Matthew Trueblood

The season has been long for the Cubs' rookie first baseman. The last two months have seen some difficult adjustments. Yet, everything in his profile tells us there's a star here. Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images If you're the type to buy in heavily on second-half trends for one season when predicting the next, you might be somewhat down on Michael Busch right now. In his first full big-league season, Busch has had a tough run since the All-Star break, batting .206/.296/.348 in 152 plate appearances. Splits like those are dangerous, though, because they suggest a causal relationship and a staying power that rarely exist. That goes double for a rookie. Busch has gone through multiple phases of adjustment this season. First, he had to learn to hold something back for the breaking ball, to cut down on an unsustainably high strikeout rate in the spring. Next, it was patching the hole in his swing against fastballs at the top of the zone. Now, it's about getting the ball off the ground more and consistently creating high-value contact. Busch has dramatically reduced his whiff rate against breaking pitches over the last two months. His strikeout rate has continued to trend downward, and he's maintained a low chase rate. He's whiffing and getting beaten with weak contact a bit more often against high-velocity fastballs, but only a bit more often. For a guy struggling through the second half of a first campaign against the best pitchers in the world, his bad stretches haven't even been that bad. In his worst month so far, a .233/.303/.389 August, Busch also had his highest hard-hit rate, at 43.9%. He just needs to get more of that hard contact off the ground, and get a little bit more lucky. Meanwhile, his defense has been sensational--and more than at any other time in baseball's last 100 years, defense is a significant part of the value equation for first basemen. This season, first sackers are only hitting .246/.319/.413, good for a 105 OPS+. They're being outhit by shortstops. Multiple managers have made mention this year of a trend they perceive at work in the game, which they hope and expect to continue, toward defenses that include better athletes at the traditionally offense-first positions. With shifts outlawed and the game's baseline athleticism rising, that makes sense. With hitting a more difficult and athletically demanding endeavor than ever, it makes even more. Being the big, lumbering first baseman or corner outfielder isn't an advantage at the plate anymore, and so, the league is looking for less big, lumbering people at those positions. Busch is a perfect fit for this new world. A solid but slender 6-foot-1, he's spent this season proving he can hit at well beyond the level typical of the league's first basemen, and he's also been one of the best fielders in the league at the spot. Only Matt Olson has more Defensive Runs Saved. There was a brutal early learning curve, but since about mid-May, Busch has been the best defender of the cold corner in MLB. He's been 11 runs better than average on balls to his right, toward the hole between first and second base, easily the league's best. This weekend, the Yankees come to town, which gives Cubs fans a chance to celebrate their first reunion with Anthony Rizzo since he was dealt in 2021. Rizzo was as good as any first baseman in the league in his best Cubs seasons, and replacing him was difficult--but the job is now done, at least in the medium term. Busch looks like a three- to five-year solution at first base, a winning player who can provide value on both sides of the runs ledger. It takes a little bit of the bitterness out of the bittersweet moment that is Rizzo's return. View full article

The secret about no-hitters is that they were never the manly feats of strength crusty baseball writers told you they were. That world was phony and bigoted and never real. We all depend on each other. We succeed, or fail, by working together. Wednesday night, the Cubs succeeded together. Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images It's bittersweet to see a pitcher pulled from a no-hitter. In a perfect world, where Tommy John surgery never had to be invented and where hurlers paid no price for the turn of the lineup card, we might never see it happen. Here in the real world, though, it's part of the game--and not a bad one. It's just how life is. So, after taking by far the longest leg in the relay, Shota Imanaga handed the baton to his bullpen for the final two innings Wednesday night. They sewed up a monumental achievement--one which can't belong to Imanaga, alone, but never should have, anyway. Outs aren't collected by lone wolves. Even a pitcher who plows through a lineup with strikeout after strikeout has to thank his coaches, and especially his catcher, for the support he got in that process: a pitch perfectly framed here, an unusual sequence the scouting report said would work there. Much mopre often, as on Wednesday night, it's not like that, anyway. The ball leaves the hurler's hand with plenty of life and terrific command, but it doesn't stop and disappear at home plate. It gets lined, grounded, and flied around the park, and if a team is working as one; if there's enough defensive talent behind the pitcher that night; and sometimes, if the official scorer can justify it, then a no-hitter grows out of it all. Had Isaac Paredes had a better night at third base, Imanaga might have gone another inning. Paredes committed three more errors, during a run in which his glovework at the hot corner has been a nightmare. Just as great defenses pick up the pitcher to preserve many a no-hitter, though, Imanaga picked up Paredes, over and over. He outwitted and overwhelmed the Pirates, and he continued his vital evolution as a big-league starter. For much of the season, Imanaga has been basically a two-pitch pitcher: four-seamer, splitter, four-seamer, splitter. It's a testament to the quality of those offerings that, more than a few times, he's looked this dominant in games using only that pairing. Increasingly, though, teams have come prepared for it, and they've made him pay for the elective shallowness of his arsenal. Lately, he's been adjusting. That was on full display Wednesday night. Imanaga threw a career-high eight sinkers, plus six changeups (a distinct pitch from his splitter and another relatively recent addition) and six sweepers, in addition to 42 fastballs and 33 splitters. Miguel Amaya deserves a healthy share of the credit for that, too. He coaxed Imanaga through a couple of jams, and got him dotting that sinker a couple of times for key strikes. It's a sign of Amaya's ongoing maturation behind the plate that he was able to catch his way to a no-hitter; that achievement belongs in equal share to the catcher, any time it happens. This might be the last great highlight of the Cubs' season. There is, too, still a minuscule but non-zero chance that it will be remembered as a galvanizing moment amid their late charge back into the playoff race. For tonight, none of that matters. Neither does Imanaga's departure from the contest. The game was a celebration and a triumph for a team that has done plenty of good things this year, especially in terms of run prevention. So far, the risky but fun acquisition of Nate Pearson has paid off gorgeously. Porter Hodge is having a rookie season to remember. It's wonderful that all three hurlers, and Amaya and some of the defenders, too, got to concelebrate this feat. They put themselves in the history books, where the purists can moan and derogate them but never erase them. It was a great night for Cubs baseball. View full article

There's some real value in zigging where everyone else zags. When it comes to pitching, though, there's also real risk to consider. Image courtesy of © Lily Smith/The Register / USA TODAY NETWORK There might not be any organization in MLB who likes a cut-ride fastball more than the Cubs. That's so true that, even if you're a Cubs fan who isn't ordinarily inclined to a lot of granular nerdiness about the game, that turn of phrase--"cut-ride fastball"--is probably at least familiar. In short, it's the kind of fastball Justin Steele throws. In some cases, it can have good carry, like a typical four-seam fastball, but its defining and less variable characteristic is cutting action, relative to most four-seamers. A cut-ride fastball looks like a cutter to a hitter. It runs away from a same-handed batter, or in on the hands of an opposite-handed one, hard and with enough backspin to defy gravity more than the batter expects. Cut-ride fastballs can be excellent weak-contact generators. They can miss bats nearly as well as elite rising heaters, when well-located. The Cubs value them highly. You knew that, though. Here's something you might not know: at the top levels of the organization, at least, the team is assiduously attempting to give the same pitchers who throw those cut-ride heaters hard changeups with lots of armside run. In fact, no other team in the league is doing so anywhere near as aggressively as they are. Of the 843 pitchers who have thrown at least 50 fastballs (four-seamers and sinkers, for these purposes) and five changeups at the Triple-A and/or big-league levels this year, the one with the largest difference between the horizontal movement on his heaters and that on his changeup was Cade Horton. Horton is, of course, the Cubs' top pitching prospect, though he's been shut down for the year with a subscapularis strain. He came to them with a potentially devastating slider and a fastball shape they liked; they worked with him to create this hard, running changeup. It's not just Horton, though. Four of the six right-handed pitchers with the biggest gaps in horizontal movement between fastballs and changeup spent some time with the Iowa Cubs this year: Horton, Brandon Birdsell, Zac Leigh, and Carl Edwards Jr. That's to say nothing of Frankie Scalzo Jr., who ranks 22nd on that list; or Steele, who's fifth-highest on the list for left-handed pitchers. It's not necessarily the case that any of these guys are throwing changeups with crazy amounts of horizontal movement, on their own. It's just that, relative to their cut-ride fastball shapes, the changeup really changes lanes in an extreme way. You can see exactly why the Cubs are so dedicated to this project, too, when you glance at the hurlers' pitch break charts. Above was Horton's. Here's Birdsell's. Those two each have tight, angular breaking balls, designed to play off their natural fastballs. Scalzo and Leigh have a greater spread, with bigger breaking balls and bigger velocity differentials from the heater on them. Here's Scalzo: You can see some scant evidence of him trying to mix in a cutter to act as a bridge from his fastball to the breaking pitches, and in Leigh's plot, you can see an even more concerted effort to do the same: There's a theme, here. With all of these guys, the breaking balls are the natural secondaries. That makes sense, given the shape of their fastballs. They like to supinate, to use physiological jargon. They're most comfortable applying some spin and pressure to the outside of the ball at release. Their heaters and their breakers each come from a natural motion that moves the ball that direction--away from a same-handed batter. This is why Steele persists in calling his very cutterish fastball a four-seamer. It's his natural way of moving. Baseball people talk a lot, these days, about motor preference. A natural supinator will easily find feel for a breaking ball or two, and often, they'll have a cut-ride heater. A natural pronator will specialize in sinkers and changeups. The Cubs collect natural supinators. Each motor preference comes with problems that demand to be solved. For pronators, it's finding some version of a breaking ball that works. Remember the talk about the death ball during last year's postseason? That's one example of a version of the curveball that can work for a natural pronator. For supinators like the Cubs' collection of homegrown hurlers, though, the problem is getting something they can command on the outer half of the plate to opposite-handed batters. If you have anything less than peak Steele-caliber command of a cutting fastball, aiming it for the outside corner to an opposite-handed hitter is dangerous, because you're likely to miss right over the heart of the plate sometimes, with the ball moving right into the swing plane of the guy with the lumber. Breaking balls, as we all know, tend not to be as effective against opposite-handed batters--but that goes double for the kind that come most naturally to heavy supinators, because those breakers tend to have wide horizontal shapes, and it's vertical movement that best fools opposite-handed batters. The Cubs' answer to this has been to simply break motor preference, and get their supinating specialists to pronate hard on their changeups. Revisit the chart of all qualifying pitchers, above, to notice that all six of the hurlers highlighted have less of a velocity gap between their fastballs and their changeups than the average for the league. These are power changeups. They seem to have simply told these players to throw the hell out of the ball, albeit from a modified grip. They're trusting the fact that these guys' arms don't want to turn that way to slow them down through release, enough to create at least a modicum of velocity separation. The rest is just about having a pitch move the opposite of the direction that everything else does. It's an interesting experiment, and it's not without merit. Given the competence of each of these pitchers when it comes to fastball and breaking ball execution, they wouldn't even need to have exceptional command of their changeup in order to get value from it. Forcing opposite-handed batters to cover the whole plate, getting a good number of ground balls, and occasionally earning an extra strikeout along the way, each of these guys could benefit from having this pitch in their arsenal. However, there's noteworthy risk to the approach, too. and the team might be feeling the backlash of that risk right now. The only pitcher whose chart we haven't looked at, yet, among those named above who are still in the organization, is Steele. This chart looks subtly different than it did a year ago. In about 800 fewer pitches, Steele more than doubled the number of changeups he threw, from 28 to 66. Right now, though, Steele is unavailable, after elbow soreness scratched him from his latest start. That brings us full-circle, since Horton, too, had his season cut short. Sometimes, when you break motor preference, the body breaks back. It's not nearly time to say for certain that forcing running, power changeups into the arsenals of cut-ride fastball guys is leading to injuries on a patterned and persistent basis. The sample sizes here are much too small, and much too noisy. However, broadly speaking, there are reasons why other teams aren't developing pitchers with this massive gap in horizontal break, born of a supinator's fastball shape and a heavily pronated change. It's a valuable skill to add to a pitcher's résumé, but only if they can stay on the mound while doing it. A more common solution for the changeup problem in natural supinators is the splitter, which is on the rise throughout pro baseball, anyway. It comes with its own risks, in some cases, but a splitter doesn't necessarily break motor preference for a guy who favors cutting action on the heat. Commanding splitters can be difficult, though, and unlike high-run, power changeups, misplaced splitters often end up in the seats. The Cubs believe they can overcome the inherent risks of asking a pitcher whose arm naturally moves in one way to move in another, or at least that the benefits of doing so outweigh the risks. It's too early to tell whether they're right, but it's a fascinating position. View full article

At this time of year, an MLB season becomes a war of attrition. It's about staying healthy, and about how well (if at all) the guys who aren't healthy can play through stuff. The Cubs suffered a brutal combo punch on Labor Day, from one guy struggling to play through something and one who no longer could. Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-USA TODAY Sports It was, arguably, the cruelest hour in three years or more for the Cubs. Ahead 3-0 on Jared Jones and the Pirates after seven scintillating frames from Jameson Taillon on Labor Day, most of the team watched helplessly as Jorge López--a terrific story, a symbol of the team's resurgence, and a linchpin of their bullpen--blew the lead in a matter of moments in the top of the eighth inning. The team couldn't struggle back to level this time, the way they did against the lousy Pittsburgh bullpen last week on the road, and they suffered a crucial loss that looked like it would be a fairly easy win. That one hurt, and badly, but it's the kind of thing you know is coming. You can foresee it, accept it, and survive it. The Cubs weren't going to be undefeated the rest of the season, and while they need absolutely every win they can get, it's easy to make the case that they outplayed Pittsburgh Monday night--that they're still playing a good enough brand of baseball to flush that frustrating defeat and get another winning streak going. Besides, López was due for a bit of regression, and he'd been sidelined for a few days recently by a nagging injury, so it shouldn't have shocked anyone to see him stumble, even amid a sterling second half. No, the knockout punch came after the game. Right at the end of his postgame media availability, Craig Counsell revealed that Justin Steele will be scratched from his scheduled start Tuesday night against Paul Skenes, with elbow soreness. In his place, Kyle Hendricks will start opposite Skenes, for the third time this year. The baseball gods love their little, cruel jokes. There's no silver lining on that cloud--or even the promise of a brighter morning ahead. The dropoff from Steele to Hendricks as a member of the rotation is massive. So is the lost opportunity to expand the rotation to include six pitchers at times the rest of the way, to keep the fading Shota Imanaga fresh. The team needs to finish something like 18-6 from here to make the playoffs. Without their ace, that's simply not possible. Maybe Steele will bounce right back and make a start later this week. Early indications seem to be that the team isn't overwhelmingly concerned about this. On the other hand, this is a pitcher who was shelved with a lower back strain for the final month of 2022; spent a minimum stint on the injured list last summer with an elbow/forearm issue; and ran out of steam at the end of last season anyway. It's time to wonder whether he'll ever make it to the end of a season with his legs under him and his arm securely attached in all the right places. We have no reason to believe that this injury portends offseason surgery, or anything that severe, but the reality of the moment is sufficiently bleak: Steele isn't a true workhorse. That has big implications even beyond 2024. It means the Cubs need to be more aggressive in the winter pitching market. It means they're further from being the kind of team they expected to be this season than it appears--a gap that was already considerable. This loss, much more than the one that ticked into the standings table after the game, spells big trouble and big changes ahead for the Cubs. In the short term, though, it just affirms what most of us knew all along: they don't have it in them, this year. This team will finish just outside the postseason, for the second year in a row. They'll finish with a winning record in the second half for the third year in a row. All that means is that, for the third year in a row, they'll pick somewhere in the low teens in next year's Draft. That is a massive organizational failure, even in a season in which some very encouraging successes have also been in evidence. View full article

The Cubs' firecracker of a center fielder came up swinging fast and free, and missing everything. Now, he's figured out how to square up the ball--but a key tweak must come next. Image courtesy of © Daniel Kucin Jr.-USA TODAY Sports By now, the numbers might be familiar to you. Let's rehash them, though, because this turns out to be one of those times when selective endpoints are valuable tools, rather than red herrings. Through Jul. 26, Pete Crow-Armstrong was batting .180/.230/.292. For reference, in the years 2000 and 2001, Kerry Wood batted .216/.242/.261. From 1998 through 2001, then-Expos starter Javier Vázquez batted .235/.266/.281. There's an old tweet saying that the most vicious burn you can hurl at someone is, "Who is this clown?", because it not only calls the target a clown, but implies that they're not one of the better-known clowns. For his first 200 big-league trips to the plate, Crow-Armstrong not only hit like a pitcher, but hit like a fairly unremarkable offensive pitcher. The next day, everything changed. Rare--excruciatingly rare, almost unheard-of, and often only illusory--are cases in which everything changed for a hitter on one day, but it's hard to make any other case with Crow-Armstrong. Very visibly, that day, he went to a bigger, more rhythmic move with his lower half--a leg kick--in the load phase of his swing. Less obviously, but just as importantly, he debuted a slower but infinitely more controlled swing, with a much more on-plane bat path. New bat-tracking data made available to the public this spring via Statcast has allowed us, for the first time, to measure the efficiency of a player's swing. It's simple, though far from easy for us laypeople: given the observed speed of the incoming pitch and the player's bat, what is the maximum possible exit velocity, had the two met perfectly squarely? And what percentage of that theoretical maximum did the hitter achieve on a given swing? Here's a rolling chart showing the Squared Up% of Crow-Armstrong's swings, courtesy of Kyle Bland, a data whiz who works for PitcherList and ginned up a supremely useful app to digest bat-tracking data within a couple of days of the information becoming available. See if you can spot July 27. Again: baseball data just never tells you this neat a story. Transformations that radical do not happen that quickly. One day, Crow-Armstrong was limping along, struggling to square the ball up and create any real damage against big-league pitching. The next day, he began teeing off on almost everything. Since that day, Crow-Armstrong is hitting .330/.378/.551. He's become the heart and soul of the Cubs' offense, even as their everyday No. 8 hitter. In 121 plate appearances, he's only struck out 18 times, and he has 13 extra-base hits. Almost paradoxically, he started hitting it hard more often, hitting it harder on average, and reaching higher top-end exit velocities, all while both making more contact (which usually means accepting some weaker contact along the way) and swinging the bat slower. Wait, what? Yes. The above demonstrates the jump in Crow-Armstrong's contact efficiency. With this chart of his swing acceleration over time, we can see that that efficiency made up for a material sacrifice in terms of raw bat speed. Part of this is, simply, that Crow-Armstrong's adjustment both got more balls onto his barrel (rather than being mishits) and led to more contact, in general--as opposed to whiffs. During June and July, especially, his swing was very fast, but also steep and out of his careful controi. He had to guess at pitch type and location, fire, and hope to run into the ball. Even on hittable pitches, he often failed to do so. PCA Before.mp4 There's no question that adding a leg kick helped cue Crow-Armstrong to be more deliberate about seeing the ball. His swing now has phases and flow, and those things require a bit more reactivity, a bit more balance. It's why he's not missing hittable pitches much at all anymore, and why he can hit them with authority, even while lacking elite bat speed. PCA Now.mp4 Here, alas, is where I jerk the chain--just a little bit--to rein us all in. You didn't think this would be simplicity and sunshine beginning to end, did you? See, when he was going truly dreadfully, Crow-Armstrong's biggest problem was a lack of plate discipline so profound it could make Javier Báez (or Javy Vázquez, for that matter) blush. Crow-Armstrong chased almost half the pitches he saw outside the zone in June and July, trying to make things happen and to avoid falling behind in counts against pitchers whose polish, sequencing, and command he could not handle. Since making his mechanical change, he's also changed this--kind of. Here are his swing rates on pitches inside the zone, and beyond it, throughout the season. Seeing that blue line trending steadily downward will warm the cockles of any hitting coach's heart. That's pixelated job security, right there. That's a young hitter taking great instruction and screaming around a developmental corner at full speed. Only, look at the yellow line, too. That one is telling its own story. At his peak, in the first half of August when he was first starting to really feel his new superpower, Crow-Armstrong was swinging at fully 90% of the strikes he saw. I don't care if you're the secret grandchild of Ted Williams and Rod Carew: you can't sustain a high level of contact efficiency while swinging at over nine of every 10 pitches in the zone--let alone chasing barely a quarter of the time in the process. That bespeaks a hitter on a true, once-in-a-lifetime heater--but not one who has figured out the game in some semi-permanent way. Crow-Armstrong, in short, still needs to learn to swing less often, and this set of adjustments to his setup and swing hasn't much helped with that. I can buy that he's going to cut his chase rate into the 30s, rather than the mid-40s, and that's plenty valuable, but until he gets more selective across the board--even within the zone--there will be pitchers getting his report and nodding purposefully. At key moments, teams will start figuring out ways to retire Crow-Armstrong, by exploiting his hyper-aggressiveness. That does not, by any means, invalidate the huge changes he's made. They should continue to serve him well. The Cubs seem to have a credible big-league hitter on their hands, thanks to the way he's changed his usage of his. They just don't have a bona fide superstar, unless and until a very difficult--and, for many afflicted with such swing happiness, impossible--second layer of major changes is made. View full article

All wins count, and at this time of year, no playoff hopeful (however remote their chances) will turn up their nose at one. As the Cubs return from a triumphant 8-1 road trip, though, they do so knowing they'll need to play much better to make their recent surge matter. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports At long last, the 2024 Cubs have strung together some important wins, and when you glance at the scoreboard, they look impressive and earned. Over the last 30 days, in fact, no one else in MLB has as good a run differential as the North Siders'. That's the good news. The news of mixed valence is, of course, that they desperately needed to get this hot, if they wanted to revive and sustain any hope of reaching the postseason--and that they have to stay that way in order to get there. So here's the bad news: What they've done over the last two weeks is utterly unsustainable. Since Aug. 16, when they began a series against the Blue Jays that launched them into their current 12-3 heater, the Cubs are hitting .337/.430/.568 with runners in scoring position. That, itself, is far better than any team can keep up, but it's only the tip of the iceberg. Against five straight weak, sub-.500 opponents, the Cubs have taken advantage of a relentless parade of bad play by the other team. Errors have put them on the bases and helped them advance. They've even been bailed out on baserunning gaffes that should have resulted in outs. The Marlins, Pirates, and Nationals, especially, weren't ready to play serious baseball when the Cubs came to town in recent days. Miami traded as much of their roster as they possibly could in July. Pittsburgh and Washington are both showing the profound, problematic cracks in their depth, and their dreadful bullpens and defense almost forced the Cubs to win games this week. That doesn't diminish the value of the wins themselves. Though a team from a suburban county north of Atlanta holds the tiebreaker against them should both clubs end up with the same record, their losses to the Phillies this weekend reduced their edge over the Cubs in the standings to three games. Unbelievably, the Cubs are now within striking distance of a Wild Card berth. To claim it, though, they have to play much better over their final 25 games. They can't continue to count on getting a hit in a third of their at-bats when runners reach scoring position. They also can't continue getting middling starting pitching, as they have over these 15 contests. Cubs starters have a 4.12 ERA in that span, and while Kyle Hendricks's blowup in Pittsburgh is part of that problem, it can't explain away the team's strikeout rate (25th in MLB) or home-run rate (eighth-highest). Justin Steele, Shota Imanaga, Jameson Taillon, Javier Assad, Kyle Hendricks, and Jordan Wicks are capable of pitching better than that down the stretch, but they'll need to do so. The team is going to score many fewer runs from here on out than they have over their recent hot streak. They have to make up for that with better run prevention. Meanwhile, as Pete Crow-Armstrong and Miguel Amaya come back to Earth, the team is going to need to get more out of Cody Bellinger, MIchael Busch, and Isaac Paredes. Under Craig Counsell's able stewardship, the Cubs have shown more resilience, and frankly more sheer talent, than they evinced at any previous stage of this season. They have an outside shot at the postseason, which is better than they could say a fortnight ago. To convert their newfound possibility to reality, though, they have to maintain extraordinary focus and further improve upon their recent improvements. The Yankees, Dodgers, and Phillies won't give the team wins on a platter, the way their recent opponents have, and they can't afford to stop winning for a moment. This has been a fun bounceback, but it's not enough--unless they build upon it. View full article

You can't spell 'Craigtember' without 'C-R-A'. Meet the Cubs' Counsell Relief Ace, and quake in fear, rest of the National League. Image courtesy of © Rafael Suanes-USA TODAY Sports The worry, if you were a Cubs fan long about mid-June, was that Craig Counsell's magic doesn't work without an elite bullpen--that the team's failure to build a great relief corps would doom them in their first season under their new $40-million skipper. They still might be doomed for 2024, but thanks to Porter Hodge, we have a fresh reminder that Counsell brings the magic with him wherever he goes. Hodge, 23, debuted on May 22. His first three appearances were all low-leverage affairs, and after a rough showing on Jun. 6, he made a brief sojourn back to Triple-A Iowa. Since returning, though, he has slowly established himself as one of the best relief pitchers in baseball--and the kind of bullpen catalyst Counsell specializes in developing and empowering. Now up to 31 appearances with the big-league team, Hodge has had 27 scoreless outings. That 87.1% rate is second-best in MLB, among hurlers with at least 15 relief appearances. Only the Guardians' Hunter Gaddis edges him out, and then only narrowly, at 87.7%. Hodge has fanned 33.6% of opposing batters and owns a 1.80 ERA. Since he made it back from Iowa on Jun. 21, opponents have a .433 OPS against him. He's become, if not the sole closer, an implicitly trusted relief weapon, and the linchpin of the league's best relief corps. Indeed, since Jun. 1, the Cubs lead MLB in Scoreless Appearance Rate (SAR) from relievers, at 75.4%. Through the end of May, their SAR of 63.7% was better only than those of the Rockies and White Sox. It took time for this bullpen to come together, and the story is about much more than just Hodge, but he's the most important piece of the puzzle--not just because he's performed so well, but because he's a walking affirmation of the staying power of Counsell's capacity for turning rookies into relief aces. Pitching in high-leverage relief in MLB is excruciatingly hard--both physically and mentally. Few pitchers can meet both types of challenge and succeed as closers or high-usage setup men right away when they arrive in the majors, but under Counsell, that miniature baseball miracle has happened numerous times. Josh Hader and Devin Williams are the famous examples, but not even the only ones. Now, he's demonstrating the same ability to manage a young pitcher through the minefield of a rookie campaign under the pressure of backend bullpen work, in a new place and without a coaching staff in which he had much say. Whether the Cubs can pull off the comeback from their dismal first half or not, Hodge's breakout season is a testament to the value of their manager, and to the mental toughness of the hurler himself. It's also a reinforcement of the organization's belief that they've come a long way in terms of pitching development. All of those things are important, but if the team can string together enough winning streaks to sneak into the postseason, they'll be doubly so, and much of the credit will belong to the pairing of veteran manager and inexperienced flamethrower. View full article

There's a funny little freedom in the fact that this team already seems to be stuck paying the luxury tax. Image courtesy of © Robert Edwards-USA TODAY Sports The San Francisco Giants have placed left-handed reliever Taylor Rogers on outright waivers, making him available to teams to claim, if they're willing to take on the balance of his contract. Rogers, 33, is a somewhat complicated case, that way, because his contract is hefty. After signing a three-year, $33-million deal prior to 2023, the southpaw is still due about $14 million: $2 million for the rest of this year, and $12 million in 2025. That's more than most teams are willing to take on, at this time of year. Most teams aren't in the unique, uncomfortable position the Cubs are in, though. Already likely to pay competitive-balance taxes this year (by the reckoning of their own chief decision-maker) and now chasing a remote playoff chance with full knowledge that falling just short would be a worst-case scenario for their season, the team should be both highly motivated to improve and only lightly discouraged by the money attached to Rogers. If they feel he can help them, they should pounce. And they should feel he can help him. Rogers has pared down to become strictly a sinker-sweeper guy, in this later phase of his career. He's a good one, too. His 2.45 ERA overstates his excellence, cushioned as it is by the fact that he pitches at home in San Francisco, but he has a strong strikeout rate (28.2%) and limits walks (7.7%). He's very, very good at spin mirroring; hitters don't get a good chance to discern the difference between his two offerings. Yet, they move very differently. A former closer for the Twins and Padres, Rogers has settled into more of a middle relief role for the Giants. He's pretty expensive for that kind of arm, but he would represent a roughly cost-neutral upgrade from Drew Smyly as a left-handed relief weapon for the Cubs going into next season. In the meantime, he'd help them in September, too, because Smyly is the only lefty on whom the team can count in the bullpen right now. Snapping up Rogers right now is a no-brainer. It would save the team the trouble, uncertainty, and thorny market realities of the winter ahead, when they will have plenty of money to spend but could easily end up giving a multi-year deal to a pitcher just like Rogers, or another misbegotten deal for roughly the same amount on a one-year deal to a lesser hurler, like Héctor Neris. Shoring up the highly fluid relief corps a bit right now would make things easier as the team tries to build a more robust contender for 2025, and it would incrementally improve their odds of making an improbable run to October this year, too--at which point Rogers would also have huge value for them. If the team is going to pay the luxury tax this year, anyway, they should eagerly add the paltry remaining money for Rogers to their rolls, knowing that Smyly, Kyle Hendricks, Tucker Barnhart, Trey Mancini, and plenty of others are coming off their books going into the winter. They have money to spend. They have an immediate and a medium-term need for relief help. They have an opportunity to use their flexibility to fill their needs and make it easier to focus on more important things. They should seize this moment. View full article

The savvy southpaw's first Stateside summer has seen some ups and downs. Hitters see his stuff coming and swing wildly--although with very mixed results. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports It's easy to miss just how roughly big-league batters have treated Shota Imanaga lately. Because he put up such gaudy numbers prior to his first rough start at the end of May, his full-season stats still look good. Since May 29, Imanaga has made 15 starts, and while he's struck out 82 batters and walked just 13, he's also surrendered 19 home runs. Imanaga's ERA over that span is 4.47. His last start that didn't include surrendering a home run came Jul. 10 in Baltimore. This weekend, in nearby Washington, D.C., he'll try to demonstrate anew the abikity to keep the ball in the park. Simply put, the league has adjusted to Imanaga. That hasn't rendered him a bad pitcher, but he's been more like Jameson Taillon than Justin Steele. He's a control artist, right now, capable of missing some bats but not of avoiding the occasional ambush. Hitters have learned what to expect from him, and they're going to the plate ready to swing the bats. It's one thing to be a pitcher who fills up the zone and forces opponents to swing. It's quite another to be literally the pitcher against whom batters swing most often. That's probably not a good thing, in Imanaga's case. He throws too many flat-VAA fastballs, tough to square up but a boon to hitters when they do; and too many splitters, which miss bats like crazy when well-executed but have a higher error rate in terms of movement and location than most sliders or curveballs would. He's been a subtle, perpetual, and assiduous tinkerer, but Imanaga has stuck pretty closely to those two pitches this year. They're his bread and butter, and he insists upon being able to trust and lean on them. It's made him deleteriously predictable, though--or at least, it's made things too easy on the opponent, because they can craft a swing that handles both the fastball and the splitter. Familiarity has also caused trouble for Imanaga. Even as he's begun to diversify his arsenal, he's also begun seeing teams a second or third team within the season. Hitters have made adjustments upon getting an extra look at him, and not just from start to start. Here's a chart showing the times through the order penalty for all pitchers with at least 15 starts this year, with the increase in batters' production from the first to the second trip through the order on the x-axis and that from the second to the third time through on the y-axis. The extra lines on the grid are the league average for each stat, so players (like Steele) in the lower right quadrant suffer more the second time through, relative to their peers, but less the third time. Imanaga is in the upper right portion, seeing a greater loss of effectiveness with both turns of the lineup card than an average starter. Some of that might be management of fatigue, as he's spent the season adapting to a new schedule and pitching on a shorter average rotation than he did while he toiled in Japan. However, if you've watched Imanaga pitch this year, you know it also feels like the hitters are just seeing him better and more ready to combat that splitter as games unfold. His next adjustment needs to be bolder implementation of one of his tertiary weapons, to keep hitters a bit more off-balance and make them swing with less frequency or confidence after the first time through the order. Those adjustments will wait, at least in part, until the winter. The Philosopher and his coaching staff will need time to digest and reflect on his first year with the Cubs, and they can more readily make sweeping, baseline gameplan changes heading into spring training. However, some of it needs to start now. Remote though their chances are, the Cubs have some semblance of hope to climb back into the NL playoff hunt. Since one of their top priorities this September should be the development and further preparation of Imanaga for 2025, anyway, the team should be working with him to alter the plan of attack right away. Imanaga's not a true-talent 4.47 ERA pitcher. Then again, neither is he the guy whose ERA stayed south of 1.00 for two solid months to open the season. Down the stretch, the Cubs need him to find a productive place between those two figures, informed by the need to get hitters a little less trigger-happy when they step into the box--particularly in the middle and late innings. If they can get something more akin to April and May Imanaga over his final half-dozen starts of the season, they'll enjoy both improved chances to make something of this desperate season and greater confidence about their rotation picture heading into the offseason. View full article

It comes down to this. The Cubs have left themselves a 28-game season, in which a merely winning record is not remotely good enough. They'll have to get scorching hot to redeem this season, but there's no turning back now. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports Winning series wasn't good enough. The Cubs needed a genuine hot streak, and a genuine hot streak means sweeping some people. With a scintillating comeback Wednesday afternoon, the team asserted itself, finishing off a three-game sweep in Pittsburgh that launches them into an off day on a surge of momentum. They've won four straight series, are 17-9 since the trade deadline, and have made much of this headway on the strength of strong performances from their young players. The odds against this late surge amounting to anything are long. The Cubs trail Atlanta by 5.5 games, and you can count it as 6.0, because Atlanta holds the tiebreaker. In that hot month of play, they've only gained a game on the Braves in the standings. If the team goes anything less than 20-8 the rest of the way, they have almost no chance to make the postseason--and crucially, finishing just outside the playoffs for a second straight season would be a worst-case scenario. Last year, the Cubs drafted 13th, after an ultimately unhelpful strong finish to 2022 and a bit of bad luck in the Draft Lottery. They picked 14th this July, after their late charge fell two games shy of the playoffs in 2023. Some better fortune or a truly nightmarish September could put them back in the top 10 next summer, but right now, they're angling toward another pick in the same range. For a team reluctant to spend the way big-market behemoths should and facing four division rivals who all get extra picks to bolster their Draft classes each year, that would be a disaster. The team is trending too much toward the recent patterns traced by the Bulls, in the NBA: be competitive, draw fans, settle into the unhappy medium of the league, and wallow perpetually in averageness. To break free of that bad cycle, they need to convert this year's fake rally to a playoff spot, and that's a very tall order. They've made these difficult circumstances for themselves, and have only themselves to blame, but that doesn't matter, now. They can't afford to think conservatively. For the next 28 games (or however many they play before cooling off again and tumbling out of the race), the Cubs are running for their lives, and they need to act like it. When the 2018 Cubs entered September, they held a reasonably comfortable lead over Craig Counsell's Brewers. They didn't collapse, either. From Sept. 1 through the end of the scheduled regular season, Joe Maddon's team went 16-12. Counsell's Crew went 19-7, though, to close the gap and force a Game 163--which, of course, they also won. Counsell led Milwaukee to a 20-7 record after the calendar turned to September again the next year, to seize a place in the Wild Card Game. They started calling it Craigtember, in Wisconsin. The Cubs' kick began in August, but it has to stay just as strong from here. The cruel facts are that even that kind of heater won't be enough this time. The Cubs need Counsell to work his magic, but they have to do it even better, and they'd still need more help than the Brewers got from the Cubs in catching them six years ago. Since they've locked themselves out of the cellar, though, the only place to go is forward. Two 20-7 months made Counsell famous. Pushing that to 21-7 on the third go-round might just get them across the line in time to qualify for the playoffs. We might as well see if he's capable of helping a team find that one more tick of greatness, when it really counts. View full article

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