enjoying being a step ahead. As long as he can stay healthy, the Cubs will continue to reap the rewards of his unique veteran savvy. View full article

Image courtesy of © Sam Navarro-Imagn Images Although his new colleague has caught more headlines early this season, Miguel Amaya has been phenomenal at the plate. Carson Kelly is still slowly coming down from his extraordinarily hot start, but even as he does, Amaya is emerging as the backstop with the higher long-term offensive upside. Last season, we saw a glimpse of this, as he tapped into a vein of exceptional contact skills during the second half. In early July, with his career dangling in front of him by a thread, Amaya agreed to eliminate his leg kick and adopt a minimalist lower-half swing mechanic. For the balance of the campaign, he hit .282/.331/.468. In 173 plate appearances, he had 16 extra-base hits and only struck out 20 times. His plate discipline wobbled, and he went off the rails a bit in the final month of his first full major-league season, but Amaya demonstrated a real and valuable offensive adaptability. There was a minor problem, though. Amaya's new setup and lower-half move didn't necessarily fit his fast (but flat) swing path. He came up as one of the Cubs' best hitters in terms of raw bat speed, but without much loft in the swing. The result was a lot of relatively low-value batted balls, with inefficient contact resulting in some of that swing speed being wasted. He didn't find the launch-angle sweet spot very often, with a few too many pop-ups in 2023 and too many grounders in 2024. Nor was he pulling the ball as much as you want a player with above-average bat speed to do so. Ditching the leg kick gave him the opportunity to be earlier, but in practice, he just started later. He started elevating the ball better late last year, but he didn't start pulling it consistently. As you can see, that's changed this year. In fact, it's radically different. Amaya is now a dead-pull hitter, and he's also hitting the ball on the ground less often than he has since the very start of his career, two full years ago. That's how he's managed to generate a .287/.323/.529 line over his first 94 plate appearances of this season, despite not hitting the ball as hard as he did last year; striking out more than he did last year; and walking very rarely. The fascinating thing, though, is how he transformed that batted-ball profile, physically. Thanks to Statcast's new swing path, attack angle and attack direction metrics, we have a newly expanded ability to visualize hitters' swings and quantify their movements. In Amaya's case, this is especially revealing. Let's start with the headlines: One of the new numbers rolled out at Baseball Savant this week (Swing Path Tilt) can be thought of as the swing-change number. If a hitter has altered how they're hitting the ball, they might have changed their swing, or they might merely have changed their timing and their approach. To see which, check their swing tilt. If it's unchanged, the hitter hasn't really changed their swing. Swing path tilt gives the degrees by which a hitter's bat angles downward from an imaginary line running through the handle of the bat, parallel to the ground. The league's average tilt is 32°. Very flat swings sit in the mid- to high 20s, while very steep swings get to around 45°. Obviously, how much hitters tilt their swings varies based on which pitches they're swinging at (low pitches require more tilt; high ones demand a flat pass), but this one number can tell you whether the bat is moving materially differently than it has in the past. Amaya's has certainly changed. So, we're looking at an inarguably steeper swing, but importantly, this change didn't take hold as soon as Amaya made his stride change last summer. In August and September, his swing path tilt was just 31°, so he didn't steepen his swing when he altered the movement of his lower half. We can also study his Attack Angle, which gives the vertical angle of movement of the barrel of the bat at the contact point. A steep swing will beget a steep attack angle, of course, although they aren't perfectly correlated. Attack angle tells us not how the hitter orients their bat, but how they address the ball within the hitting zone. It is, in some ways, a timing metric, because the attack angle will change fairly dramatically throughout a swing, so if a hitter meets the ball just a bit farther in front of their body, the angle might be much higher—whereas if they start to catch it deeper, the attack angle will shrink toward 0°. Last summer, when Amaya changed his stance and stride, he only saw his attack angle go down. That's not necessarily bad news. Remember, he did strike out very rarely in the second half of last year, thanks to a huge boost in contact rate. Swings with flatter attack angles tend to be the ones you hear about as "long through the zone", with room for error on timing. You might mistime a swing with a flat attack angle, but instead of whiffing, merely mishit the ball. Still, it's noteworthy that the attack angles have jumped for him this year. We'll get back to that. Finally, there's attack direction—the horizontal angle of travel of the barrel at the contact point. In other words, has your bat yet passed the point where it's perpendicular to the incoming pitch, or not, and by how much? This is expressed in degrees, too, to either the pull side (if the bat has already passed that point of being perfectly square to the ball) or the opposite field. Amaya had, on average, met the ball slightly on the pull side, through the end of last year. This spring, there's nothing slight about that tendency. This isn't surprising, of course; we saw the spik in his pull rate, far above. Still, it's telling by how much the attack direction of the bat itself has changed. Let's talk about how he's moving in more detail, though. Statcast also furnished new visualizations this week, allowing us to see a hitter's swing from beginning (more or less, the moment their front foot lands in its final position) to end. That can help us see how, exactly, a hitter's swing path tilt, attack angle or attack direction might have changed. Here's what Amaya looked like in 2024 (left) and what he looks like in 2025, at the start of his swing. There's already a couple of slight differences here. Can you spot them? As you'd guess, for a player who has quieted his stride, we see that Amaya is more upright and less spread-out this year. He's got more weight left on his back side, and his front hip and foot haven't opened up as much as they did right away last year. Now, here's the moment in each season when his attack angle gets to 0°. Every swing has to start downward, of course, so it's good to check when a hitter's bat stops that angled descent and begins to get "on plane," as hitting people put it, with the pitch—and what their body looks like at that instant. We're starting to see the steepening of Amaya's swing come into play, here. Note that this year, his bat is not up to the same speed by the time he gets to attack angle 0. Indeed, his overall swing speed is down this year. Yet, he's closer to attack direction 0 already—and, crucially, look at the right side of each snapshot. The animated ball has entered the frame for 2024 Amaya. By the time he got on plane, last year, the ball was almost on top of him. This year, he's still working with some time. The steeper swing means that his arms aren't yet as extended and his bat isn't as fast, but he's going to be on plane better by the time the ball arrives, because he's started bringing the bat onto that plane earlier in the flight of the pitch. Now, here he is at contact, both last year and this year. Even at contact, Amaya's arms aren't as extended this year. In theory, that means less power—or at least, less exit velocity. We have seen that. Since his bat has been working uphill just a bit longer and is just a bit more past its point of flatness to the incoming pitch horizontally, though, he's pulling it more often—and specifically, pulling it in the air, much more often. His season-by-season Pulled Air%, according to Statcast, tells the story. 2023: 24.7% of batted balls in the air to the pull field 2024: 13.1% 2025: 30.9% As a pitcher must think about what happens if they miss their spot, too, hitters have to think about what happens if their timing is wrong. With his old swing, if Amaya was late, he was likely to hit a ground ball up the middle or to the right side. With his new one, that's almost impossible. A late Amaya will still line it up the middle or push the ball the other way. Here's the percentage of all his batted balls that have been grounders up the middle or to the opposite field, for each year of his career. 2023: 20.5% 2024: 24.1% 2025: 13.3% Meanwhile, if last year's Amaya was early, he'd have a chance to hit a hard line drive or fly ball—but it would probably be to center or left-center. He'd also be more likely to roll over and hit a grounder, because hey, look again at that contact point snapshot above: last year, he was closer to full extension and to rolling his wrists than he is at contact this season. This year, an early Amaya is more likely to loft the ball to left field, and while that can generate a few lazy fly balls, it can also generate this. MnJPazVfWGw0TUFRPT1fQVFaV1ZsVUhYZ29BQVFGUVVnQUhBMVZSQUZoUlVRSUFBVkpRQWdFRkJ3QUdBMWNB.mp4 Amaya has hit a bunch of balls better than that this year. He'll hit a bunch more. But if you build a steep, still-fast swing with a pull orientation and you're a bit early, you have a chance to occasionally mishit a home run. Last year, Amaya wasn't going to mishit a ball out of the park. Kelly's production has been a godsend to the Cubs. Amaya still has plenty to work on, including and especially plate discipline. After last year's change to his lower-half mechanics, though, we're seeing a true swing change in 2025, and it's turned Amaya into a much more dangerous hitter. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images You had to figure something was up. Porter Hodge hadn't pitched Sunday, and in fact, he'd only gone once since last Wednesday. If he were fully healthy, Daniel Palencia would not have been on the mound for the ninth inning Monday night in Miami, when the Cuibs had a chance to secure a one-run win. On Tuesday afternoon, we found out what had been going on. Ian Happ is back with the team, after being down for 10 days with one of history's mildest oblique strains. Hodge, however, takes his place on the shelf, with the same injury. It's unlikely that the Cubs will be as lucky with Hodge as with Happ. All else being equal, pitchers will often miss more time with this type of injury, simply because an oblique strain requires rest until there's no longer any pain when throwing. That means that, even once Hodge gets past the injury itself, he'll need some time to ramp up on a rehab assignment—and as Javier Assad has already reminded us this year, there's no guarantee that the injury won't be reaggravated, even with a cautious and steady return schedule in place. For Hodge, the Cubs will swap in fungible righty sweeper specialist Ethan Roberts. It's a long way from being an even trade, and the team's scramble for bullpen help is likely to get more dire before it gets better. Meanwhile, Happ's return on the positional side means the end of the first big-league stint for Moisés Ballesteros. It wasn't the impressive or exciting first week Ballesteros might have hoped for, but he does look like a hitter with a chance to be good in the big leagues. Now that he's gotten a taste of big-league stuff, he'll need to go back to Triple-A Iowa and demonstrate a greater ability to consistently elevate the ball. Reinstalling Happ into the lineup is a relief. It slides several players back into places where they seem to fit more comfortably, and takes Seiya Suzuki off the field. Suzuki passed his first extended test as a left fielder, for the most part, but since he's prone to oblique strains and that malady seems to be spreading like wildfire, some workload management is in order for him. The Cubs are still right in the heart of a very friendly stretch of the schedule, and they've begun that stretch 5-2. As frustrating as all losses to bad teams are, there are lots of bad teams left on the slate in May, and the Cubs just need to continue winning series against them. It's increasingly clear that external pitching additions will be needed, but too soon to guess what they might look like. For now, Hodge's loss is a worrisome development, but Brad Keller had already stepped forward into a role similar to the one in which Hodge started the season, and Ryan Pressly has looked better lately. If the Cubs can convince Palencia that having a third pitch only helps if you throw it; if they continue to get yeoman's work from superannuated southpaws Drew Pomeranz and Caleb Thielbar; and if they can find just one of their rotating cast of low-leverage arms to stick and stabilize them a bit in the middle innings, they should be ok. A division title (or more) is very much within the reach of this team. It's just looking more expensive than the Ricketts family would probably prefer. View full article

Image courtesy of © Sam Navarro-Imagn Images Ben Brown was in trouble from the moment he picked up the ball and climbed the mound Monday night. The Marlins had just seen him a week earlier, and they laid in wait for him. As our Randy Holt detailed earlier Monday, Brown must work ahead in the count, and he fell behind on each of the first two batters. That forced him to throw each a heater with plenty of strike zone around it, and both Jesús Sánchez and Agustín Ramírez punished him mercilessly. The Cubs were down 2-0 before Brown could get an out, and things didn't get much better for him. Importantly, even if he had filled up the zone from the first pitch, Brown would have had a rough night. When a pitcher with such a shallow repertoire faces a team twice in a row, it's big trouble. The Marlins were not letting his fastball by them. They sat on that pitch, and if any hitter sits on Brown's fastball (with its unexceptional shape), they're going to hammer it. Brown did adjust, going to the curveball with unusual frequency after getting blitzed in the first inning. It worked, too—to an extent. Brown piled up 12 whiffs on the curve, in 23 Marlins swings, and caught them looking at six more strikes on it. After giving up back-to-back homers to lead off the game and nearly giving up a third in the first, he didn't allow a batted ball in the air in the second, third, or fourth. He entered the fifth frame with six strikeouts, no walks, and a chance to cruise through the bottom half of the Miami order, enjoying a 3-2 lead. Instead, the Marlins made a counteradjustment, and Brown was cooked. Connor Norby and Liam Hicks each sat on his curveball. Norby got one in the zone on the first pitch, and lined a double into the left-field corner. Hicks watched a fastball strike and Brown's show-me changeup for a ball, then took another curve in the zone and whipped a triple to the fence in right-center. The Fish had tied the game, and were immediately threatening to take the lead. Brown, with just the two (real) pitches in his arsenal, was out of ways to fool them. Craig Counsell, however, let him keep going. The starter recovered with a strikeout of Derek Hill, on which he located both pitches well: curves below the zone only, one fastball in the zone after two curves for a called strike and one (right after it) well above the zone, where it could only have been a whiff or a ball. Against Javier Sanoja, though, Brown threw two straight fastballs, each in the zone and below the belt, and Sanoja threw the knockout punch, sharply bouncing a single through the infield at 105 MPH. Only, Counsell still didn't move. Brown stayed in to face Sánchez for a third time, and Sánchez got a curve with too much of the zone on it and singled, too, scoring Sanoja (who had stolen second base). It was 5-3 Marlins, with a runner on, and still, Counsell didn't take down Brown. He got to face Ramírez a third time, too, and with three high-and-tight heaters and a curve near the dirt, he struck him out. That brought up Otto Lopez with two outs—and yet again, Counsell held his hook. Sánchez, too, stole second, and Lopez hit a hard one-hopper through the left side. Woof. Finally, Counsell lifted Brown, and as he stared out toward the outfield and awaited Caleb Thielbar, maybe he saw the horses that were well out of the barn, galloping out to the horizon. This is a thing, this year. League-wide, when pitchers have a tough day (defined, here, by a Game Score of under 45; Game Score is a simplistic tool for summarizing an outing based on outcomes and duration, created by Bil James in the 1980s, and the average is just over 50), they get to 21 batters faced a tidy 76% of the time. The Cubs, however, have now had 12 such starts this season—and Counsell has let those guys get to 21 batters faced on 11 of those 12 occasions. It's been Brown three times; Shota Imanaga, Jameson Taillon and Justin Steele twice each; and Colin Rea, Matthew Boyd and Cade Horton once each. The only one in the set not to get at least 21 batters was Steele, and that was in the second game of the Tokyo Series, so (for multiple reasons) it really doesn't count. Counsell has simply refused to pull struggling starters as early as the typical manager does. Eight of these 12 outings have even seen at least 22 batters faced, and four have gone as far as 24 of them. Counsell does not always operate this way. In fact, he was a fairly aggressive hookster for much of his time in Milwaukee. The difference, this year, is twofold: Rightfully, Counsell sets little store by his own bullpen. The Cubs struggle to hold late leads, and still haven't found a reliable high-leverage arm this year. They have a bevy of guys you can trust with a three-run lead, but no one you want to hand the ball to if you have no margin for error. If he can steal an extra inning, even at the expense of a run, he'll often do so. He even does this with cruising starters, whom he knows might be about to run into trouble; he's betting on their bad outcomes being better than the average expected ones from his relievers. The Cubs' offense is so good that he can afford to think about managing workloads in his pen and to give up some mid-game leads. With the Brewers, he often had teams who struggled to score consistently. As the Cubs proved by storming back to take a 7-6 lead Monday night, they have a high-octane lineup that can claw back lost advantages. It's much easier to stretch a starter if you know you'll score a few runs in the late innings, and usually, Counsell can count on that. The strategy has not always worked. The simple truth is that the Cubs' bullpen still isn't good enough, in ways sometimes glaring and sometimes more subtle. On Monday night, one of those subtle ways became very glaring, indeed, as Daniel Palencia (a sensationally talented hurler with a bit of a problem between the ears in big moments, and with too little trust in his own third pitch) gave up the game. Nor is their rotation very strong at the moment, with Steele, Imanaga and Javier Assad down. Losses like Monday night's are the kind this roster will continue to suffer until (at least) Imanaga returns to stabilize the rotation, or until external additions bolster the whole staff. In the meantime, we can debate the wisdom of Counsell's plans. He's gambling, and he's lost his bets (in one way or another) about as often as he's won them this year. This style of managing doesn't seem to suit his strengths, even though he's aware enough of its underpinnings to keep trying it, and it might be time to take a new tack. On balance, though, you can at least see what he's thinking—and it's clear that the real solution to this problem must come from the front office, not the top step of the dugout. View full article

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images As you might have noticed, Nico Hoerner doesn't have a home run yet in 2025. In fact, he hasn't come especially close. He's only hit one ball more than 370 feet in the air this season, and that was to dead center at Wrigley Field last week—aided by a wind gusting out to center field. It didn't truly threaten to leave the park, and it needed a push even to force Derek Hill onto the warning track. Hill made the catch, looking rather unimpressed by the time it settled into his glove. This is the best Hoerner can hit a ball, and it barely topped 100 miles per hour, and he didn't get around on it. Nnk5R05fWGw0TUFRPT1fQlZkU1hGSUZBRk1BWFZGV1ZBQUhBQTlUQUZnQ1ZRQUFCUVFDQ1FvQ0NRTmNDQXBV.mp4 Only two other balls hit by Hoerner have pushed an outfielder as deep as the track this season. This one really did almost leave the park. bmJNUTdfWGw0TUFRPT1fQlFrQ1YxZFNYd0FBQUFBRFh3QUhCUUpXQUFCV0FsRUFDbFVIVlFKVVVnc0RCZ2NI.mp4 But that was to the part of the park where Wrigley is friendlier to hitters than any other park in the league. There's no big-league venue in which that ball is gone; it left his bat at a good-not-great 98 MPH. Here's the last instance, the least impressive of the bunch. M3k0Tk5fWGw0TUFRPT1fQWxOVkFBWU5WRllBWEFRS0JRQUhCbE1EQUFCWEFWWUFWQVFIVkFaUVV3SUhBRk5U.mp4 Even here, we're not so much marveling at Hoerner's warning track power as being forcefully reminded that left-center field at Citi Field is a short porch, just like that of Wrigley Field and Dodger Stadium. Hoerner has 146 batted balls 349 feet or shorter, and only nine that traveled 350 feet or more. Only Jacob Wilson Wilson, Steven Kwan, Luis Arraez, Bo Bichette and Jarren Duran have more of the former, and only Wilson and Arraez match him by having a mere nine of the latter. Hoerner stands firmly among the least powerful hitters in baseball. This is also a year with a pretty dead baseball. On average, the drag coefficient on the ball is up, dampening offense league-wide and taking flight distance off fly balls. It's harder to clear the fences than it has been, arguably, at any time since the dawn of Statcast in 2015. We have to seriously consider the question, then: What if Hoerner doesn't hit a home run all season? It's possible—and because he's a good hitter, except for his staggering dearth of pop, it would put him in position to make history. Thanks to batting sixth (most often) for one of the best offenses in the league, Hoerner enters play Monday night with 20 RBIs. That puts him on pace for 69 of them on the season, which would not only be the most by a player without a home run since 1987, but shatter that milestone. No one has amassed more than 53 RBIs in a season without clearing the fence (or even circling the bases on an inside-the-parker) since Ozzie Smith's famous 0-dinger, 75-ribbie campaign in the Rabbit Ball year of 1987. Given the myriad ways in which the game has changed since then, that record has felt utterly untouchable—but Hoerner is in position to challenge it. You can go all the way back to 1947 (before which baseball is functionally unrecognizable), and Smith's miniature miracle year is the only instance of a player driving in more than 56 runs without hitting a homer. The next fistful of entrants on the 77-year leaderboard are: Billy Goodman, 1949: 56 Willie Randolph, 1991: 54 Ozzie Smith, 1986: 54 Jason Kendall, 2005: 53 Matty Alou, 1968: 52 Goodman, 1955: 52 Dick Groat, 1965: 52 Bip Roberts, 1996: 52 Firstly, I think that in honor of his 1986 and 1987 seasons, Smith should get a belated Commissioner's Historic Achievement Award, like the ones Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani received from Rob Manfred a couple years ago. Secondly, though, this puts into perspective what kind of history Hoerner is chasing. He's in a unique position, and handling it in a historic way. It's an egg race, this kind of record chase. One homer would ruin it, in a wonderful way. Maybe Hoerner will make an adjustment at some point this year and get back to the handful of homers he hits in most seasons. With the ball flying like a lead balloon and Hoerner already a hair past his power peak (based not only on his age, but the hand injury from last year that is probably still affecting him), though, it's just possible we'll see one of the great achievements in the history of punch-and-judy hitters this year. Hoerner is a perfect little cog in this lineup, a cleanup man's assistant and second leadoff man rolled into one. It would surely be fun for Cubs fans, too, if he could bump the Hall of Fame Cardinals shortstop from this page of the obscure record book. View full article

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