Matthew Trueblood

Exploiting market inefficiencies is not a substitute for a personality. Image courtesy of © Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images Earlier this month, I wrote about the Cubs' unique usage of a pair of pitches that rarely go together: cut-ride fastballs and power changeups with ample arm=side run. That's just one crystallizing way to understand a broader organizational philosophy, though. The Cubs believe that the league, as a whole, is too fixated on velocity, and they've set themselves on a different course. For the eighth straight season, this year will find them at the bottom of the league in terms of average fastball velocity from starters. That's intentional. They've identified other traits they prefer to prioritize. Cade Horton, Justin Steele, and Jordan Wicks all possess the Cubs' favorite characteristic: a cut-ride fastball shape. In other words, their heaters have more glove-side movement than a hitter's eyes expect, given the speed and carry on the pitch--or, flipping the axis of expectation mentally, more carry than the hitter thinks it will have, given the cut spin they see out of the hand. Fastball shape has become a very popular buzzword in pitching analysis, because the release point and movement of a pitch can be every bit as important as the velocity or location. As pitching gurus will readily tell you, fastball shape is also an important concept to understand because it's rarely changeable. Most organizations think of fastball shape as being akin to a fingerprint; you can't easily change what a pitcher's fastball naturally does. Mechanical overhauls can alter fastball shape, but those usually involve a complete rebuild of a hurler's approach and arsenal. Such breakdowns and rebuilds are extremely and increasingly rare in the modern game. Therein lies the rub for the Cubs. More than perhaps any other team in baseball, they value that cut-ride shape. They value a different look, and believe that the league tends to undervalue it. They even believe that pitchers can survive at lower velocities with that shape (generally true), and thus that they can get the same value from hurlers at lower velocities and reduce their overall injury risk (much less clear, though plausible). To some extent, they're right about those things. Right now, however, they've overly committed to that concept. It's good to have principles and predilections within an organization; that's a sign of firmly understanding the job at hand. Trouble lurks, however, when a team crosses the line from predilections to obsessions, or from principles to dogmatic beliefs. At that point, you start making overly extreme decisions. Your tendencies become too strong, and you foreclose helpful possibilities to yourself. For instance, when you select too strongly for a relatively rare fastball shape, you have to narrow the pool of pitchers you consider--and you might do so too much. Picking from just a segment of the population if talented pitchers in a draft class or on a free-agent market (minor- or major-league) often means accepting lower velocity, not primarily because it might mean a slightly lower injury risk, but because the really hard-throwing hurlers don't meet your stringent criteria. In this specific case, focusing on an uncommon fastball shape also means getting locked into the idea that fastballs must come first. No team in baseball has thrown fewer sliders than the Cubs this year. That's not unusual, recently, but it is a problem. Sliders miss bats. Even good cut-ride fastballs often don't. Why doesn't the team just throw more sliders with the hurlers they've selected? It's not always that simple. One key variable in the effectiveness of a slider is the average velocity of the fastball off of which it works. Breaking ball shapes are more like signatures than fingerprints. They can be fiddled with, altered, and molded. Velocity, meanwhile, is like body weight, if we're sticking to things that identify a person: It's affected by biology and habits, but it can also be optimized, to some extent. Thus, a couple years after his fastball shape had many people worried and his prospect stock fell precipitously, Kumar Rocker emerged again as a top prospect this summer for the Rangers, culminating in a debut this month. Rocker throws very hard, which helps offset the suboptimal shape of his heater. He also has a devastating, top-of-the-scale slider, a pitch he and the team have worked together to reengineer. It would work well no matter what, but it has the potential to vault him into the middle or front of a rotation in the near future because it plays off a fastball that sits 96-97. The Cubs need not abandon their project of collecting guys who have an appealing, unusual fastball shape. It's part of how they became top bidders on Shota Imanaga. It's how they locked in on Horton and Wicks, and while they each had semi-lost seasons in 2024, they both look like reasonably sound picks. Broadly, though, they need to loosen their commitment to any one set of criteria for selecting pitchers. Occasionally scooping up a hurler like Brandon Birdsell on Day Two of the Draft is highly valuable, but they could do that while still taking more standard-issue, harder-throwing pitchers with top picks. There's something to be said for seeking a less velocity-oriented solution to the problem of getting outs in the big leagues. It might be the future of baseball; emphasizing everything but velocity might be positioning the Cubs to benefit significantly from an ongoing rise in injuries related to pursuing too much velocity. It might make them especially well-suited to a league that tweaks its rules to favor pitchers who can pace themselves and turn over lineup cards. Neither the actual benefits of throwing less hard nor the chances of structural changes to the game are clear enough to justify strongly committing to a strategy that sacrifices so much of the most fluid currency in pitching, though. For that matter, too, consider Wicks, who worked hard to add velocity this past offseason and had injuries (which felt closely related to that work) derail his 2024. Selecting pitchers for traits other than velocity might not prevent some of them from chasing more velocity, offsetting whatever health benefits would come from throwing less hard. A fine line exists between being too rigid in an organizational approach and not having a clear enough idea of what you're looking for. Either thing is problematic, but the good organizations manage to avoid both traps. They have preferences, even idiosyncratic and proprietary ones, but they don't overcommit to them. The Cubs need to establish themselves in that happy, medium space a bit better going forward, because while their approach to pitching acquisition and development is creative, it's not returning enough value to justify the risks it poses. The team is missing out on some easier developmental projects and some more lucrative ones, because they believe a bit too fanatically in the virtues of their own approach. View full article

Don't overthink this. Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images On Tuesday, the Cubs announced that Justin Steele will return from the injured list and start the final game of their series against the Oakland Athletics Wednesday afternoon. After being sidelined with elbow soreness for the last fortnight, Steele comes back with a chance to make as many as three more starts before the end of the season. From many quarters, a cry has risen in response to this news: "Why?" Fans and commentators have remarked on the fact that the Cubs are essentially out of playoff contention, and wrung their hands about the risks associated with having a player who just reported a balky elbow pitch in games that they regard as meaningless. There's a real pushback against this decision, rooted in the idea that there's no good reason to roll Steele out there. There's a very good, important reason to have him pitch, though. Get your pencils and scorecards ready. Here it is: Because he can. There are no truly meaningless baseball games, unless you believe that baseball itself is meaningless. In that case, tune out altogether. In reality, the Cubs have been out of the race for the postseason since around the end of June. That hasn't rendered the entire second half of their season meaningless, and it doesn't make finishing in the best form they can manage unimportant. Steele, especially, has much to prove. He's never gotten through a full season without injury issues or a loss of effectiveness down the stretch, and rebounding from this not only establishes his good health, but acts as a proof of concept to both himself and his team: Steele can be counted upon. He'll post whenever he can do so. His elbow might go sproing on Wednesday, or next week. So be it. The team will be no worse off if that happens than if it happens next February. The team ordered an MRI when Steele first missed a start at the beginning of this month, and it showed no structural damage. He's healthy enough to take the ball, and when a qualified big-league hurler is healthy enough to take the ball and it's their turn, they should do it. It's to Steele's credit that, rather than jealously guard his own earnings in a second round of arbitration by minimizing his own risk heading into the offseason, he wants to fulfill that duty. It's important to remember, as baseball fans, that we're just baseball fans. If we were team-employed physicians, we'd have a valuable perspective on whether or not a player should take the field, but most of us have nowhere near the requisite information to form an educated opinion on that subject--so we shouldn't. If a team and player confer, with far better, more detailed information, and make a consensus determination about the player's status, we should generally assume they're weighing risks and rewards. Some teams clearly err too far on the side of caution, in certain cases, and sometimes, there are public rifts between a team and a player about the best course of action with regard to an injury, Those are valid subjects for debate and discussion in a public forum. This case, though, is nothing like that. Steele's elbow is intact, if not quite fresh as a daisy. He wants to pitch. The Cubs agree with that wish, even understanding that he can't save their season. This is good news. It's unobjectionable. And it's arrogant of any fan to believe they know better. None of this is to say that Steele won't get hurt, now or in the near or medium-term future. That's all perfectly possible. Again, he hasn't been especially durable during his short big-league career, anyway. If pitching Wednesday posed a new or substantial risk to his arm health, though, he wouldn't be doing it. We all want, badly, to control the world, and especially to shelter ourselves and those we care about from its vicissitudes. Unfortunately, that's not how life or baseball work. Steele can't live in bubble wrap and be of any value to the Cubs. They're right to send him to the post, if that's what he wants, and it's encouraging that he feels good enough to give this a go. Hopefully, it will lead to better vibes about the team's rotation heading into the offseason. If not, it won't be for lack of trying. View full article

The Cubs' best starter began this season as a two-pitch specialist, playing with other offerings only at the margins. Now, he seems to add a new pitch every other outing. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images Given the enormity of the cultural and linguistic barriers Japanese players often face when they arrive in the United States for the first time, it can be very hard for them to adjust at the speed required by the modern game. The league starts working to figure you out the moment you show up for spring training, and because it's often hard to talk as freely with teammates and coaches when one is living in a new country and learning a new language, sometimes, the league does figure you out, and you struggle to adjust back. That's the first thing that made Shota Imanaga special, when he became a Cub. It's not his marvelous splitter or the vertical approach angle on his fastball; it's his personality. It takes a certain level of competitive intensity and risk appetite to cross an ocean to play against the best competition in the world, but that doesn't always pair with the fearless extroversion required to cross a room or a ball field to talk to someone from whom there's something valuable to be learned--especially when doing so means bringing along an interpreter. In Imanaga's case, though, both sets of traits are present. He wanted to prove himself in the United States, and he wasn't afraid of the logistical hurdles he had to clear in order to do so. He came over with a unique pairing of fastball shape and release point, with a splitter that made him unusual and briefly unsolvable even for MLB batters. Those two pitches carried him through the first two months of the season; the competitive intensity and his sheer talent got him that far with gaudily impressive numbers. Since then, though, the league has figured out his initial tricks, and that's where the fearlessness and extroversion have factored in. At almost every stop the Cubs have made over the second half of the season, cameras have caught Imanaga in pre-game conversations with prominent members of the other team. Paul Skenes of the Pirates is one very visible example, but far from the only one. Although he's developed solid English skills, it's not really that aptitude that has allowed Imanaga to soak up new information from all kinds of sources throughout the league. Rather, it's been his willingness to have in-depth conversations, even when they have to be mediated. He's picked up things from opponents, from teammates, and from coaches, and as the season winds down, he's implementing all that learning in remarkable fashion. In his 11-strikeout gem Monday night against the Athletics, Imanaga threw eight sinkers, tying for a second time his season high in that regard. He also threw a season-high 19 changeups, though--that's 19 of his Vulcan-grip changeups, not to be confused with the 23 splitters he also threw. At this point, he's not only not reliant on the four-seamer and splitter, but has widened and reshaped his arsenal to include five different offerings: four-seamer, splitter, changeup, sweeper, and sinker. He uses all five regularly, right now, even though he's largely shelved the curveball and cutter with which he tinkered earlier in the year. Look at the way his approach to batters of each handedness has changed, from month to month. Against fellow lefties, he's become a thing one could hardly have imagined of him early in the season: a sweeper-first guy. Part of the growth of his sweeper and its utility against lefties has been introducing that sinker more often, because the latter pitch runs in on the hands of lefty batters more and forces them to cover the inner edge, setting them up for the sweeper away. Just as eye-opening, though, is the way Imanaga has varied and updated his arsenal against righties. Most notably, it's against them that he's become a two-changeup hurler, with both the splitter and his Vulcan change. Crucially, it's not as though Imanaga is carving his Vulcan change usage out of the bloc previously dedicated to the splitter. Rather, he's paring down his fastball usage, to accommodate both changeups. Nor is the difference between the two purely about matching one offering's movement to an opponent's bat path. He's stumping hitters more by giving them both looks within the same game, and sometimes within the same at-bat. Here he is throwing a splitter to Enrique Hernández in the third inning of his start against the Dodgers last week: Shota Splitter to EH.mp4 And here he is victimizing him for a strikeout with the changeup, two innings later. Shota Change to EH.mp4 This isn't a classification fluke. If you watch the videos above carefully, especially slowed down, you can see the difference in his grip on the two pitches. There are also characteristic differences. The Vulcan change is about 1.3 miles per hour slower, on average, with a bit more armside run but considerably less downward movement. His splitter involves more deadening of the spin out of his hand, which makes it a more variable offering with greater depth and more deceptive movement. It's the pitch that will get more whiffs and more ground balls, but having the Vulcan change in the mix makes both pitches play up. If a hitter has to try to handle both, in addition to the fastball and whatever other pitches he's playing with in a given outing, they're much less likely to time up the splitter or the four-seamer, which reduces his vulnerability both to power hitting and to the times-through-the-order penalty. These improvements and new pitches haven't made Imanaga an untouchable ace. Whatever he and Skenes talked about a few weeks ago, the younger rookie wasn't able to convey to the elder one the ability to throw 100 miles per hour. Imanaga still gives up home runs, and will still have to work around that weakness going into next season. So be it. The thrilling thing about the recent changes Imanaga has made is that they affirm that fearlessness and adaptability. He will keep exploring new paths to success and absorbing new information, because he has a joyful and tenacious approach to the competitive act of pitching. That both makes him more likely to succeed in his sophomore MLB campaign and beyond, and increases his watchability. He's a delightful player to watch, and the brightest spot in a largely disappointing Cubs season. Seeing him transform from a two-pitch pitcher to a five-pitch master manipulator has been a pleasure, and there are more in store from him. View full article

As the team hurtles toward an offseason that will need to include a lot of changes, one big bat has turned a subtle corner in Triple A. Can it translate to the next level? Image courtesy of © Lily Smith/The Register / USA TODAY NETWORK It's been an eventful season for Owen Caissie, and ultimately, it's also been a successful one. He's been a steady producer for the Iowa Cubs, though he's never forced the issue and looks unlikely to get a taste of the big leagues before the campaign is over. In 514 plate appearances at Iowa, he's batted .271/.372/.471, with 18 home runs, nine stolen bases, 68 walks and 143 strikeouts. The big, left-handed power hitter hasn't tapped into the tool that will make or break his big-league future, but his year has had an air of skill consolidation. He's held serve. Ordinarily, holding serve isn't what you want from a top prospect who started the season at Triple A, but Caissie is a special case. He just turned 22 in July. He's not yet on the 40-man roster, so there were logistical roadblocks to him contributing to the big-league team this season. On balance, it's not at all discouraging to see him steadily produce at an average-plus level against high-level pitchers. Still, you want to see a corner turned at some point within any season. The good news is, we might be seeing just that from Caissie, right at the end of his season. Since the calendar flipped to September, Caissie's swing rate is down to the lowest it has been in any month of the season. Specifically, he's laying off pitches down and away, or off the outside edge. He's cut the plate in half a bit, to focus on driving the ball more consistently. That's led to great raw results; Caissie is batting .275/.408/.575 since the start of the month. He's maintaining an excellent walk rate and a manageable strikeout rate by keeping his zone drum-tight, with a 16.3% chase rate on pitches outside the zone during the month. More importantly, though, perhaps, Caissie is finding more consistently authoritative contact by becoming more selective. For the first time all year, 10% of his swings in September have resulted in batted balls with an exit velocity of at least 100 miles per hour. That's an important threshold, because it's very hard to be a power hitter of any serious value in the big leagues without having at least that high a rate of triple-digit exit velocities per swing. Of the 267 batters with at least 300 plate appearances in the majors this year, 86--almost exactly one-third--have a rate of at least 10%. The league leaders are Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Juan Soto, who are each over 17%. It's not impossible to be a productive hitter, even one who leans on power somewhat, with a rate below 10%, but it puts a lot of pressure on other skills. Most players who successfully do it get there by having better-than-average strikeout rates, superb walk rates, or some other special talent. Caissie is a relatively standard-issue left-handed power guy. He's a better athlete than his frame might imply, but not a true speedster, and while he can drive the ball to all fields, any version of his approach likely to work in the majors will probably depend a great deal on pulling the ball with authority. He's still whiffed on over 30% of his swings this year. He'll struggle to be productive at the next level even with that whiff rate, and we should expect him to whiff more against big-league hurlers than against Triple-A ones, anyway. Given the very high strikeout rate he's likely to run, he really does have to generate high-end power, which means that crossing that 10% barrier is vital. Again, though, we should expect him to have a lower 100+/Sw% in MLB than in the minors. The progress he's made this month is commendable and crucial, but going into the offseason, the Cubs can't count on anything from him next year. Instead, much like Matt Shaw and Kevin Alcántara, he'll spend the winter as a frequently-named trade candidate. Any or all of the three could be back next year. Any or all of the three could compete for and even claim roster spots. The team needs to have a lineup that works without contributions from any of them, though, and they have to count what they can get from each as a bonus. Caissie undeniably has power potential--the kind that could translate to 30 or more home runs in a season someday. This month has been an exciting step in the direction of turning that potential into reality. Yet, once we account for the huge level jump in difficulty ahead for him, we have to acknowledge that he's not yet ready to cross that bridge. By next April, he might be. This season has brought positive signs, especially at the end. It just hasn't brought the breakout for which the Cubs might have hoped. View full article

The Cubs' right fielder is on a torrid September run, and while it's been fueled by some friendly weather and park factors, it just might take him out to free agency again. Image courtesy of © Chet Strange-Imagn Images So far in September, Cody Bellinger is hitting .304/.396/.587, with four home runs. Those bombs came on hot nights at Wrigley Field, at Dodger Stadium, and in Coors Field, and the real power behind his power binge is a bit suspect, but it's still of interest. Bellinger has spent much of this season playing banged-up, and it's often shown up in his stat line. Aided by weather and more than his raw batted-ball data might support or not, a string of long hits at the end of the season is making Bellinger a more plausible free agent. Since fully recovering from the finger injury that sidelined him in July, Bellinger is swinging better. He's generating more bat speed, after a massive dip in August that coincided with terrible production for most of that month. Come the end of the season, Bellinger can elect free agency, or opt in to a $30-million salary for 2025, while retaining an option for $20 million more in 2026. For most of the last two months, it's been nigh unfathomable--whatever national pundits examining the situation from a great remove and without sufficient specific information--that Bellinger would be better served by opting in. There was always some chance that he and agent Scott Boras would make a massive mistake, but it was clear that the correct choice for them was to opt in. That's probably still true, really. Bellinger will turn 30 next summer, and September sizzle be damned, his power is faltering a bit. He has just 42 extra-base hits, in 518 plate appearances. Four injuries and declining stats suggest that he's not a center fielder, and his inability to play at an elite level when he's not fully healthy suggests he's not a star worth $30 million per year. The same quirky batted-ball data that kept his market cool last winter will probably keep it cool this winter, and the league's increasing problems with regional TV revenue figure to be bad for it, too. Still, Bellinger has come around nicely, and if he can continue to slug over the final fortnight of the campaign, his surface-level numbers will look fairly good. If he and Boras remain overconfident, they really might take a leap of faith this winter, figuring that there will be either a similar deal to the one he'd be leaving behind waiting for them--or else, a longer one, albeit at a considerably lower annual average value. It would be good news for the Cubs if Bellinger did pursue that path. They could use more financial flexibility, and if they ended up retaining Bellinger on the other side of an opt-out, it would have to be at a lower price. It remains more likely that Bellinger sticks around, and that wouldn't be so bad, either. He's still a productive player, and the short-term deal to which he's signed isn't onerous. He's showing the ability to meet the ball squarely, at a level that he didn't for much of the season. Barreling the ball helps make up for the fact that he doesn't swing as fast as most other players who hit for plus power, and while it hasn't resulted in actual plus power consistently this year, Bellinger is making big progress there of late. The team has plenty of money coming off its books this winter. The only big hurdle Bellinger opting in would create would be a clogged lineup spot. The Cubs need more power. They need to add a big bat or two to their lineup. Bellinger doesn't really count as such a player, and if he returns, they'll need to get more creative to make the needed upgrades. That's why, if Bellinger does stay hot for the balance of September and opt out this fall, it will make the Cubs' life easier. View full article

Missed opportunities have seen the last few grains slide through the Cubs' playoff hourglass over the last three series. Now, they're forced into a corner of desperate hoping and nervous scoreboard watching. Image courtesy of © Kiyoshi Mio-Imagn Images As of Thursday morning, the Cubs have a 3.8% chance of reaching the playoffs, according to Baseball Prospectus and its PECOTA projection system. If that sounds too optimistic, it's because it almost certainly is, but that's what the model says. The Cubs haven't quite seized their moment lately, with a bad series loss to the Pirates last week and a game that slipped away from them at Dodger Stadium Wednesday night, but their competition has been kind enough to falter, too, keeping some theoretical possibility alive. Funnily enough, that 3.8% mark is almost identical to the chances that the Cubs will sneak into the MLB Draft Lottery and pick within the top six picks in 2025. They're currently the team with the second-best record, among those who stand to be left out of the playoffs--the 17th-worst in baseball. According to the odds the league uses for its lottery, the team slotted to pick 17th in theory has a 94.6% chance of picking in exactly that position, and a 2.1% chance of picking 18th. The rest of their probability is scattered among those top six picks, since they could be selected for any of them via the lottery. In practice, the Cubs' chances of being in the lottery are a little higher than the numbers suggest, because the White Sox and A's are both ineligible to pick inside the lottery next year--but the effect of those disqualifications on the Cubs' hopes, given their position, is quite small. So, each of these two things are possible, and about equally so. It's close to 25-to-1 that the Cubs make the playoffs, and close to the same number that they get to pick higher than they have since 2014 in next year's first round. That's it, though. If neither of those longshots comes in, the Cubs will have muddled through another season of being stuck in the middle, without substantial change or progress and without a high pick to try to ameliorate that next summer. The reality of their lousy odds and high stakes is starting to get more stark. The team is unlikely to move on from their group of baseball decision-makers this fall, but without that turnover, from where will the changes they really need come? If they do make the playoffs, that would go a short but meaningful distance toward validating Jed Hoyer's project as the architect of the team. If they do eventually win the lottery, at this year's Winter Meetings in early December, it would give them a chance to make a sudden and unexpected infusion of high-end talent. In all the most likely cases, though, they head into the winter with another not-good-enough season behind them, facing the formidable task of dramatically upgrading a roster that was built around the idea that it was good enough without such an overhaul. To believe the team can turn the corner without the confidence and revenue infusion of a playoff berth or the talent boon of a lottery pick, you have to believe this front office is ready to change the way they do business. They've already shown a shrewd eye for talent, with recent draft picks and sound trades and signings, but that's not enough. They have to show an appetite for big-picture, grand-scale upgrades, and a greater mixture of flexibility and urgency than they've shown over the nearly half-decade of Hoyer's administration. For now, the cards are still coming down. Maybe the team will hit the big flush they've been drawing to, on the fourth or fifth card. It's much more likely, though, that they're about to walk away from the table with empty hands and pockets again. They had better bring a wholly different, more robust strategy to next year's main event. View full article

The Cubs' young southpaw has had a frustrating, injury-marred season, but between stints on the shelf, we've been able to glimpse an evolution--some of it purely aimed at thriving, and some aimed at surviving. Image courtesy of © Rafael Suanes-Imagn Images In what was supposed to be his first full MLB season, Jordan Wicks will barely scrape away his own rookie eligibility. At most, he might throw 60 innings in the majors, and he'll finish with no more than 12 starts, not counting rehab appearances. Yet, it's been an intriguing campaign, rather than a purely miserable one. He burst onto the scene this spring with an altered pitch mix and a few ticks of unexpected new velocity, clearly intent on being more of a typical modern starter, missing more bats and taking care of business himself. Then, reality happened. Let's take a look at the seasons within Wicks's season, to get a better sense of the likely shape of the seasons ahead for him. Exploring and Abandoning the Sweeper Wicks caught just about everyone's eye with a spring debut: a slider with such a horizontal shape to it that it was much more sweeper than pure slider. It was a kind of variant on his curveball, first tinkered with late in 2022, and it was a surprising addition to Wicks's arsenal, for a simple reason: he's usually a guy who favors pronation. When the Cubs selected Wicks out of Kansas State University three summers ago, his calling card was his changeup. Of his two fastballs, the sinker is the more natural one out of the hand. As I wrote about recently, the Cubs like to play with and force flexibility in motor preference, but this project is not specific to them. Because it's more about grip manipulation than maximizing supinated spin, sweepers can be friendly to a natural pronator--depending on how they're thrown, and depending on the player in question. We can't say with any certainty that these are linked, but the fact is that Wicks went down late in April with a forearm issue. Since then, the sweeper has been gone. He throws a gyro slider, now, rather than that sweepy one. Cutting It Loose, and Tightening Up The other big news about Wicks early on was how hard he was throwing. For a pitcher who sat just over 91 miles per hour and only rarely bumped it up near 95 last season, there was suddenly quite a bit more in the tank. Wicks showed the ability to sit close upon 95 and touch even higher, and he clearly intended to use that increased velocity to bully hitters. We all understand the limitations of pitchers with below-average fastball velocity. Once you can regularly find the mid-90s, though, many things unfold. Wicks leaned away from the sinker and into his four-seamer, more than ever, trying to miss bats at the top of the zone and set hitters up for even more whiffs with breaking and offspeed stuff down low. A more imposing combination of speed and shape were, he seemed to believe, his path to frontline starter status. Maybe that would have turned out to be true, but instead of getting to find out, we found another kind of limit. Wicks went down with an oblique strain in June, and since he's come back, his velocity is not the same. On this chart, the farther out a datum is on the set of rings, the harder the pitch was thrown. Wicks pitched at the top of his potential velocity range until his body couldn't bear it anymore. Now, he'll have to get by in his new life as a starter with the ability to manage contact, but not necessarily the capacity to strike hitters out at an above-average rate. Finding the Right Mix Both the new things Wicks tried and the reformation of his profile around a more familiar set of pitch shapes have required him to rebalance his pitch mix. We've seen him change the way he attacks hitters and weighs his options during his three stints with the big-league team this year. The changeup is the near-constant, because that, again, has always been Wicks's signature pitch. He knows in which situations he wants to use it, and how to do so. Around it, though, everything is shifting. As you can see, the four-seamer is still driving the fastball ship, but his sinker is back in a place of prominence after being deemphasized at midseason. Now that he's using the more comfortable gyro slider, he's going to that pitch more often. Note, too, the broader inclusion of the cutter, which is as much a harder variant of his gyro slider as the sweeper was a harder variant of his curve. This is probably the best version of Wicks. That it hasn't yet yielded especially impressive results is ok. Given his style, he's going to need to learn better command (where that term applies more to execution of each pitch, including consistently achieving the right movement shape, than hyper-specific location) and good sequencing. As he does, he can tap into more overall value. Next season, the Cubs will hope to get more than 100 strong innings from Wicks. He's done plenty this year to suggest that he's capable of that--even if it's all been broken up, and come with some unexpected changes of tack and style. A strong finish in this final handful of outings would go a long way toward boosting everyone's confidence, as Wicks seeks that next, never truly final, form. View full article

The two late hits he delivered Tuesday night were excellent examples of a subtle but important approach change by the Cubs' designated hitter, enacted coming into this year but only accelerated late in its run. Image courtesy of © Kiyoshi Mio-Imagn Images Everything about Seiya Suzuki's approach is geared toward getting pitches on the inner half of the plate and blasting them to his pull side. That's a fairly standard modern big-league hitting philosophy, but its effectiveness varies widely, based especially on whether and how well a hitter can respond when pitchers start adjusting to that intention. Even as he's come into his own in the majors, Suzuki hasn't hit pitches on the outer third of the plate and beyond it well, and that incomplete coverage of the zone has made it hard for him to translate his extraordinary offensive skills into extraordinary offensive value. For his career, Suzuki is just a .217/.305/.312 batter on pitches at least on the outer lane of the plate to him. Most hitters don't handle outside pitches well, of course. They do their best work on the stuff down the middle, and generate most of their thump on balls inside. Still, Suzuki has been rough, and when you glance at the raw data, it looks worse than ever this season. He's hitting just .202/.279/.283 in plate appearances that end with a pitch away. Dig a little deeper, though, and you can see signs of Suzuki digging deep to find ways to attack the outside pitch better. As his MLB career has progressed, he's both rolled over on the ball less often and found ways to pull it more consistently. It's good, when you're a hitter with plus power, to pull the ball, even if the pitch is on the outer part of the plate. However, Suzuki has sometimes had an unfortunate--even devastating--tendency to roll over that pitch and hit sharp but harmless ground balls on it. It's encouraging, then, to see hits like the two he delivered late on Tuesday night. Both were hit at fairly low trajectories, but whether you classify them as ground balls or line drives, each had an exit velocity over 100 miles per hour and a launch angle of 6 degrees or higher. Even nominal grounders, when hit at launch angles above 5 degrees and with some juice behind them, are almost always hits. Suzuki has tapped into something more sustainable on the outer third lately, even if the results are slow to reflect the value of that change. Here are his month-by-month average exit velocities and launch angles for pitches on the outer third, for the last two seasons. This reflects a concerted and successful change this year, which is nice. Notice, too, though, that this month boasts a considerably lower average launch angle than some other recent ones. Does that mean Suzuki is falling back into the habit of rolling over on the ball? No. In fact, I think the insight we're tapping into here is that for hitters like Suzuki whose power is mostly on elevated stuff over the inner half, you don't want to see them trying to hit fly balls on the pitch away--let alone succeeding in doing so. It probably waters down their command of the inner half of the plate, and their barrel speed and accuracy when they get those meatballs. It probably also means a lot of quasi-encouraging fly outs that really shouldn't encourage us. In the era of Statcast data and expected slugging averages rendered in neat Baseball Savant sliders, this kind of swing looks good, to seasoned fans and to data sets. Seiya 2.mp4 I don't believe that we should actually take much solace from those. Suzuki still only has two home runs on balls over the outer third or beyond this year, and he owes one of them to the Allegheny River, for forcing the Pirates to build a very close (though high) fence down the right-field line at PNC Park. It's ok to try to drive the ball when it's out away from you, even as an inner-third, take-and-rake slugger, but the ideal version of it might be a swing more like this one. Seiya 3.mp4 If he's focused on being early enough to get the bat head out and drive that outside pitch on a flat trajectory like this, he can more consistently collect actual hits than if he's trying to extend his more leveraged power swing an extra few inches to cover the corner. Just as importantly, though, I think it also leaves him more room to adjust and be the dangerous hitter the Cubs need him to be if a pitcher comes in on him, when he was looking away. For right-handed batters who want to dominate the inner half of the plate, it's not enough to go up there with that preference fixed in the foremind and be stubborn about it. There are too many good right-handed pitchers in MLB, all eager to pick ruthlessly at the holes they find in such an approach. You can't look for the pitch you want and adjust to the one you don't want. As paradoxical as it sounds, you have to start by covering the pitch you don't want, then let the pitch you do prefer still work for you when you get it. It's a tricky mental puzzle to complete, which is why relatively few right-handed batters (especially those whose formative amateur and professional years were spent in the Americas) have such an inside-oriented approach. For those who do, though, seeing that reverse angle on the craft of hitting is essential. Suzuki might be starting to get there. Given how good he's been for most healthy portions of his career to date, that's tantalizing. If he can come back next year with a consistent and coherent plan for covering the outer edge while still punishing pitchers who come inside on him, he'll become an even more dangerous version of the hitter we've seen over the last season and a half. That would be a huge development for the Cubs lineup. View full article

The Cubs' left fielder is a switch-hitter who's constantly evolving, and his latest change from the right side of the dish is into a version of himself we've certainly seen before. Image courtesy of © David Richard-Imagn Images He's gone through many iterations and adjustments over his near-decade with the Cubs, and for Ian Happ, almost any adjustments have to happen twice. As he well understands, being a switch-hitter is a bit like being two different hitters altogether. So much has to be different in the way you attack the difficult task of being a productive hitter, based on whether you're batting left-handed or right-handed in that particular plate appearance. Over time, we've seen Happ gradually transform from a take-and-rake hitter with surprisingly high-end power but too many whiffs to a more complete and well-rounded one--although one without that ability to smash the ball to smithereens and go on hot streaks that make him one of the best hitters in baseball. He's traded some upside to dramatically raise his floor, and it's generally been a good tradeoff for him. It's a bit more complicated, though, when you break things down based on the handedness of the opposing pitcher (and, therefore, the side from which he's hitting in a given plate appearance). When Happ began reinventing himself in the middle of 2021 and emerged in 2022 as a solid but much more contact-focused one, that transition proved much easier for the left-hitting version of him. His left-handed swing has some natural lift and better raw bat speed. His right-handed swing has never been quite as sweet, and when he rebuilt his game to put the ball in play more, he ended up hitting it on the ground far too often from the right side. His approach is also a little more uneven against southpaws. He has a harder time organizing and enforcing his own strike zone. He's a bit less capable of covering the whole plate and defending it. The ball doesn't jump off his bat the same way it does from the left side. To a very real extent, though, that's changing. He's rediscovering some power this year. Seven of his home runs this season have come from the right side--the most he's hit off lefties in MLB in any season. He's both hitting it harder when he lifts it, and lifting it more when he hits it hard. That's a good combination. You can see his fight to make these improvements in the way he's modified his right-handed swing over time. Here he is in 2021, near the end of a season in which he came to grips with the need to make more contact and sacrifice some power to better tap into his on-base skills. Happ RH 1.mp4 That's a jerky, disconnected swing, and it results in lousy contact. He did put the ball in play, but the real value of that batted ball was not much different from if he had whiffed. It's hard to maintain the fluidity and the violence required to hit for power from your less-frequent side, and in that video, you can see why. Here's a clip from about a year ago, when Happ had come quite a way in his evolution as a right-handed batter. He'd become materially smoother, and he was looking to use the whole field from that side. We could call it progress. Happ did improve last year as a right-handed batter, as he overhauled his approach, returning to a more patient posture after a 2022 dedicated to slapping the ball around the diamond in swing mode. Happ RH 2.mp4 Now, here he is this year. Of course, the video is selected to portray the changes he's made in a maximal way, but notice just how much violence there is here. That requires connection and intention. Happ is tearing into the ball against lefties this year. His increased home run total from the right side isn't a coincidence. Happ RH 3.mp4 If you go all the way back with Happ, though, this swing might look a bit familiar. It's quite a bit more damage-oriented than the right-handed swings he's deployed the last few years... but it looks an awful lot like this. Happ RH 4.mp4 That home run is from all the way back in 2018. See, Happ is getting to his righty power this year, by basically swinging for the fences the way he did when he first came into the league--but only from that side of the dish. He's given back his improved contact rates against lefties to start pummeling their mistakes, and it's basically worked. You wouldn't want to make a habit of whiffing on just over 30% of swings, as Happ is against lefties this year, but you can make up for it if you run into a ball and blast a home run in 5.3% of your plate appearances. From the left side, Happ remains that balanced, new guy. He's not giving up on making more contact than he used to; that free-spirited trade of whiffs for power nearly ran him out of the league once. In anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of his trips to the plate, though--all the ones where he sees a lefty pitcher--he's ok with setting that aside and giving a nod to his old self. This year, that's worked out nicely for the Cubs, and for Happ. With him and his complicated switch-hitting profile, you never know whether that means it has major staying power. View full article

Sometimes, you sit down to rededicate yourself to something, and you realize it was probably better letting it slip away, after all. Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images Someone pointed out to me, a few weeks ago, that I use wins above replacement (WAR) and its cousin, WARP, less often than most writers with whom they typically think of me as a kindred spirit. I was a little bit surprised, and a little bit alarmed. WAR is one of the fundamental concepts of much online baseball writing, and I hadn't noticed that I was neglecting it. It took me another week of writing to notice and confirm that that was true. The next step I tried to take, going into the following week, was mapping out how I might get back to making greater use of the framework for audiences. The more I tried to do so, though, the less enthusiasm I felt for it. In fact, at this point, I've come to the opposite conclusion. I don't think WAR is helpful or useful--or at least, I think it misleads as much as it informs, and I'm done using it, even to whatever limited extent I had been in previous months or years. I don't want to sound retrograde, or atavistic. Early in the era of WAR, some old-school writers hit back against the framework based on things like the existence of competing WARs, with differing fundamental assumptions and widely disparate numbers for the same players. Some rebuked it for the inexactitude of a replacement level, itself. I don't completely disagree with those arguments, but they're not my reason for leaving WAR behind, and I don't think they're especially problematic, really. Rather, I have a couple of other issues. WAR values have become blunt instruments, not for loosely estimating player value, but for ending conversations by assigning false certainty to player valuations. Runs, not wins, are the directly measurable contributions to a team made by individual players. Wins are fashioned from the interactions of players, managers, moments, and opponents, and players' contributions translate only very messily into wins. Counting runs produced and prevented is a far superior way to express player value than doing the same thing, then milling those runs into theoretical wins and roughening the estimate without showing the increased error. For my money, replacement levels aren't the right baseline to which to anchor player value, after all. The old heads were right about that, but for the wrong reasons. They were trying to cling to raw numbers, like pitcher wins, home runs, and RBIs; that was analytically untenable. WAR sought to anchor the world to the baseline of a replacement-level player, which is convenient for teams and from the perspective of management vis-a-vis labor, but what we need to anchor ourselves to, instead, is the league average. When you compare a player's batting, baserunning, and fielding to an average player's, you find out how many runs they really contribute to the project of reaching the postseason for a team. Taking the extra step of adding what amounts to padding--credit applied to a player relative to the replacement level, on the unexamined assumption that they were better than the possible replacements actually available to their team--valorizes below-average players and dampens the apparent value of above-average ones. The existing WAR metrics are too rigid; they adapt only too slowly, and thus sometimes retroactively. That doesn't make them useful to me in telling the story of a player or their value for readers. This season, first basemen are hitting at a historically lousy rate, relative to the rest of the league. In theory, according to WAR's underpinnings, that should make the offensive contributions of especially good first basemen especially valuable, and it should make the struggles of some of those players a bit less damaging than they seem. Alas, the first "should" there is only hypothetical, because the positional adjustment that is one key aspect of WAR doesn't flex the way you might think or like, at least in all cases. The second "should", meanwhile, is just an assumption I don't really agree with. There seems to me a logical inconsistency in the places where the various flavors of WAR do and don't elect to depart from observed reality--or, perhaps, in how they adjust it. This is most readily apparent in pitching WAR, which ranges from being rooted in runs allowed and only lightly bumped along the spectrum based on park factors and defensive support to being rooted almost solely in strikeouts, walks, and home run rates. But it's really everywhere within the framework. I don't like the opacity of the process, even though it's not left intentionally opaque by any of the sources who provide it and even though they're not opaque to me, personally. I think these layers of assumptions and adjustments, baked in neatly en route to a single-number estimate which fans then treat as something real and concrete and non-negotiable, end up doing more harm than good--even though most of them are immensely valuable, if kept separate and noticed along the way. I would rather continue to break down player performance using more telling indices, with either greater predictive or greater descriptive power, than try to speak the language of WAR again. Finding that I'm out of practice in that tongue turned out to be liberating. What WAR is trying to do, and it's admirable enough in a certain way, is to shrink the complexity and the difficulty of player evaluation and roster construction, until those abstract tasks become apparently concrete and easy to grasp. Unfortunately, as most attempts at such radical simplification do, it fails. I would rather live here, in the discomfort of uncertainty and abstraction, than seize upon the cozy but false sense of surety WAR offers. I'd rather continue to help interested readers learn more about players and how they come together to win games than invite them to continue conforming to a constructed reality I feel does a poor job of capturing the one on the field. View full article

This season fell by the wayside, as the Cubs proved not to have the depth of quality in the top or middle sections of their roster to keep pace with other NL playoff contenders. To fix that for 2025, a fairly staggering roster overhaul is necessary. Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images There will be money to spend this winter, and a few players are sloughing naturally off the Cubs' books and roster roll. To get from where they are to where they really want to be, though, the team doesn't need a few more capable contributors; they need over a dozen. The Brewers are not a bad analog for the Cubs, and they're about to cruise to an NL Central title. The massive difference in the standings between the two this year hasn't come from Milwaukee having a superior set of core contributors, per se, but from the fact that of the 50 or so players around whom a team must plan a modern season, the Crew have a clear edge over the Cubs at 15 or 20 spots--most of them in the middle and lower parts of the respective roster hierarchies. Fixing that means getting aggressive, as soon as this season ends. The Cubs can't afford to be affectionate, patient, or indulgent. They need to be ruthless this fall. There are a small handful of players who will become free agents at the end of this campaign, including Kyle Hendricks, Jorge López and Drew Smyly, but there are also a whole lot of players with team control remaining whom they need to jettison. Let's take a tour. Marginal Veterans with Role Player Ceilings Patrick Wisdom has been a good Cub, all things considered. He's a pleasant clubhouse presence, and when he's in position to get regular playing time, he can get hot and run off barrages of home runs that give him real value. Durability and defensive utility have eluded him the last two seasons, though, and as the Cubs have shrunk his role, they've also found that he can't thrive as an occasional pinch-hitter. He has to be non-tendered in November. The same goes for Mike Tauchman, who has much more value in a part-time role but is older than Wisdom and starting to show his limitations. With only passable defense even in the outfield corners and no power left in his bat, Tauchman needs to be non-tendered, to open some roster room for a needed upgrade in the position-player mix. Of Julian Merryweather and Yency Almonte, the team probably needs to keep just one, and send out the other. Each can be dominant at their best, but each has a long track record of getting hurt or proving inconsistent, sometimes because of nagging physical issues not quite bad enough to shelve them. Letting both take up roster room all winter would be negligent, given the magnitude of change needed. Christian Bethancourt is a fine catch-and-throw backup backstop, but keeping him and offering him arbitration this winter would be malpractice. The Cubs need to be planning an attempt to acquire a higher-end catcher, pushing Miguel Amaya toward the role Bethancourt currently plays for the team. Young Players Who Are Never Going to Be Anything for the Cubs Much though it chagrins so many Cubs fans that he never got sustained playing time in the big leagues, Alexander Canario was denied that opportunity for a simple reason: he can't hit big-league pitching. The swing is too long, too grooved, and too inflexible. He's in the way. It's sad that it's come to this, but the Cubs can't wait around any longer to see if Brennen Davis magically stays healthy and demonstrates MLB-caliber skills over a prolonged sample next year--two things he's never really done before. Hopefully, there's still a chance out there somewhere for Davis. The Cubs shouldn't be in the business of trying to make it be with them. Matt Mervis was a great story for a bit, and with a bit better luck and some better adjustments, he might have blossomed into a credible big-leaguer--even if stardom was never on the cards. Instead, he's simply out of the picture for the Cubs. With Michael Busch in place and Cody Bellinger overwhelmingly likely to opt in at the end of the year and come back, there's no need for a third left-hitting first baseman on the 40-man roster. There could still be room for Mervis if he were ever likely to figure out big-league pitching, but he isn't. For a long, long time, the names Keegan Thompson, Ethan Roberts, and Caleb Kilian have carried varying levels of cachet with Cubs fans. There was some reason to believe in each of them, at certain times, but now is the time to stop believing in any of them. The team needs to produce better options than each from within, and they need to move on from each, to maximize their potential pitching depth. Obvious Jetsam Presumably, only the injury he suffered while in Iowa has even kept Nick Madrigal in the organization this long. He should be cut this fall, sad though it is that that experiment didn't work. You can sort of make the case that the Miles Mastrobuoni experiment did work, in that he cost virtually nothing to acquire; gave them inconsistent but nonzero value with his defense and speed; and was alaways flexible. Now, it's time to refresh that roster spot and try to do much, much better for the same role. Picked up for various flavors of free in recent months, Trey WIngenter, Shawn Armstrong and Colten Brewer all could theoretically be kept this winter. In practice, the team should probably spend the final few weeks evaluating each as best they can (If Brewer suffers a disadvantage because he's hurt, so be it; remember, he broke his hand in a tantrum) and then waive two of them at the first opportunity. Nico Hoerner Only one player gets his own category, and it's Nico Hoerner. He's not a bad player, but he is not currently a good one, either. Unlike some of the other players tethered to big contracts on the team, he's not tied down by a no-trade clause, and he's not producing at a level that makes you wary of losing him. The Cubs need to bring a lot of good players to camp in 2025, including putting some into uncomfortable spring competitions. Getting Hoerner out of the way would open up second base as one potential fallback position for one or more losers in those battles. His trade value might be limited, but it's not zero. None of these players need to be designated for assignment on the spot, or anything. Some are tradable, and others only need to go when certain offseason deadlines come. This winter needs to find the Cubs aggressively rearranging their roster, though, and that means cutting hard--to make room for free agents, and for trade arrivals stemming from the consolidation of their farm depth into MLB value, and for additions from within the organization both during the winter and entering next season. Nearly half their 40-man needs to change. Can Jed Hoyer do that? View full article

Though he can't be a frontline hurler for a team with serious October aspirations, the Cubs' most unconventional starter is finishing his third big-league season with style, and he's carving himself a place in next year's rotation. Image courtesy of © Rafael Suanes-Imagn Images We live in much too strikeout- and walk-obsessed a world for Javier Assad to be a star. He's only fanned 19.6% of the batters he's faced this year, and he's walked 9.9% of them. Those numbers are both markedly worse than the league average. In strikeout rate minus walk rate (an increasingly popular oversimplification of the task of pitching), Assad ranks 110th of the 127 pitchers who have thrown at least 90 innings this year. He's gotten all 26 turns he's been healthy enough to take in the Cubs rotation this year, but part of that is just a product of other players getting hurt--from Jameson Taillon and Justin Steele to Ben Brown and top prospect Cade Horton. Last year, by contrast, only 10 of Assad's 32 appearances were starts. It took until this spring for the team to figure out that they should even stick with him as a starter, and had they been less afflicted with injuries, they might not have even given him an unfettered start then. Make no mistake, though: Assad is a legitimate, valuable fourth starter on a good team, or a third-best one on a more stretched unit. His numbers look unsustainable to the saber-trained casual observer, but three partial seasons into his big-league career, he's shown a number of ways to outperform those peripheral stats on an ongoing basis. How? In short, you could say that Assad is the embodiment of the effectively wild hurler--although in a way that defies stereotypes. When we think of that term, we tend to envision Nolan Ryan, and similar pitchers with so much power on their fastball that they couldn't reliably throw the ball over the plate. Hitters also couldn't figure out where or when to expect the ball, though, so their ample walks and hit batters didn't cost them much. In the modern game, it's hard to be that kind of effectively wild. To be sure, Assad isn't. He sits mostly in the low 90s with his fastball, though he certainly can touch higher. Rather, he's just an assiduous junkballer non pareil. He doesn't give in, and he doesn't throw anything over the middle unless he feels confident that the opponent is unprepared for it. He works the edges of the zone, and hitters are happy to wait him out, too. Of all pitchers with 60 or more innings pitched this year, Assad ranks second-lowest in opponent swing rate. Yet, when hitters do swing, they're not really squaring Assad up--at least not often enough to make up for the number of called strikes they're taking. They only swing at 42.2% of his pitches, but 35.3% of their takes go for strikes looking. The only other pitchers with opponent swing rates under 43.9% and above-average called strike rates are relievers Dylan Floro and David Robertson. Then, they swing, and hitters foul the ball off at a high rate, racking up even more strikes for Assad. Because he misses so few bats, Assad doesn't convert many of these called strikes or fouls into strikeouts. He does, however, take advantage of hitters' defensiveness once they get behind in the count. He also ratchets up the hitter's frustration. This is the third year in a row in which Assad is running an ERA just over 3.00 in MLB, albeit in samples of various sizes and in varying roles. Just as importantly, though, his ERA is telling a true tale about his run prevention. Teammates Steele and Shota Imanaga make instructive comparison points. Assad's unearned run average (UERA) is well below average, and has been throughout his career. Steele's is well above average, and has been throughout his career. Imanaga, too, has given up a lot of unearned runs in his first Stateside campaign. Obviously, the two things are not equal in their impact or predictive value, but if you just add them together and take run average per nine innings, Assad has been one of the 15 best pitchers in baseball this year. Again, his lack of a typical modern skill set makes everyone prone to doubting him. Assad's FIP is about 1.5 runs worse than his ERA, and many people dismiss him as a swingman or a nice-to-have extra arm, expecting him to come back to that level. Yet, he persistently avoids that. On Saturday, he handled the imposing stars in the Yankees lineup ably, without so much as a blink. It was the kind of start in which some fans keep waiting to see him implode... but he never does. Four starters who have made at least 15 starts this year have yet to have one in which they allow five runs in the first four innings. Assad has done it, but only once in his 26 starts, making him the fifth-least combustible starter in the game. Now, the chart above also serves as a reminder of one of the two reasons why Assad isn't a No. 1 or No. 2 starter, even if every bit of the hit and run prevention he does with runners on base and his other magic holds up: He doesn't dominate. There aren't days when Assad takes his team out of the game, but there also aren't many in which he takes control of the whole proceeding, getting at least 16 outs and allowing two or fewer runs. Yet, as the season has unfolded, Assad has earned more of his manager's trust, and begun working deeper into games. One reason is that, as it turns out, hitters don't gain very much from seeing Assad a second or third time. He's one of the best hurlers in the game, in fact, at getting outs with the same efficacy as the lineup card turns over. It's really a combination of stuff, command (occasionally at the expense of control; he emphasizes execution over location) and deception that hitters can't cope with. The depth of Assad's arsenal makes him hard to outguess, and his delivery has just enough unpredictability to it to mess with timing. It's why hitters don't swing as much as they should against him, and why they're still figuring him out the third time they see him. Then, he throws even more wrinkles at them. For most of the season, Assad started on the right side of the pitching rubber, from the pitcher's perspective--closer to third base. Assad 5.mp4 In his last five starts, though, he's slid all the way over to the other side, giving hitters a new look and himself a new angle with which to attack the zone. Assad 6.mp4 He's never going to run a FIP as good as his career ERA to date. His ERA, itself, might swell a bit if he's a full-time starter next year. As unorthodox as he is, though, Assad is a delightful throwback, and a very valuable arm for the Cubs. He's the kind of pitcher you can win with, as long as he's not an indispensable part of the starting plan. We should get, then, to the other reason why he can't be a frontline starter--and no, it's not the lack of a 26% strikeout rate. Rather, it's the same thing that holds Justin Steele back from the same status. The most important ability in pitching is availability. Assad has had to miss time two years in a row with a balky forearm. He has ways to sustain this seemingly improbable success across a full season of starting work, little though some might be inclined to buy into it. What he doesn't have is the durability to do it over 160 or 180 innings. Instead, he looks likely to consistently contribute 120-140 strong frames. That's helpful, and the Cubs should happily pencil him into their 2025 starting rotation, alongside Steele. However, they also have to figure out how they'll find a player capable of the same or better performances across an extra 50 innings. That's a tall order, and an expensive one to fill, but the team can take some solace in knowing that Assad's presence will compound the value of any ace-level newcomer, just as Steele's and Imanaga's do. View full article