Matthew Trueblood

After stealing eight bags against the hapless Pirates Monday night, the Cubs rank eighth in MLB with 120 steals this year. They need to run much, much more, though. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports You can do lots of math around the breakeven success rate on stolen base attempts. In some situations, the odds are in a team's favor even if they're only 68% to succeed when sending a runner. In other situations, the number creeps past 75%. Much depends on the game state, but the identities of the batter (and those due up behind them) and the pitcher count for something, too. The weather conditions matter. Injury risk has to be priced in, at times. It's a tricky calculation. Let's start, then, with a simpler one: Divide 120 by 143, and you get 0.839. That's the Cubs' success rate on steals in 2024: 83.9%. You can do lots and lots of math with breakeven rates, but they all come in well below that. The Cubs are eighth in MLB in Go Rate, a metric that divides steal attempts by plate appearances in which a player had a clear opportunity to attempt a steal. Based on the frequency with which they've succeeded, they should be thinking more about Go and less about Rates. Obviously, not everyone can or should steal bases. However, as the season has unfolded, it's become increasingly clear that the Cubs have several players capable of thievery--and that they're coaching them up well. Seiya Suzuki was a downright bad basestealer over his first two seasons in MLB. With 15 steals and 12 times caught stealing, he was actively hurting the team by taking off. He was caught on his first attempt this spring, on Apr. 14, too. Since then, though, he's 11-for-15, a respectable 73.3% success rate. Ian Happ is now 11-for-13 on the season, and 9-for-10 since Jun. 1. You already know about the exploits of Pete Crow-Armstrong, Nico Hoerner, and even Dansby Swanson, who has made speed a newly important part of his game over the last five weeks. In the modern game, with the pitch clock as a subtle mechanism for timing a pitcher up and the rules against disengagements as a deterrent to throwing over to limit leads, it doesn't require blinding speed to effectively steal bases. The Twins, for instance, are one of the slowest teams in the league, but some of even their slowest players are also their best basestealers. They simply catch pitchers, not napping, but triaging their tasks and sliding the slow-footed runner down their mental priority list. Anthony Rizzo used to exploit this brilliantly. During one stretch of more frequent play earlier this year, Patrick Wisdom did it well, too. Michael Busch might be the next project for the coaching staff. A good on-base guy whose feel for baserunning is better than it seems, he's shown no comfort at all stealing bases so far this year. He should have that ability, though. He just needs to learn to use it. Just 2-for-3 so far this year, he would be a good candidate to sneakily take a half-dozen bags down the stretch, if the team can help him commit to the bit--even if it means getting caught a couple of times, for learning purposes. The thing is, if you're getting caught as infrequently as the Cubs are and hitting for power as inconsistently as the Cubs are, you need to be running even more. The team is third in MLB in Go Rate in the month of August, but there's room to push further, and they should explore it. For as long as the team remains theoretically in the playoff race, every run counts, and their aggressive style on the bases is paying dividends. Those dividends could be even bigger, if the team got even more ruthlessly daring. View full article

The quintessential throwback shortstop of his time is throwing his game back to a style he's never actually played before. Image courtesy of © David Richard-USA TODAY Sports The constant in Dansby Swanson's game--the meat in the sandwich, around which toppings and bread styles can change without the essence materially doing so--is his defense. His offensive contributions have always been variable, prone to long slumps and impressively long streaks. However, the shape of that production has been fairly consistent. Swanson is a power-over-OBP guy. He hits for average, maybe, sometimes, as a product of hitting the ball hard when he's seeing it well, but he runs a high strikeout rate and a low-to-average walk rate. His strength at the plate lies in his ability to rack up extra bases more often than many shortstops. In his final three seasons with Atlanta, when he came into his own at the plate, he had a .265/.324/.451 slash line. He averaged 21 home runs and almost 50 extra-base hits per year, even though one of those seasons was the pandemic-shortened 2020. That power--the foundation of his offensive game, at his peak--has been missing for a long time, now. It was a crisis that threatened his viability as an everyday player. He batted .212/.282/.350 in the first half of 2024, after going .212/.297/.346 over his final 200 plate appearances in 2023. The batting averages there drag down both of the other numbers, but viewed another way, the fact that his isolated power fell from .186 over a three-season stretch in Atlanta to .137 over a full season's worth of games from August of last year through the break this year indicates a lower quality of contact. He wasn't hitting for average for the same reason he wasn't hitting for power: too many rolled-over ground balls, too many whiffs, not enough juice behind the ball when he hit it. Those are three different problems, but they're also related. They're about what you're looking for, as well as how your body moves. Fixing them is difficult, because when you're experiencing all of them, you're very much in multi-system failure. Like a knot that has been pulled tighter and compounded by tangling and time, it's hard to get the situation unwound even far enough to identify and tackle the underlying issue. For the moment, it seems like Swanson has given up on trying to be his whole, natural self at the plate. That sounds bad, but it might be exactly what the moment demanded of him. Since the All-Star break, Swanson is batting .268/.339/.366, a combination of modest-but-solid batting average and below-average power you just never see from him. He's commanding the strike zone much better, with his strikeout rate down from 27.0% before the break to 20.5% and his walk rate up from 8.3% to 10.2%, but his batted-ball data all says that those changes are a matter of giving up power to put the ball in play. That jibes, too, with what I broke down on Swanson almost three weeks ago. As that article pointed out, Swanson is getting on base with some dribblers and some bloopers recently. Even his double in Sunday's finale in Miami was a space-finder, rather than a wall-banger. He's become an effective hitter, for a little over a month now, purely piling up singles and walks. The key to making that a dynamic offensive profile, though, is speed. It takes a little bit of it to reach on those choppers to the left side, and a little bit of it to get to second on those maybe-doubles that require some courage and hustle. It also takes a good deal of it (and another helping of nerve) to steal bases. Swanson isn't slow, per se, but he's not especially fast, and he has absolutely never made that a substantial part of his game in the big leagues. He did steal a career-high 18 bases in his walk year with Atlanta (almost everyone lucky enough to reach what can be readily identified as a walk year will set their career high in steals in that season; it's just good business), but he was caught seven times in the process, washing out most of that value. Remove that year from the equation, and Swanson has never stolen more than 10 bases in the big leagues--at least, he hadn't, before now. At the All-Star break, Swanson (whom many believe has been hampered this season by a nagging knee injury that might require further intervention this offseason) was just 5-for-8 in steal attempts on the year. He took bags in back-to-back games in the team's mid-June trip to San Francisco, but otherwise, he hadn't even attempted a steal since May 1. After swiping third after hitting a double Sunday afternoon, Swanson now has nine steals in as many tries over the last five weeks. He's up to 14 on the year. In the first half, Swanson attempted steals in 6.2% of his opportunities. Since the break, that rate has more than doubled, to 14.3%. He is, in one way of looking at it, pretty much what Nico Hoerner has been for the last few years--not quite what Hoerner has been when he's been going well, but what he's been overall. There's a solid batting average and good plate discipline here. There is, suddenly, a huge speed element. Power is still absent, and that should concern us. The fact that Swanson has come out of the break running so well and so eagerly is encouraging, since it would seem to tell us that his knee is feeling better after five days off--but the fact that his power didn't come back might mean that it's gone in a more lasting way than we previously guessed. For now, what matters is that Swanson is finding ways to make big and valuable contributions to the team, even in the absence of what has typically been his signature offensive skill. Maybe he can come out on the other side of these struggles as a better and more well-rounded hitter than ever, but in all likelihood, what we're really looking at is just a great competitor getting creative in the pursuit of utility. That leaves a whole universe of possible futures on the table. View full article

The Cubs' 2023 first-round pick is a good player, and he's hit very well in the upper minors this season. That said, there are big adjustments (and therefore, plenty of risk) left to make for him, and it's premature to hope he can help the big-league team any time before the middle of next season. Image courtesy of © Cody Scanlan/The Register / USA TODAY NETWORK One of the privileges of living in our time is that we all have considerable access to highlights of even minor-league players. It's easier to get tangibly excited, and to gain a real sense of a player's strengths, than it was for fans who wanted to follow top prospects a decade or two ago--let alone those who sought to do so in the 20th century. We've had that ever-growing treasury of highlights for several years now, as decent broadcasts proliferated through the minor leagues and intrepid Twitter users learned to clip them and share short videos. Only very recently, though, have we also gained advanced data on some players in the minors, so we can try to marry up what we see on Twitter with what the numbers say. This is a crucial step. No one shares highlights of a great pitching prospect giving up two ringing doubles in one inning, or of a future slugger striking out three times. We can, and do, get carried away when we focus only on highlights. The numbers ground us, and for players who reach Triple A, we have better numbers than ever. If that preamble has you a little bit nervous about what I'm here to say about Matt Shaw... well, good, actually. That's appropriate. While Shaw is a legitimate and solid prospect, Twitter hype around him is getting out of control, and the major purpose of this piece will be to rein it in a bit. Shaw, 22, has had a very good first full season in professional baseball, but there are big questions remaining and some important things he will need to work hard to change this winter, if he hopes to contribute to the Cubs at the MLB level any time before next year's All-Star break. Shaw has 433 total plate appearances this season: 371 at Double-A Tennessee, and 62 at Triple-A Iowa. For the Smokies, he batted .279/.373/.468, and since his promotion, he's barely missed a beat, hitting .255/.387/.451. The highlights are flying, fast and furious. Ah, but when it comes to the minor leagues, neither the highlights nor the surface-level success tell a full story. After all, the question for Cubs fans is: Will Shaw soon, or eventually, be able to hit the best pitching in the world? And the problem with the International League, as a place to seek answers to that question, is that those aren't the best pitchers in the world. If you want to know how Shaw will fare when he does encounter that level of competition, you have to look under the hood--and you have to watch the highlights with a critical eye, rather than a merely excited one. Here's one important data point: Shaw is whiffing on 29.9% of his swings so far against Triple-A pitching. He's done better against fastballs, but that only underscores the problem here. His whiff rate on offspeed and breaking pitches is around 42%. We don't have pitch-type breakdowns for his time in Double-A, but we can say that his overall whiff rate there was a more manageable 23.2%. That's good, but not exceptional, and probably not good enough for a hitter most people expected to be a hit-over-power player in the big leagues. Then again, Shaw has shown a bit more pop than those same people might have expected. He only has 32 extra-base hits on the season, but 17 of them have cleared the wall. In his short time in Iowa, he's hit 13 balls at more than 100 miles per hour off the bat, and his 90th-percentile exit velocity is 106.2 miles per hour. It's impressive that, in just a few weeks at the level, he already has at least one batted ball with a triple-digit exit velocity and a positive launch angle against five different pitch types. Is there a whole lot more power here than was projected from Shaw? In short: probably not. That's a slightly cruel pun, but a necessary one. Shaw is listed at 5-foot-9, which might be generous. Being short does not disqualify one from hitting for power, of course. José Altuve does alright for himself. So did Dustin Pedroia, to whom Shaw has drawn the odd comparison anyway. The smaller you are, though, the more work has to go into generating power. So far, in his professional career, Shaw is doing that work with a huge leg kick. You can see it in the video above. You can also see how vulnerable that will be to elite stuff, especially from more polished and wily pitchers. Shaw false starts while waiting for the pitcher to kick and fire. That can happen, if a hitter is balanced and very talented, which Shaw proves himself to be by staying through the ball and driving it the way he does. Still, pitchers with more looks at him and more, better pitches at their disposal will wreck him until he creates a more balanced timing element for his swing. When we talk about timing in hitting, we tend to think of making a fast enough swing to keep up with the fastball, and about having hands smart enough to adjust the bat path when it turns out not to be a fastball coming. It's really more than that, though. The fight to get timing right starts before the pitcher even delivers the ball. It's an adversarial dance between batter and pitcher, and when you use a leg kick as big as Shaw's, you can pretty easily be forced out of step. Moreover, we shouldn't fail to notice the low number of overall extra-base hits, just because more than half have cleared the shallower fences of the minor leagues. If Shaw can't consistently produce gap power, the pressure on his profile increases. He'll have to either adopt an Isaac Paredes- or Altuve-style pull-heavy approach designed to get him to 20-plus homers (unlikely to work, in his case), or dramatically increase those contact rates. Doing the latter with the leg kick intact is even more unlikely than Shaw maturing into a surprise slugger. Athletes good enough to find success this far up the competitive chain have already been through some adjustments, and know they'll have to make more. Shaw might very well make a big set of changes this winter, quieting his leg kick or modifying the way he balances his body during it, and come to camp next year ready to compete for a roster spot. He's nowhere near ready to have success in the majors yet, though, and in fact, it would be wise to keep a lid on optimism about him for the time being. He's likely to be a big-leaguer, but paradoxically, his success in his pro stops so far doesn't actually augur stardom. Rather, pro pitchers have shown him what he'll have to do to catch up to and eventually beat their betters. Hopefully, Shaw and the Cubs see that writing on the walls, even as fly balls keep carrying over them off Shaw's bat. View full article

A major mechanical change made early last month has drawn a lot of attention, but it might be a bit of a red herring. Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-USA TODAY Sports As baseball fans, it can be frustratingly difficult to see the difference between a player making good moves on the mound or at the plate, and one who's failing. So many of the mechanical separators, in this game of inches played on several acres, are subtle enough to completely slip by even a relatively engaged fan. It's not an easy game to love, sometimes. That's why, as fans, we get especially excited when a player makes a successful adjustment that runs toward the broad and obvious. It's reassuring. The game opens up for us a bit, because we feel like we can see what's happening. It's hard to figure out why Kyle Hendricks's sinker won't quite tuck into the landing spot he was aiming for anymore, but it's easy to see what changed for Miguel Amaya during the first week of July. For those who missed the story, it was well-documented by Marquee's Andy Martinez. During an interregnum in which they gave backup catcher Tomás Nido three straight starts to reset their young catcher, the Cubs coaching staff approached Amaya about utilizing a toe drag--another name for it might be a toe turn; it involves turning the heel of the batter's front foot skyward and the sole of their cleat toward the pitcher--instead of the leg kick that had been his way of getting into his stride for his whole life to that point. Amaya felt deeply uncomfortable, but he agreed to try it--not just because, as Martinez reported, the team asked Nelson Cruz to endorse the mechanical tweak, but because (as Cruz basically relayed to the youngster) there really wasn't much to lose. From mid-April through the time of that change, Amaya batted .164/.234/.207, in 155 plate appearances. He was, in a sense, very lucky the Cubs had no real alternatives to him throughout that time. That's a slump long and deep enough to terminate a career. As I wrote when Statcast began publishing bat-tracking data in early May, Amaya was one of the stars of that reveal, from a Cubs perspective. However, the headline of that very article lays bare what held him back: "Miguel Amaya Has to Rediscover His Plate Discipline." He was swinging at everything, and that was holding him back, far more than any mechanical element. That said, there's no doubt that mechanics and approach have a relationship to one another. Let's turn around the concept for a moment, to demonstrate. Here's Amaya, from early June, being frozen on a breaking ball up in the zone, the kind of pitch he should have hit and that was in the zone from the moment it left the pitcher's hand. Amaya Frozen.mp4 Let a lot of pitches like that one go, and you don't last long in the league. The problem was that, with the leg kick, Amaya was wired into one particular pitch type every time he dug into the box. He had to guess along with pitchers, because his timing was not very adaptable. If he got the breaking ball when he was sitting on a heater, he either flailed hopelessly at it or locked up completely. Relatedly, pitchers could beat him with even mediocre fastballs on the inner half, because in order to leave anything for the breaking ball, he had to start a little bit too late to get to inside heat. Amaya Whiff June on Sinker.mp4 One of the chief advantages of the toe drag is that it's a very balanced, adaptable timing mechanism. Cruz is not its most famous practitioner, by a longshot: it's what Shohei Ohtani does in the box. Making the change to a toe drag has, by any reasonable criteria, worked gorgeously. Since being reinstalled in the lineup with his new setup and timing mechanism on Jul. 7, Amaya is hitting .299/.341/.506, in 85 plate appearances. He's cut his strikeout rate nearly in half. His grand slam on Thursday afternoon was an affirmation of his huge progress over the last month and a half. There are two natural questions to ask, in the wake of this turnaround. The first is much more important: Can he sustain this? The second is purely for our intellectual curiosity: Is the improvement a direct result of the mechanical change? Unfortunately, I'm not sure the answer to either question is "yes," at least so far. Let's dig in on it. We can start with good news. Remember that high-and-away slider that locked up Amaya with his old moves in the box? Here's a similar pitch, on the other side of his change. Amaya w Toe Turn.mp4 You can see that extra balance, and the ability to slightly alter when he fires his hands, while tracking the ball well. This is why he's made more contact since the change, and why he's able to hit for average with the new swing--at least so far. With a smaller set of moves in his lower half, Amaya can also get his barrel cleanly through and hit the inside fastball more squarely. Amaya Gets Hands In.mp4 That's two different problems we could clearly identify in his attack before going to the toe drag, at least partially solved by the switch thereto. That's exciting, especially as mere anecdotes within the broader context of those gaudy numbers since the change. Why, then, should anyone think the mechanical change inessential to the improved results? Well, consider this chart, showing the rolling average of Amaya's chase rate by week throughout the season. This is the percentage of pitches outside the strike zone at which he swings. As we discussed above, there is almost always some relationship between mechanics and approach. Still, what the right side of this chart suggests most to me is not an epiphany about plate discipline fueled by a mechanical cleanup. Rather, it looks like an overly aggressive hitter swung less often for a while, due to a deep discomfort with a new physical swing. We don't even really have to speculate to say that. In the piece by Martinez linked above, coaches acknowledged that the transition was difficult for Amaya. If he's going to go back to swinging at nearly 40% of the non-strikes he sees now that he's comfortable in his swing again, as has been the case for much of August, the good times are not going to last. On the other hand, swinging more because one is more comfortable can be a good thing. It can mean one has figured out how to really use a new or modified swing. In that case, it would be a good thing to see a hitter change their swing rate, within reason. They might just take off as a slugger. Indeed, Amaya and the coaches talked about his feeling weak and unable to generate power when he first made the switch to the toe drag. The cage work was uneasy, because he couldn't get the force he wanted to--the force he was used to--into his swing. Over the last few weeks, that's changed. That cavernous drop in his rolling average swing speed for the early part of July is Amaya really struggling to generate the bat speed that is a huge part of his game. The new swing was not an easy install. The big jump to a level beyond the one he established early this season after that, though, says he's gotten through that difficult period of adjustment. He's figured out, even without the near-superhuman strength that allowed Cruz and allows Ohtani to do it, how to create lethal bat speed with the toe drag in place of the leg kick. The homers he's hit over the last week are clear evidence of his consolidating talent. Amaya w Toe Turn on Heat.mp4 That said and shown, though, Amaya's average and high-end exit velocities are both down since the change. Even now that he's creating more bat speed than ever, he's not squaring the ball up measurably more than he did with his old swing, in terms of getting actual exit velocity out of his swing speed. Furthermore, since ratcheting the speed of his swing back up, he's also whiffing and chasing more. Here, then, is a grand unified theory of the Miguel Amaya Renaissance, complete with a forecast of its future: Amaya needed a change that would spark a turnaround, not primarily in his address of the ball, but in his pitch selection and plate approach. Multiple mechanical changes might have accomplished this, because part of the effect was designed to be akin to a placebo: Boost his confidence, so he can regain a sense of control and take a more focused tack in the box. However, the toe drag nicely facilitates Amaya's natural power, as evidenced by some of its other famous users. It also directly addressed the major vulnerability of his swing, which was manipulable timing, which made the fit felicitous. Some of what we've seen since the change is the result of better swing decisions, which could just as easily have been made without the mechanical tweaks. Importantly, that improved decision-making has eroded recently. Most of his future viability as a first-division backstop depends on those swing decisions. Still, the simultaneous increase in swing speed and swing rate recently tells us Amaya is getting more comfortable with the new setup. In the long run, that's a good thing. Will Amaya finish turning the corner and enter the offseason as the team's clear first-string catcher for 2025? It's hard to guess, right now. However, with this better understanding of what's been happening since he made his swing change, we can reasonably hope to have a better sense of it by the end of the season. Six more weeks to study the integration of hitting concepts with this still-new timing signature should give us some real and meaningful insight into Amaya, and either way, that insight is highly valuable. His toe drag might not be a panacea, but it's an important step in both his development and his long-term evaluation. View full article

Accidental close “Heart Attack” Héctor Neris is out, and with the focus shifting to the Cubs’ future, it’s time to identify and install the Cubs’ next closing pitcher. Image courtesy of © Darren Yamashita-USA TODAY Sports Bullpen depth, health, and reliability have eluded Craig Counsell’s squad at some critical junctures of the 2024 campaign. Yet, amid a late-season renaissance from the unit, the North Siders’ next long-term shutdown closer just might already be on the roster. Let’s take a look at the standout candidates. Porter Hodge Splashing onto the scene earlier this summer, the sturdy 23-year-old righthander wields a terse but effective pitch arsenal, featuring a nasty fastball employed 66.2% of the time. With his penchant for throwing strikes and an ERA of 2.08, Hodge can blow it by opposing batters as well as anyone on the team this season, but his youth is what could make him a serious threat for years to come. It’s probably too early to tell, but the possibilities are tantalizing. Tyson Miller Don't mess with the Chicken Man. Since coming over from the Mariners, Miller has more than impressed. Though he is just over half a decade older than Hodge, Miller is elite when it comes to keeping other teams’ batters from reaching base, ranking in the 98th percentile. Versus Miller, opposing hitters have only managed an average exit velocity of 87.5 MPH, and a barrel rate of 7.0%. When Adbert Alzolay was at his best, he forced a ton of ground balls and got hitters out faster than the Old Style kegs run out at Bernie’s. Albeit with quirkier, less overpowering stuff, Miller can do much of the same. Jorge López Far from being a “horrible teammate”, Lopez has been a revelation since moving to the “City of Broad Shoulders”. With an ERA of 2.44 and a WHIP of 1.25, López looks inspired right now. His off-speed stuff dazzles, set up by a sinker he deploys 37.7% of the time. He is a longer shot for this role, especially considering his past performances, impending free agency, and age (31), when compared to his fellow closer candidates, but he touts a level of maturity and consistency that piques your interest. Honorable Mention Drew Smyly Smyly is not a viable candidate to be the Cubs’ closer of the future, but, he’s delivered a striking number of quality, low-stress appearances for the Cubs in 2024. This year, in 50 innings of work, Smyly lays claim to 43 punchouts, and is yet another Cubs’ pitcher with a sub-3 ERA of 2.88. His veteran presence and steadiness are an example of the confidence and stability needed in the Cubs’ next elite closer. The fact that Héctor Neris is no longer a Cub feels like one of the biggest wins of the season, purely from the standpoint that increasingly disgruntled fans wanted him gone--and so, too, did the Cubs’ brass, evidently. The Cubs need a closer who can get the final three outs better than anyone else in their division, and hopefully, better than the whole rest of the league. Is he already on the team, or will a winter shopping spree be the remedy? View full article

Even after leading the month with a walkoff double and a home run the next day, the team's erstwhile fourth outfielder has been virtually invisible. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports Back in spring training, Craig Counsell was proactive and firm. He sat down with Mike Tauchman right away to tell him he would be on the team, because Counsell rightly saw the immense value of Tauchman's offensive stability and defensive versatility. A high-OBP left-handed hitter who can acquit himself at all three outfield spots when the need arises, Tauchman was a perfect fit for the Cubs early in the season. While he was sidelined by a groin strain in June and July, though, the ground shifted. Firstly, it's become increasingly clear that the team itself understands the fact that Seiya Suzuki needs to be an everyday DH. That created some opportunity for Tauchman earlier in the year, but with the team trying hard to give a long runway to Pete Crow-Armstrong and evaluate him for a future role, it's ultimately squeezed him. With Crow-Armstrong in center and Michael Busch firmly established at first base, Cody Bellinger has taken over in right field. For as long as Busch, Crow-Armstrong, Ian Happ, Suzuki and Bellinger are healthy, it's clear that Counsell sees no room in the lineup for Tauchman. Entering Wednesday night's game, Tauchman has only 16 plate appearances in August. He last started on Aug. 7, and even pinch-hit opportunities have been scarce. The player Counsell was so excited to install as a heavily used rotational piece is now an afterthought at the far end of the bench. Some of this is planned obsolescence, of course. The team hoped Crow-Armstrong and Busch would assert themselves, and if they did, it was bound to make it tough to find playing time in the outfield and DH spots. Still, it's surprising, not least because the Cubs could have traded Tauchman to a contender at last month's deadline, giving him a chance to play a role like this on a team with a chance to win a World Series--and picking up some minor prospect in the exchange. If they were going to keep Tauchman, it seemed to make sense to create at least a modicum of playing time for him down the stretch, so they can make a more informed decision about retaining him on an arbitration-determined salary for next season. By stashing him as deep in the dugout as they have, they're missing that opportunity, after letting the chance to get even a fringe prospect in return for him slide by the boards. Injuries, sustained failure from Crow-Armstrong, or an unexpected opt-out by Bellinger could restore Tauchman's relevance going into 2025. Even if Crow-Armstrong flames out, the team would probably next hand off center field to Kevin Alcántara, but having Tauchman as a platoon partner and cushion for the young player could come in handy. A Bellinger departure would open up a lot of left-handed playing time. That makes it reasonable to keep Tauchman, but then, the team also has to make room for Owen Caissie on the 40-man roster come November, and if Caissie turns out to be a capable regular, he's likely to get there by the middle of next season. In other words, in even the rosiest scenario for Tauchman, he probably spends another first half floating around to find playing time, and then gets marginalized again next June or July. In that case, he would no longer have any trade value, so the Cubs have missed their penultimate chance to move him. Their last one will come this winter, by which time they surely hope to have a clearer idea of how Crow-Armstrong, Bellinger, Suzuki, Happ, Busch, Caissie, Alcántara, and Moisés Ballesteros can help them in 2025. What they probably won't have, though, is much good intel on what Tauchman can offer them. It's hard to demonstrate positive or negative future value with one's arms folded over the dugout railing. View full article

The sub-.500 Cubs jettisoned one expensive and unwanted reliever Tuesday. Could they try to shed another, in the hope of sneaking underneath the luxury tax threshold after all? Image courtesy of © Darren Yamashita-USA TODAY Sports In their series-opening win over the Tigers at Wrigley Field Tuesday night, the Cubs turned the eighth inning over to an unlikely setup man: Drew Smyly. With a two-run lead, it was a medium-leverage appearance, rather than an exceptionally high one, but it still marked an unusual usage for the veteran southpaw. Smyly had only entered with the Cubs in the lead in the eighth or later and holding a lead of fewer than four runs one other time this year--in mid-June, when he tried to rescue the team from a Colten Brewer meltdown in San Francisco but failed, giving up the game. This time, working with a clean inning, Smyly mowed down the Tigers. He allowed a single and loosed a wild pitch, but he ended up with three strikeouts and a relatively worry-free 15-pitch frame. That brought Smyly's ERA for the season down to 2.88. In 50 innings spread across 38 relief appearances, Smyly has been a fairly valuable reliever. It's not quite clear how. His FIP is a much less encouraging 4.68. He's only struck out 20.8% of opposing batters, and he's walked 8.2% of them. Of the 180 pitchers who have made at least 30 relief appearances this year, Smyly ranks 142nd in strikeout rate and 138th in SO%-BB%. Some pitchers without a great strikeout rate or overall command profile have similarly solid ERAs, and fully earn them. The Tigers' Tyler Holton has a strikeout rate right in line with Smyly's, but doesn't walk people. The Athletics' Scott Alexander has similar strikeout and walk rates, but keeps the ball on the ground exceptionally well and keeps the ball in the park twice as well as Smyly does. That doesn't quite mean that Smyly is just a luck monster, though. Famously, he throws a unique pitch mix, with a sinker that acts much more like a four-seam fastball--in fact, that has trended that direction in an especially notable way this year, departing from last season to hold more of a vertical shape--and a curveball that has funky, fadeaway action for right-handed batters. He's designed, when pitching at his best, to induce some weak and unthreatening contact. Because the various third pitches he's attempted to add over the years have failed to blossom into real weapons, Smyly's value is confined to short or medium-length relief, but as long as that's his role, he does have the stuff to keep hitters off-balance and induce a good amount of weak contact. Hitters hit a lot of lazy fly balls and pop-ups against him, and interestingly, they rarely get jammed--which can lead to the flares that land just beyond the infield for frustrating hits. Note the absence of balls in shallow center field, here. He's not letting hitters use the big part of the field against him. The .248 BABIP opponents have run against him this year probably isn't sustainable, but Smyly's expected numbers suggest that he's tapped into something real. Last year, after his belated move to the bullpen, he racked up strikeouts, but he also issued more walks and ran into more hard contact. After offseason work at Driveline that has effected a change in his fastball movement, he's earning more batted balls that are automatic outs, or nearly so. Since moving to the pen last year, Smyly's actual opponent batting average is .221. His expected one is just .224. Opponents' expected .384 slugging average is a tad higher than their expected .381 mark. The gaps are wider if you lock in on this season, because there aren't as many strikeouts on which expected production is .000, but he's genuinely controlled contact well. That said, there have been a fistful of batted balls like these that found gloves for him this season. Smyly Special.mp4 Smyly's true talent level is not a 2.88 ERA, but it probably is below 4.00. He's a wily veteran, and has shown fairly impressive stamina and availability since his on-the-fly moves to the pen. Were I running a team in contention and in need of relief help, I would be eager to snag him for the middle of a bullpen hierarchy. Teams tend to be more circumspect about relievers without high-end velocity than I am, though--especially when they don't have great strikeout rates. They're also wary of taking on salary, even late in the season, and Smyly comes with a not-insignificant salary obligation. He's making $8.5 million this year, and because of the buyout on an option for 2025, he counts for $9.5 million against the competitive-balance tax figure for the Cubs. In among those numbers lives an opportunity, though. The Cubs should, at the very least, waive Smyly and see if any team wants to claim him. If anyone did, within the next few days, the Cubs could save almost $2 million in calculated salary, especially if they're able to replace Smyly with a player already being paid as a big-leaguer while on the injured list, like Jordan Wicks. It might not get them beneath the luxury-tax threshold, but then again, it might. We don't really know where they stand, and it seems like it will be very close, either way. Meanwhile, a team not worried about the tax threshold taking on Smyly would owe him about $200,000 less the rest of the way than the Cubs would effectively dump if he were claimed. That makes him fractionally easier to claim, for a team like the Twins, Red Sox, Royals, or Phillies. It's possible Smyly has already been waived, and not claimed. We might well not have heard about that, if it happened. If he were to be waived and go unclaimed, unlike Héctor Neris, he should stick around for the balance of the season. He's been better than Neris, is more versatile, has been part of the organization longer, and comes with a mutual option for 2025 that might actually hold some appeal for the Cubs. If they haven't already done so, though, the Cubs should certainly give waiving Smyly a shot. They could yet end up as non-payors of the luxury tax for 2024, which would come with some small ancillary benefits, and if nothing else, Smyly might appreciate a chance to land with a team who might make a run in October. He's an unorthodox bullpen success story, but not a smoke-and-mirrors one--or at least, in addition to the smoke and mirrors, there's also a little bit of real magic. View full article

This is going to be fascinating. It might be insane, or it might just be ugly, but it won't be boring. Image courtesy of Somerset Patriots On Tuesday, the Cubs cut Héctor Neris loose, designating him for assignment and immediately releasing him, after he'd previously cleared waivers. The move makes way for the addition of Jack Neely, the tall, mustachioed, hard-throwing reliever the team acquired in exchange for Mark Leiter Jr. just before last month's MLB trade deadline. Neely. 24, stands 6-foot-8, with a fastball that sits at 96 miles per hour and touches 98. He's an imposing and impressive mound presence, and since the Cubs got him, he's pitched 6 2/3 innings for the Iowa Cubs, giving up just one unearned run. In 25 batters faced, he had one walk, allowed four hits, and racked up 13 strikeouts. It's not the fastball that should garner the greatest attention for Neely, though. After arriving in the Cubs organization, he changed something about his gyro-style slider, and it now has a chance to be a bat-missing mega-weapon--or a total disaster. Neely really only throws the fastball and slider; he keeps things very simple that way. The Cubs haven't introduced a new pitch to the mix, and they haven't attempted a major change of fastball shape. As you can see, his pitches have moved in largely the same way since he changed organizations, with just a slight increase in the depth on some of the sliders he's thrown since coming to the Cubs. The Cubs also haven't made a major change in his mechanics; his horizontal and vertical release points and his extension at release are all virtually identical from his time in the Yankees system this year to his tenure with Iowa. However, there has been a change to his slider, which runs a bit deeper than the sheer movement on it. Here's the spin direction of the ball out of Neely's hand for each of his pitches, from the pitcher's perspective, for each of the organizations with whom he's pitched this year. That's a meaningful change, explaining the difference of a couple of inches in vertical movement on the slider, on average. (Note that he's also made an adjustment to stay behind the ball and get a bit truer backspin on his fastball.) Neely has always had a low-spin, gyro slider, meaning the pitch relies on cement-mixer spin direction to get its downward movement. A bit more of that spin pointing downward, though, would figure to be a good thing. Indeed, Neely's whiff rate and batted-ball data on the slider have improved this month, in the limited time he had at Iowa. He's throwing the pitch at exactly the same velocity he was before, so naturally, more downward movement is yielding more extreme outcomes. Here's where things get a bit crazy. Above, you saw the spin direction out of Neely's hand--the spin he imparted on the ball as he let it go each time. Here, by contrast, is the same histogram, but for the direction of the pitches' actual break. In other words, regardless of what initial spin direction might have predicted, this is where the ball actually went. The plot on the right shows that, thanks to that gyro action, Neely's slider consistently resisted the effects of gravity during his time with the Yankees' affiliate in Scranton-Wilkes Barre. This only shows the frequency of each direction of break; it doesn't show you that that resistance was very slight. Nonetheless, the pitch had a consistent shape. The plot on the left is chaos. It's pure chaos. With slightly higher spin rates and a hair more in the way of downward sidespin, Neely has the slider breaking in utterly unpredictable fashion. It's also not as controllable, but that doesn't necessarily matter. If it's sufficiently difficult for hitters to pick it up, they won't be able to hit it, and if he can throw his fastball for enough strikes, they won't be able to lay off the slider, either. As has been said by your favorite color commentator dozens of times (no matter who your favorite color commentator is), if you could reliably throw a backup slider, it would be one of the nastiest pitches in baseball. That's kind of what Neely is flirting with. Here's a scatterplot showing the break direction of Neely's pitches, by pitch type and organization. It's similar to the chart above, but gives you a greater understanding of how widely the slider break varies since he came to the Cubs. Average movement numbers, obviously, can't capture this turn toward chaos--at least, not very well. It's the variation that makes it so hard for a hitter to anticipate what's coming. Here, for the sake of a different kind of comparison, is how Pirates reliever Hunter Stratton (whose average spin direction and break direction on the slider are almost identical to Neely's) slider moves. Stratton's slider comes out of the hand with very similarly clustered tilt to that of Neely: sidespin toward the glove side, slightly downward. It's just that once it leaves Stratton's hand, it reliably takes just a little extra lift, acting like a traditional, tight gyro slider. We could look at the same plots for momentary Cubs pickup Vinny Nittoli, or for Brewers starter Freddy Peralta, and we'd see similar things: a fairly tight cluster of spin direction out of the hand, more lift and a bit more scatter to the break direction, but basically a gyro slider, swerving off the path of the fastball. The wide variance in the direction of break and in the overall spin rate is especially wild. It sure looks like there was a grip change, and now, Neely is throwing a chaos ball. Will that mean an extraordinary number of strikeouts, or will it just mean a struggle to hit spots? Will hitters pick up a pattern in all this noise on which they can lock in, to make hard contact against the breaking ball? Will Neely throw enough strikes at the top of the zone with his fastball to make use of this unique breaking ball? It's hard to say. Chaos means more questions than answers. The difficulty in testing the efficacy of this change by any means other than introducing it to big-league batters only augmented the urgency of bringing up Neely, though, which helps explain the timing of this move. Over the final six weeks, we'll see whether the Cubs have a new and strange weapon at the back end of their bullpen, or just another weird arm whom the league will forget about within a year or two. View full article

There have been better players in Cubs history. There has never been one who altered the game--who drew the entire miniature world of the diamond into his, and reoriented the entire sport into something new and more thrilling--quite like him. It's good, and sad, to see him again. Image courtesy of © Steven Bisig-USA TODAY Sports Whether Javier Báez is easy to root for, for you, depends a lot on what you want from a baseball player. No player in modern memory was more capable of taking your breath away than Báez, and at his best, few players in the last decade were better. Báez blended a bunch of unsubtle and typical baseball skills--top-of-the-scale raw power, better contact ability than you'd guess, and a throwing arm you had to see to believe--with some extremely subtle, even almost invisible skills that made him unique. That much of that has to be put in the past tense, though, makes the whole thing even more bittersweet than it might be otherwise. His talent was obvious even before he was drafted, back in 2011, and at his peak, it was crazy loud. The combination of a dancer's feet and a heavyweight's hands made him an extraordinary power hitter and defender at shortstop. His aggressiveness--he might have been, for a few years, the most aggressive all-phases player of the game I have ever seen--made the field and the crowd buzz with electricity whenever he was around the ball. His hot streak of stolen bases, extra bases taken against sleepy or too-slow defenses, and sensational, explosive defensive plays in 2018 was a tour de force more exhilarating and more valuable than Sammy Sosa's 20-home run month in 1998. Because it was slightly harder to capture it in statistics, it's not remembered this way, but it might well be the most incandescent stretch in Cubs history. He took over baseball games that summer in a complete and imperious way, possible most of the time only for starting pitchers--but more often than starting pitchers could do it. His game gave off tidal waves of heat and light. At times, of course, it all ran too hot. Báez's aggressiveness in the batter's box slightly ate into the utility of his hit tool, which has been drastically underrated across the years because of that fact. His fearlessness on defense led to some errors of enthusiasm, and the same on the bases (though it led to miraculously few bad outs) occasionally led to injuries, and while he played through lots of mostly unmentioned injuries over the years, he didn't always help his team by doing so. Sometimes, he was too compromised to be the version of himself that deserved to play, especially on the deeper iterations of the Cubs with whom he toiled. That's a full paragraph of forgivable foibles. The less easily comprehensible times were the ones when the switch on that 1,000-watt bulb that is his baseball IQ seemed to have been left in the "OFF" position for the day. He lost track of the outs while on the bases more often than is remotely explicable, given how smart and tenacious he was the rest of the time. He had some indefensibly uncompetitive at-bats, on days like those, where even the reverse thrusters he usually engaged to push against the drag of his lousy plate discipline seemed not to be there. Báez needed the crowd, the external cues to deepen his concentration. That's why he folded in 2020, much more so than the lack of available video to review in the dugout, and it's why the Cubs ultimately abandoned their efforts to keep him beyond 2021. It is part, but not the whole, of the explanation for his calamitous tenure with the Tigers. There's so much to the person of Báez. He's a kid who lost his dad at a young age, who moved from home in Puerto Rico to gain his best possible future opportunity by playing ball in Florida. He's not well-educated, because quietly, Florida spends a lot of time manufacturing ballplayers in schools that are an insult to that word. He's also a big brother to a sister who lived with disability her whole life, and whom his family lost just as his career was about to take off. He's a family man, unstained by any accusations of ugly personal behavior. He's a smart and passionate person, but not necessarily the kind of person the baseball world demands that someone be, in order to maximize on-field success. He's not as ebullient off the field as the brilliance of his game on the field would imply, and at times, that made things hard for him--with fans, with teammates, and with the media. Báez worked hard to become an exceptional player. He did it. He's done little to earn real enmity or frustration from any fan base. Yet, his work hasn't always been directed to improving the right things, and the way his career has cratered is just plain sad, for anyone who considers themselves a baseball fan. The kid who caught and played center field in the two halves of doubleheaders when he was a teenager never stopped wanting to be right in the center of the action, and it visibly pains him not to be able to contribute meaningfully to the struggling Tigers now, even while playing as central a position as MLB has. It's getting hard to remember how he reshaped the game. The way he broke down Will Craig of the Pirates on that May day in 2021 will live forever, because the internet has gotten its teeth deep into it, but that was just the most extreme example. Much more easily forgotten, especially as layers of dust and years of a sub-.500 OPS cake on top of them, are the time he let a soft liner drop to turn one out into two--during the NLCS; or the multiple times he played cat-and-mouse the almost equally brilliant Lorenzo Cain on balls that made their way out to center while Cain was there and Báez was coming around to third base--and then, suddenly, home. His showy but simple plays, like the tag he made while pointing in at Yadier Molina in the 2017 World Baseball Classic or any number of swim moves on slides into bases, remain vivid because they show up on Twitter and YouTube, but it's easier to forget the times (in a crucial late-season game in Pittsburgh in 2015, and again in NLDS Game 5 in 2017) when he picked a grounder cleanly and came home with a Statcast-breaking throw to nail a runner whom everyone had assumed would score fairly easily. The titanic home runs and the mouthing off with Amir Garrett have highlight value, but the way he waited back on an 0-2 pitch and varied his lower-half timing to hit an opposite-field, game-winning homer in 2019 receives much less remembered attention. bldqOWRfWGw0TUFRPT1fVndKVEJnWlZWQVlBRDFkUVh3QUFVd0VEQUFNRldnUUFCd01FVWxkWFZRTURBVkFD.mp4 If you're looking for a perfect ballplayer, keep looking. The Cubs of the era to which Báez belonged had better players, overall--or at least, guys who contributed more consistent value over half a decade and change. In history, there have been some Cubs (Sosa, Ron Santo, young Ernie Banks) who were similarly great even to peak Báez. None of them set baseball on a new angle on the table before you, though, to make it possible to see it in new light and understand new facets of it. Báez did. It's one of the great tragedies of the baseball moment that that version of Báez seems to be so far gone, so soon, but it will still be good to see him at Wrigley Field again. View full article

On Monday, a report by Bruce Levine of 670 The Score made the rounds, stirring Cubs fans to dream about the team signing one of the game's top pitchers this winter. Does it really make sense, though? Image courtesy of © Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports Though some fans overlook it because of the success Justin Steele, Shota Imanaga, and Jameson Taillon have had this year, the Cubs do have a glaring, imminent need in the starting rotation going into 2025. Those three veterans aren't guaranteed to maintain their good health, and after a season in which Javier Assad, Hayden Wesneski, Caleb Kilian, Jordan Wicks, Ben Brown, and Cade Horton have all missed time with significant injuries, it would take a unique level of arrogance to assume they'll come back next season and deliver a high volume of high-quality work in the big-league rotation. All that, plus, Kyle Hendricks is leaving. Thus, it makes a world of sense that the Cubs would consider a pursuit of Corbin Burnes, who will hit free agency at the end of this season with as strong a résumé as any domestic starting pitcher has brought into that process since Gerrit Cole in 2019. The 2021 NL Cy Young Award winner was traded to the Orioles this winter, but has been close to the same pitcher this year that he'd been over the previous three. His strikeout rate is down slightly, but so is his walk rate, and he remains one of the best pitchers in baseball at inducing weak contact. Burnes is tied for sixth in MLB in innings pitched this year, tracking toward his third straight with at least 190 frames, and he's seventh in WARP among pitchers, according to Baseball Prospectus. He's only going to turn 30 this winter; he's just nine months older than Justin Steele. Of course, there's also a connection between Burnes and the Cubs already, because until this year, his only big-league manager was Craig Counsell. The problem with a Burnes signing is that it would be massively expensive, taking up a huge amount of payroll space for a team that also has huge needs outside its starting rotation. Hence, signing him would have to be just one move in a complicated and very bold series of them. The Cubs need to get ahold of an impact player at one of the few positions they don't already have locked down for the medium-term future, in order to upgrade a below-average offense that hasn't proved capable of keeping them in the race this season. They also need to move on from some bad money and freshen their books, particularly if they intend to take on a line item as hefty as a Burnes deal. The team's farm system is strong, albeit without either the every-level depth or the top-end star power that marks the very best groups in baseball. They have the firepower to, for instance, put together an appealing trade package for Angels catcher Logan O'Hoppe, whom they've prized for years. They might elect to keep Matt Shaw, whose introduction to Triple-A Iowa has been encouraging, and slot him into their everyday lineup right away. If they do so, though, they need to create space for Shaw, and they need to clear money both to accommodate Burnes and to prepare themselves for potential extensions with Shaw, a new arrival like O'Hoppe, and/or Isaac Paredes. Specifically, that could mean trading Nico Hoerner. It could mean trading Taillon. In just the right circumstances, it could mean trading Steele, although it's unlikely that a trade package worth the attendant risks for the Cubs would materialize during the winter. If that trade were going to happen, it would have happened last month, when desperate contenders and the lackluster Cubs were in simpler positions for trading. One way or another, though, signing Burnes would need to come with a bevy of other transactions, aimed at making the Cubs a better team around and beyond their starting staff. That makes such a signing unlikely, but we knew that. Even if Levine is right that Burnes will be a focal point for the team going into the winter, we know that Jed Hoyer doesn't like to allocate his resources the way he would need to in order to make a Burnes addition work. We also know that the Cubs are likely to surpass the luxury-tax threshold this winter, putting up small but meaningful roadblocks to signing any player with a qualifying offer attached to them. In all likelihood, the Cubs will need to be more creative and accept more risk in the process of upgrading their rotation this winter. Burnes sure is an appealingly unsubtle potential solution to their problems, though. View full article

Chicago's most dangerous hitter is also one of their most disciplined. Are umpires behind the plate denying him the full value of that skill? To many Cubs fans' eyes, it's not a question of if umpires are unfair to Seiya Suzuki, but one of why. Watching him pile up 38 called strikeouts (12th-most in MLB, trailing mostly players with 100 or so more plate appearances) and seeing a lot of 1-0 counts go to 1-1 when it looked like they could have gone to 2-0, those watchers have come to the reasonable conclusion that Suzuki is getting a raw deal. He's become a poster child, in some quarters, for the need to implement a technology-assisted strike zone, on the theory that he's a better hitter than the skills or dispositions of MLB umps have allowed him to demonstrate. That conclusion is reasonable, based on watching games and on how our fallible human brains work, but is it supported by objective data? When you break down Suzuki's taken pitches, do the numbers show the same magnitude and direction of impact that Cubs fans perceive? It's a little bit more complicated. Firstly, we have to acknowledge a crucial fact that is often underdiscussed in this type of debate. Suzuki swings very infrequently, overall. He's excellent at not expanding his strike zone, with a chase rate in the 94th percentile among hitters who have seen at least 1,200 pitches this season, but he's in the 10th percentile for swing rate on pitches within the zone, too. The difference between his in- and out-of-zone swing rates is actually a hair below average. By being so selective, he exposes himself to more potential called strikes on the edges of the zone. Still, overall, there has been a slight bias against Suzuki. Its effect has been vanishingly small. According to count-sensitive framing runs above average (FCRAA), Suzuki has lost just 0.11 runs to bad calls this season, though that's a net total. Few hitters have gotten as many unfriendly calls, like this one: A Very Bad Call on Seiya.mp4 Suzuki has been the victim of 28 called strikes rated as clear balls, with no higher than a 25% chance of being called a strike in a neutral setting. Only Corbin Carroll and Randy Arozarena have suffered more such calls, with Isaac Paredes tied with Suzuki at 28. On the other hand, none of those three have gotten as many called balls on pitches rated as clear strikes, with at least a 75% probability of being called, as Suzuki has. In fact, only Aaron Judge and Jonathan India have gotten more of those friendly calls than Suzuki, on pitches like this: Another Friendly Call on Seiya.mp4 Here's where things really get interesting. Obviously, Suzuki forces umpires to make more close calls than almost any other hitter in the league. He's gaining a lot of value on some borderline pitches, and losing a lot of value on others, and much of it washes out. Fans see all of these pitches, when they watch games, but they tend to give Suzuki credit for close takes when the call goes his way, yet blame the umpires when the call goes against him. That's natural; it's a blend of various patterns in the way our brains work. Still, it's distortionary. Some substantial share of the perceived unfairness to Suzuki by umpires is really just the way fans experience randomness--as a cruel and biased force, rather than a chaotic but essentially fair one. That would be true, at least, except that there is a pattern to the errors umpires make on Suzuki--or, more plausibly, an error in the way we're capturing their calls. Here's how Suzuki's Strike Looking Above Average rate looks, based on the location of the pitch: Maddening though it is for many fans, the top and bottom of the strike zone are essentially subjective. The horizontal zone is bounded by the edges of home plate, and when a pitch is off the plate, it has to be counted as a ball. The vertical zone, though, only has theoretically solid boundaries. How a hitter stands in the box partially determines where those boundaries are set, and even then, we're asking the umpire to judge the location of the ball with respect to those boundaries, without very good visual markers to set it. Thanks to choices made by production trucks throughout MLB, the white box dominates the way we watch the game. A more accurate version of it also delineates balls from strikes in models like the one rating Suzuki's zone as basically neutral. It helps that such models treat pitches near the edges probabilistically--i.e., that a pitch called a strike in a location where it would be one just half the time only counts as an extra half a strike against Suzuki for the purposes of evaluating how he's officiated--but those models still assume that all pitches at a given vertical location to a hitter of a given height have the same chance of being called a strike. Pretty clearly, that's not true. Here's a very typical called strike against Suzuki, that (according to the modeled zone, with its firm but subjective bounds) ought not to have been: Another Bad Call on Seiya.mp4 Certainly, based on how he's reacted to them throughout his career, Suzuki doesn't think that should be a strike. The model doesn't think so, either. When you see where it's caught, though, does it really look extreme or egregious--except in that it's above the magic white box? Meanwhile, here's a pitch that wasn't called a strike, but clearly should have been, based on the model. A Friendly Call on Seiya.mp4 This pitch wasn't well-framed, which can always be another confounding factor, but it does clearly nip the bottom edge of the box. At the same time, it doesn't feel like an egregious miss, does it? If you cut the zone in half vertically, the numbers for Suzuki leap flying off the page. In the upper half of the zone (roughly speaking, anything above the belt), Suzuki has had 34.8 extra strikes called against him this season. That's the highest number among the 208 batters who have seen at least 500 pitches in those locations this season. His -5.3 FCRAA in the upper half of the zone is also the league's outlier; umps have taken 5.3 runs from him at the top edge. In the bottom half of the zone, though, the men in blue have given Suzuki 5.2 runs, which is the highest figure of the 294 batters with at least 500 pitches seen below the belt. They've given him, on balance, 25.2 extra balls in those locations. It all nearly comes out in the wash. To that observation, add this one: Suzuki swings considerably more at pitches up in the zone. His overall swing rate is higher, 45.1% to 36.6%. So is his swing rate on pitches with between a 20% and an 80% chance to be called a strike, based on framing models, 53.6% to 34.3%. The logical conclusion from all these observations is not that Suzuki is being robbed, or that he's being too passive. It's just that we need to stop treating the strike zone you see on TV for him as accurate. For whatever reason, based on how he stands in the box, how he swings, or some other inscrutable factors, umpires clearly perceive his zone to have higher bottom and top edges than the computers have dialed in. Suzuki agrees. Look at his swing rates by location, or just a heat map of his swing rate, and you see a hitter who thinks of some pitches just above the zone as within his eager reach, and some within it at the bottom edge as unworthy of him. If the umpires and Suzuki agree, when it comes to the vertical bounds of the zone, arbitrary computerized zones shouldn't intrude on the arrangement. Pitchers can't really exploit this, because if they aim for that bottom edge of the zone that Suzuki disdains, umpires won't call it. If they aim for the top of the zone, they might steal a strike now and then, but Suzuki is also waiting to pounce on a mistake in that region. The horizontal zone has to be called objectively; we have a good way to define it. But with a few exceptions, Suzuki's horizontal zone has been called fairly, throughout his career. It's the high and low pitches that have yielded consternation, and the appearance of unfairness. That consternation is unnecessary, and the appearance of unfairness is deceiving. The Suzuki strike zone is a good reminder that technology isn't ready to call balls and strikes especially well, in one dimension, and that doing so isn't a matter of simply drawing an imaginary line at two fixed vertical positions for a player based on their height. The game is more beautiful and more complicated than that. View full article

In an interview on 670 The Score Thursday afternoon, the Cubs' president of baseball operations said the team will surpass the competitive-balance tax threshold in this year's failed attempt at contending. That's not as big a deal as it sounds like, yet it reveals more about Hoyer than it seems to. Image courtesy of © Katie Stratman-USA TODAY Sports One of the many frustrations of Cubs fans this winter was the team's apparent unwillingness to spend beyond the $237 million first threshold for the competitive-balance tax. By stopping shy of that threshold, it seemed, the team was foreclosing options for itself, and missing out on chances to add impact players. Those concerns have been justified by the way this season has played out. To the further chagrin of many, then, though, Hoyer said Thursday that the team will exceed that threshold after all. "As far as this year, we sort of looked at it at the end of February, we were likely to be under the tax, but once we decided to sign Bellinger, on what I thought was a fantastic deal for the Cubs to bring back Cody, knowing that when we did that, that was very likely to trigger us being over the tax, Tom and Crane were certainly in favor of that, given what it meant for the club," Hoyer said. "So the expectation is certainly that we'll probably go over this year, and the reality is that that's always been a discussion. There's never been any real desire to stay under every year, it's been like, 'Let's make those decisions on a year-to-year basis.' The expectation is that we'll be over this year, and that's really because the decision was made to invest in Cody." There's a lot to unpack there. Until now, the belief among most Cubs fans (supported by the good work done by Jon Becker at FanGraphs and by Jeff Euston at Cot's Contracts, powered by Baseball Prospectus) had been that the team was going to be under the threshold this year. It was always understood to be close, especially given some of the bonuses and incentives that are imperfectly reported by various sources, but no one outside the Cubs organization had been operating under the assumption that the team was going to be a luxury tax payor this year. Let's separate this into things that matter, and things that don't. Assuming the Cubs are willing and able to exceed the tax threshold again in 2025 (which Hoyer and Crane Kenney each implied they would be), one thing that doesn't matter is the repeat offender tax escalation. The Cubs' tax bill for this year, if indeed there is one, will be very small, and the step up from a 20% tax to 30% as a second-time payor next season isn't worth anyone worrying about too much. Exceeding the tax for a third straight year would bump that rate to 50%, which is more meaningful, but the smart bet is that the Cubs are eying an organic reset in 2026. That's the first season after the ends of the contracts on which team is paying Ian Happ, Seiya Suzuki, and Jameson Taillon nearly $60 million, in total, and they've worked hard over the last two years to build a farm system they believe will replace those players more than adequately from within, at minimal cost. On the other hand, a change in the penalties the team would pay for signing a player attached to a qualifying offer would matter, if only at the margins. As a ballpark figure, signing a guy who received a QO would cost the Cubs about $950,000 more in spending power for amateur talent in 2025 after exceeding the tax in 2024. They'd give up an extra draft pick (a fifth-rounder, in all likelihood, with a value around $450,000 toward their total bonus pool allotment) and lose $1 million in international free-agent spending space, rather than $500,000 if they were non-payors. That would be felt in a significant way, for a farm system whose best talent is already clumping at the upper levels and which is viewed as thin in the lower reaches. Would it be enough to change their decision-making about signing such a player? In this particular winter, it could, though only on certain guys. After the year Michael Busch has had and in the wake of the Isaac Paredes acquisition, neither Pete Alonso nor Alex Bregman were going to be options for the Cubs, anyway. It's overwhelmingly unlikely, given the way Hoyer works, that they will be in on Juan Soto or Corbin Burnes, but if they are, the heavier penalties for signing them won't get in the way. The two fringe cases where it might come into play are Anthony Santander and Max Fried. Santander, the Orioles' switch-hitting slugger, could hit the market having clubbed 45 homers in his walk year. He'd be a thunderous addition to the lineup, though a tricky fit, depending on how the team sees some of its young players and on whether Cody Bellinger opts in or out this fall. Fried is a high-upside but injury-prone southpaw starter, and while he'd be a great addition to the Cubs' rotation mix next year, he'd also be a risky one. Setting themselves up to lose significantly more potential talent to sign guys like this would be a strategic error, and the fact that the Cubs are over the tax does seem to indicate that they'll shy away from Santander or Fried this winter. The big things that matter, though, aren't the things that lie ahead. These comments from Hoyer reveal much about what he thought this team was, and why, and about his approach to team-building. None of it is good. Firstly, it's pretty clear from these remarks that Hoyer viewed the Bellinger deal as the capstone on a championship contender. That's preposterous, as was clear even going into this season and as the progress of the campaign has confirmed. Bellinger is a fine player, and the team should have tried more proactively to sign him instead of waiting so long, but they shouldn't have been thinking of him as a player who could finish off their roster. If nothing else, they might have more carefully considered the fact that he had a great season for them in 2023, and they still weren't even a playoff team. Secondly, Bellinger's free agency and the team's mindset about re-signing him vis-a-vis the tax threshold reveal a problematic priority being placed on marginal value, rather than absolute value. Signing Shota Imanaga and trading for Busch and Yency Almonte were strong moves. So was bringing in Héctor Neris. They all seemed of a piece with bringing back Bellinger and staying under the tax, though. If Hoyer and the organization were really spending all that time thinking about re-signing Bellinger even if it meant going over the threshold, they should have simply gone over the threshold--and not just signed Bellinger, but also inked Blake Snell, Jordan Montgomery, or Matt Chapman. Retaining Bellinger wasn't going to be the difference-maker for the 2024 Cubs. If they were willing to exceed the tax threshold to bring him back, they should have made sure to exceed it by much more, thereby adding more high-end talent and better depth to a roster that has been exposed on both fronts at times this year. That they waffled all winter with moves seemingly aimed at staying below the tax, then signed Bellinger even though it meant paying it, suggests that Hoyer was far, far too optimistic about the team he had built. We already had some intimations of that. Now, it seems like an unavoidable conclusion. Hopefully, the team and their president have learned from that. If the Cubs want to win in 2025, they need to go into this winter thinking bigger, both in terms of budgeting and in terms of talent. They can't come back next year with the same group, still thinking it's a team worth paying luxury taxes for. View full article

Twice in a span of just over nine months, the Cubs acquired a side-arming, late-blooming right-handed reliever with a tantalizing combination of fastball shape and breaking ball possibilities. The first move didn't pan out. The second one has done so gorgeously. Image courtesy of © David Richard-USA TODAY Sports When the Cubs traded a minor-league power hitter with only a dubious future in the organization for a righty with an extreme release point and a flat VAA on their fastball, you could be forgiven for thinking they were just trying to turn off the José Cuas trade and turn it back on again. Chicago loves pitchers with unique combinations of release point and fastball shape, which is why they targeted Cuas last summer and Shota Imanaga this winter. It's also what led them to give up Jake Slaughter for Tyson Miller this spring, and whether they were consciously reprising the Cuas deal or not, it's worked, for exactly the reason why the Cuas move failed: command. Miller, an ex-Cubs farmhand who pitched in the Rangers, Dodgers, Brewers, Mets, and Mariners organizations after leaving the team a few years ago, is almost a match for Cuas's extremity of release point and arm angle. Like Cuas, Miller boasts a fastball with a flat vertical approach angle, which is highly valuable--in theory. In practice, though, that's only true if you can locate it, and if you have a secondary pitch that can fool hitters out of the hand to keep them off it. Pitchers who pair great rising action on their heater and elite velocity with that approach angle don't need to do much else well, but that's not remotely the case for Miller or Cuas, each of whom averages less than 92 miles per hour on their heater. Throwing from such a wide angle narrows the plate for the pitcher, so it's almost impossible to throw even an average number of pitches in the zone from there. The trick is to have a merely below-average zone rate, rather than a borderline catastrophic one. Unfortunately, Cuas never learned that. In 36 appearances for the Cubs, he walked 12.1% of opposing batters, and only learned to hit the arm side of the plate, where hitters didn't experience as steep a horizontal approach angle. Miller, by contrast, has solved the riddle. He's become so adept at working all the way across to the other side of the zone that most of his misses are there, but he's both minimized walks and managed contact fairly well, all by forcing hitters to handle balls veering steeply as they enter the hitting zone. Normally, a pitcher who only sits around 90 miles per hour with the fastball can't afford to throw the ball in the middle of the plate as much as Miller does. Being in the heart of the zone and right around it so often has resulted in fewer whiffs than Cuas was getting and in a fairly pedestrian strikeout rate, but Miller's topline results as a member of the Cubs bullpen have been stupendous. He's gotten hit, at times, because those pitches run right into the bat paths of some hitters. He's only given up three home runs, though, and the dearth of walks has made those few extra-base hits much less costly than the ones Cuas gave up during his time in Chicago. It's hard to overstate what a knee-buckling experience it must be for a righty to stand in the box against Miller. Tyson Punchout.mp4 What the Cubs hoped they could teach Cuas to do, Miller really can do. Firstly, his sweeper has a crazy amount of ride to it. Not for nothing did our Davy Andrews call it the "sweepiest sweeper in baseball" a month ago. His four-seamer's lack of ride from his low arm angle works in his favor, because the sweeper looks a lot like the four-seamer out of the hand--a lot like it. Much of that is thanks to the way he throws his fastball. He treats his four-seamer almost like a cutter, so his horizontal release angle on that pitch is steep. Of 375 qualifying right-handed pitchers, Miller has the 12th-steepest gloveside release angle on the four-seamer. Cuas is first, and others like them (that is, guys who throw from low slots or far toward third base) populate the top of the list, but whereas the rest of that fraternity all have above-average arm-side run on their heat, Miller's has more cutting action. To the hitter, then, Miller's fastball already behaves like a cutter. It comes out of his hand at a steep angle, but instead of spinning back toward a right-handed hitter, it carries toward the outside corner. That makes the times when the ball has extra swerve and ends up being a sweeper especially cruel. Miller releases both pitches with the same initial angle of movement better than any of the other 93 righties who have thrown at least 50 four-seamers and 50 sweepers this year in MLB. If you can pick up the spin, despite the funky release point, there's a giveaway to be found, because the two pitches do not have mirrored spin at all. But, trickily, recognizing the pitch is only part of the battle. Seam-shifted wake doesn't do with Miller's fastball what it does with most low-slot pitchers'. The fastball actually carries a bit more than it looks like it will (recall that flat VAA), in addition to behaving like a cutter. The sweeper, meanwhile, also checks up and holds its line a bit more than it looks like it will. When they each get to the plate, the horizontal approach angles of the four-seamer and sweeper are reasonably different, but the vertical ones are identical--or so nearly so that they might as well be. This cocktail of things is why Miller can throw strikes, but Cuas couldn't. It's why Miller gets a lot of called strikes and a lot of chases with his sweeper, but Cuas couldn't. It's why Miller has been able to induce weak contact and a lot of lazy fly balls, but Cuas couldn't. At a quick glance, they appear similar, in several important ways. Dig deeper, though, and the equally important differences stand out in sharper relief--which, by the way, is what Miller has given his old and new team. There's more, too. Miller has added a sinker for righties and a curveball for lefties since joining the Cubs, taking pitches that were previously lurking almost unused and finding their utility as he learns to make the most of the things that make him unique. Primarily, though, he's been so good--a 1.42 ERA and a 0.79 WHIP--because his fastball and his sweeper are each unique, and the way they interact makes them even harder to handle than they would be on their own. Under team control for years, yet, Miller is the single pitcher you can most confidently write into the Cubs' 2025 bullpen plans. He'll be there, and he'll play a vital role. Others will probably be more important, but Miller has already done enough to secure a place, as long as he can stay healthy. He's one of the least comfortable at-bats in baseball, and his success makes both his own acquisition and that of Cuas worthwhile. View full article