Matthew Trueblood

We're inside two weeks until the 2024 MLB trade deadline, and the Chicago Cubs need to be sellers during that time. They have a variety of options, though, and choosing which to pursue is a matter of sifting through both internal and external talents with an eye on 2025 and beyond. Image courtesy of © Thomas Shea-USA TODAY Sports The particular shape of the Cubs' frustrating first half has closed some doors for Jed Hoyer and company. At the outset of the season, names like Pete Alonso (a free agent at season's end) and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.(a costly potential trade target) were high on the wish lists of many Cubs fans. Now, they should almost be completely eliminated from those fans' thoughts. Michael Busch has been one of the best stories of the team's season, and the team needs to save either first base or DH for him for the foreseeable future. Since it also doesn't look like Seiya Suzuki is a viable big-league outfielder, defensively; or like Cody Bellinger will be opting out and heading back to free agency; or like Christopher Morel can play third base, it doesn't make sense to wedge an extremely expensive Alonso or Guerrero into the team's plans for the second half of this decade--let alone to give up major young talent, as they would have to do to acquire Guerrero. Let's talk, then, about the five high-profile players hitting free agency this fall who should occupy fans'minds, and whose impending availability should inform the front office's strategy over the next fortnight. Juan Soto, RF While he's only a slightly better positional fit than Alonso or Guerrero (in that he's only marginally better in the field than is Suzuki, and might not be any better, were he tasked with playing the tough sun in right field at Wrigley Field on a regular basis), Soto is a special category. He's one of the four or five best overall hitters in baseball, with those skills heavily weighted toward things (power and plate discipline) that will age exceptionally well and port across a change in environment. He's very nearly as good as Aaron Judge, but is hitting the market a half-decade younger than Judge did. For all those reasons, Soto is likely to sign for more than half a billion dollars, and therefore, he's overwhelmingly likely to sign somewhere other than the North Side. Still, he belongs to an echelon of talent the Cubs need to start pursuing. They don't develop players of this caliber. They don't draft high enough to get ahold of players this talented through pure scouting. They have to at least take a serious look and make a good-faith offer every time someone like Soto hits free agency. It only happens a few times per decade, anyway. In the short term, that means clearing a path. With Bellinger likely to be back next year, it becomes more urgent than ever to trade one of Ian Happ and Suzuki, clearing some space in both the payroll and the positional picture for the next few years. Though it already looks like the Cubs are just below the first luxury-tax threshold, it's also crucial to ensure that they stay that way, because their taxpayer status will affect the penalty they pay if they sign a player of Soto's caliber this winter, and signing him would mean being a taxpayer for the next few seasons, at least. You want to be starting from the non-payer level, going into such a deal. Alex Bregman, 3B It's clear that Morel isn't the third baseman of the future. Maybe Cam Smith is, but that's a little ways off. Matt Shaw is a fine player with a bright future, but it's more likely to be at second base than at third. His bat might not profile well at the hot corner, and even if it does, his defensive skillset might better align with the demands of the keystone. Counting either Shaw or Smith as a hatched chicken would, in any case, be the kind of foolish error the Cubs have made too often over the last several years. They have to stop thinking of themselves as an elite player development organization, unless and until they actually become one, so they can operate in a clear-eyed, non-delusional way. One thing that means is ardently pursuing a player like Bregman, who is batting .256/.316/.414 in his age-30 season but will surely finish the season with his metronomic .800+ OPS. Since the start of 2022, his OPS before the All-Star break is under .750, but after the break, it's just a hair shy of .900. Bregman is an exceptionally tough out, and would be the consistent, high-floor hitter missing from this lineup full of streaky sluggers. He's going to be expensive too, but age and a less obviously elite profile will reduce his asking price a little bit. The Cubs should be in heavily on him, and the move to set that up is obvious: trading Nico Hoerner for the solid young talent he should command, to clear second base for Shaw or Morel, making it possible to land Bregman and slot him into the everyday lineup. Corbin Burnes, RHP Illustrating how much work the Cubs have to do, it still feels like the Brewers won the trade they made with the Orioles this winter, even after Burnes started the All-Star Game Tuesday for the American League. Milwaukee got budding star infielder Joey Ortiz, potential long-term bullpen weapon DL Hall, and the 34th overall pick in this week's Draft, with which they selected college bat Blake Burke and were able to further goose a generous bonus pool. They're going to win the 2024 NL Central, and they look very nicely set for 2025 and beyond, too. That said, Burnes's season is important, because it reaffirms his status as one of the game's best and most durable aces. Craig Counsell knows him, and has gotten the best out of him. His approach mirrors what the Cubs like their pitchers to do, and as the manager gets more chances to shape his staff and filter his preferred messages out to players, that figures to hold true. Burnes will be a candidate to get $300 million on a single deal, as only two other pitchers ever have, but no matter the exact price tag he eventually commands, he's going to be the top pitcher on the market this winter. Starting pitching has been the strength of this year's Cubs, but maybe it's a strength from which they need to trade, in order to build the best possible club in 2025. With Soto and Bregman the only positional free agents with any meaningful profile who will move the needle for next year's team, maybe the move is to swap Justin Steele, Jameson Taillon, Shota Imanaga, or Javier Assad (whichever turns out to yield the most value in return, based on what the Cubs project each to actually do in the next few years) for a position player-centric package, akin to what the Brewers just did with Burnes--and then splash money around this winter in the deeper pitching market, be that on Burnes himself or on someone like... Max Fried, LHP Whereas Burnes is as good a bet to take the ball and work deep into the game every fifth day as any starter in baseball, Fried is a health risk. He doesn't strike out as many hitters as Burnes does, either, and is more vulnerable to the odd blowup start. When he's right, though, he's even more dominant than Burnes. With a deep arsenal and a diverse skill set, he induces ground balls at one of the best rates in the league; limits walks; and keeps the ball in the park. He could be a very simple 1-for-1 replacement for Steele or Imanaga, although a more expensive one. This is one of the ways the Cubs could (by being less risk-averse and more willing to spend like the big-market behemoth they ought to be) attempt a lateral move on the pitching side and get more young positional talent in the process. Jack Flaherty, RHP Fried, Burnes, Soto, and Bregman are all going to be given a qualifying offer on their way into the free-agent pool. That means each will cost the Cubs a draft pick, should they manage to sign them. Flaherty, Fried's high-school teammate, is an exception. The Tigers will trade him before the end of this month, and once they do, he'll be ineligible to receive a qualifying offer. Whichever team signs him this winter, all they'll have to give up for him is cash. It'll be a lot of cash, because Flaherty has made some overdue and vital adjustments this season. In the wake of them, he's striking out over 32% of opposing batters, and walking fewer than 5% of them. If he can sustain the slider command he's shown this season, Flaherty is going to remain an ace, and he has good enough control to pitch deep into games, too. The Cubs front office needs to think like a chess player over the coming weeks and months. Each move they make (or don't make) will have short- and long-term ramifications. As they choose from their menu of possible pursuits at the deadline, they have to think about how each would set up another move this fall or winter. It's important that they make some moves, but the risk of making the wrong one is clear and present. These five players should loom over each course they choose, because of the way each could change the organization and reshape their needs. View full article

The erstwhile Cubs starter has one of baseball's most interesting pitch mixes. He throws one changeup to left-handed batters, and another to righties. The latter is an especially fascinating, almost unique flavor of the cambio. Image courtesy of © Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports It's not just that Kyle Hendricks throws two distinct versions of his changeup. It's also extremely unusual that he throws one of them the way he does. Changeups come in all shapes and velocities, and some cut toward the glove side, in an absolute sense, while others have a crazy amount of arm-side run. By and large, it depends on the overall movement profile of the pitcher--how his arm works, what kind of spin he imparts, and which grip he employs for the change. The harder, faster rule, though, is that you can safely make a directional prediction about changeup movement based on fastball movement. Some pitchers have a high-rise changeup with virtually no vertical separation from the fastball, whereas others have diving, downhill splitter-style pitches. Some have huge run to the arm side, and some stay in the same lane as the fastball, depending on a slight fade and a significant velocity differential. What hardly any of them have is cutting movement, relative to that pitcher's fastball. The changeup Hendricks throws to right-handed batters is an exception. (In this image, I removed Hendricks's curveballs, which are not relevant to this particular study.) As you can see, Hendricks leans heavily on his sinker against righties, and his changeup moves more to the glove side (away from a righty batter) than the sinker does. It also moves more in that direction than his seldom-used four-seamer, on average. It even resists gravity a bit more than the sinker, and thus appears to rise relative to it. How rare is that? Well, 80 right-handed pitchers have thrown at least 25 changeups to right-handed batters this season, and of them, only four share this characteristic. No one quite matches Hendricks, but to say just how unusual his cut-change action is, let's dig in a little bit on each of the other three who have a significant amount of cut-change, themselves. Logan Webb Like Hendricks, Webb is a sinker-and-changeup star, and throwing a sinker does make it slightly easier to achieve a cut-change effect. If your sinker has considerable run, and your change is more about velocity separation than movement, you can have that pitch stay over the heart of the plate to induce chase below the zone, whereas you want the sinker to run to the inside edge and generate weak contact. Plainly, though, that's nothing like Hendricks's six-inch difference in average movement, and unlike Hendricks's, his change dips lower than his fastball, the way you'd expect it to. All that heavy action is what makes Webb one of the league's premier ground-ball guys, and it's what's missing from Hendricks's these days, as he becomes more homer-prone. Pedro Avila Though a little-know long reliever, Avila (whom the Guardians snatched up from San Diego in April amid a desperate need for healthy arms) has been valuable this season, with a 3.51 ERA in 41 innings of work. He uses both a four-seamer and a two-seamer against righty batters, but the changeup has cut action relative to each--as well as a huge vertical movement disparity. The combination of offerings flummoxes hitters, and while right-on-right changeups are rarely standout pitches in terms of results, Avila's is an exception. He gets chases on 44 percent of the changeups he throws to righties outside the zone, and the whiff rate on the pitch is just under 33%. The only (understandable) bad news is that he finds the zone with that pitch just 46 percent of the time. Tayler Scott In what has been an up-and-down season in Houston, Scott has been a much-needed bullpen stabilizer. He's primarily a sweeper artist, eating right-handed batters up with the breaking ball that runs far away from them. He sets that pitch up with two different fastball looks, though, and when hitters sit on those primary offerings, he drops a vertically-oriented changeup in under their reaching hands. Yes, then, there are a few pitchers who have a cut-change, so Hendricks isn't totally alone in having one... but in a very real sense, he's alone. Not even the small group of other pitchers who have a pitch that technically fits into the same category do things the same way Hendricks does. His balloon-ball changeup, floating away from a righty against a sinker that seems to veer down and toward them at the last moment, is a whole different thing than the league's other cut-changeups. There's one more person we might compare him to, though: his past self. Over time, Hendricks's vertical movement on the sinker against righties has gotten heavier, as he tries to tilt the pitch for more horizontal wiggle. As he's undergone that change and accentuated his cut-change, though, he's just now found a major cut-change interaction between the heater and the cambio over the last two years. Obviously, it was a wildly successful adjustment in 2023, but so far in 2024, the results have been ugly. It might be that hitters have adjusted and compensated for this innovation, and that to stay viable in the big leagues, he has to find the next one. Maybe his ramped-up curveball usage is that very innovation. Maybe there's still a trick or two in his bag. Even if he doesn't figure it out from here, though, and if The Professor's tenure is winding down, it's fun to note that he truly has been unique--not only in what he does, but in how he adjusts and alters what he does when the feedback from his opponents demands it. View full article

Jed Hoyer recently lamented, in public comments, the way his teams have made it difficult for him to focus on a trade deadline strategy in successive seasons. Maybe he needs to be reminded whose job setting that direction is. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports There is an infamous quotation ascribed to the French revolutionary leader (not that French Revolution; no, not that one, either; the Revolution of 1848) Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Although briefly the chief champion of the proletariat during that mid-century uprising, he failed to provide decisive leadership at the crucial moment of that would-be bloodless coup, and when the working class was thwarted, Ledru-Rollin became largely unwelcome both among that constituency and among the empowered nobility from which he had emerged and with which he clumsily sided, late in the going. "There go my people," Ledru-Rollin is purported to have said when the action began to percolate. "I must find out where they are going, so I can lead them." It's almost certainly an apocryphal quote. In the latter decades of Romanticism in Europe, hard facts weren't as important as finding just the right way to capture the soul of a moment. The reason we still hear this not-quite-factual quasi-aphorism, though, is that its inventors nailed it. They nicely encapsulated the odious thing about Ledru-Rollin, in the view of the general public, in two pithy sentences. He was meant to be a leader, and he let a whole lot of people down because he turned out not to understand what it was he was meant to be leading, or to have the courage and competence to lead it successfully. There are 15 days left before the 2024 MLB trade deadline. That's all the time Jed Hoyer has to separate himself from Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Right now, he's right on the precipice of being buffeted right into a corner by his own "people," the team of which he is the president of baseball operations, for the second year in a row. You can't adequately substitute any other trait for decisive leadership, and you can't fake it, either. Hoyer was dealt a tough hand last season, when the Cubs scuffled badly until the All-Star break, only to go on such a torrid streak that he had virtually no choice but to make buyer-like moves at the trade deadline. Yet, those moves didn't make the team clear favorites for anything, and indeed, they missed the playoffs altogether. Nor did Hoyer elect to let that season's momentum build by making big splashes on the player talent market over the past offseason. Nor did he use their September stagger as pretext to seriously reorganize the roster. A year later, he's overseen a team with a new manager but most of the same old faces, and a combination of insufficient star power, insufficient depth, and plain old bad luck put his club behind the 8-ball entering July. Then, over their final week and a half before the All-Star break, they got pretty hot again. They won eight of their final 11 before this four-day summer interstice. "It's not the road you want to travel," Hoyer said about the way the season has gone, during an appearance on the Marquee Network game broadcast last Saturday. "Last year, we almost felt like we were going day to day, which you never want to do, but we were sort of day to day thinking about which direction we were going to go in." He admitted that that's basically what the team is doing this season, too. That is, on its face, a recipe for persistent failure, not just on a single-season basis but in the great project that should be building the Cubs into a dynastic force in the NL Central. If Hoyer wanted either the 2023 or the 2024 teams to be genuinely good, he should have invested more in them before Opening Day and been more proactive in his problem-solving once their flaws became glaringly obvious in the early going. He's missed those chances. There's every chance that, left to their own devices, the Cubs will come out of the break by winning five of their first nine. That would put them at 52-56, and it would probably have them within three games of the third Wild Card berth in the National League. With two days before the deadline, at that point, would Hoyer shift into buy mode? Could he possibly rebuild the entire lousy bullpen, make up for the faltering depth of the rotation, and add the missing dynamism to the lineup in those two days? No chance. If Hoyer is just trying to preserve leverage in trade conversations by playing up the possibility of a surge, or if he's playing a public-relations game and actually intends to sell aggressively, we'll know it soon. Right now, though, he sounds like Ledru-Rollin. He got this job because his longtime boss and mentor had enough of a halo around his head to handpick his successor as he walked out the door, and that halo was made from a reputation for clear-eyed, aggressive leadership. Hoyer's letting that halo clatter to the ground, a tarnished and ungrasped brass ring. Standing pat looks like the most likely scenario for the Cubs over the next fortnight. It would be a calamitous one. They are a team paralyzed by its own okayness, with a core not good enough to do what this franchise ought to be dead-set on doing, lurching toward old age and immovable contract status. They have a strong farm system, but not a generational or transformational one. They should be tenacious in their pursuit of young talent, even if it costs them young talent. The best thing Hoyer has done since taking over the team was the Michael Busch trade, and while that was an opportunity not entirely of his own creation, the lesson from it should be to try more things like it. The Cubs aren't a playoff team this season--at least not in any valuable sense of that term. They're not especially close to being one in 2025. Their leader needs to lead them, rather than waiting to see in which direction his collection of people confusedly run over the next two weeks. If he does that, he might still not get the pleasure of seeing the fruits of the seeds of change he plants. (He can ask a handful of other leaders, from other French revolutions, all about that.) But he would, at least, be planting seeds the fruit of which will be worth seeing, instead of preciously tending a garden that will never yield more than a few stew-grade tomatoes. View full article

The Cubs are hot, but after a pitch hit Cody Bellinger in the hand Wednesday night, they have to adjust to being without their highest-paid player for the second time this year. It's a change with short- and long-term ramifications. Image courtesy of © Mitch Stringer-USA TODAY Sports Earlier this month, I wrote that nothing should dissuade the Cubs from behaving as sellers this month, ahead of the MLB trade deadline. Even as they've heated up (with five wins in their last six games), that has remained true, but losing Cody Bellinger until what figures to be early August seals the deal. The only thing material impact it should have is making it impossible (rather than merely difficult and unlikely) that the team will trade Bellinger this month. It also all but ensures that Bellinger will opt into his $30-million salary for 2025. He hasn't played well enough to this point to come back from an injury like this one and put up numbers that will give him or Scott Boras any confidence about testing the market again this winter. For all intents and purposes, this injury locks Bellinger in as part of the team's medium-term lineup. That should only increase the team's urgency in trying to find a trade partner palatable to one of their two valuable corner outfielders, each of whom have no-trade clauses around which they have to work. Ian Happ and Seiya Suzuki have real trade value, and although it might be hard to move them because of those clauses, it becomes even more important now, since Bellinger should be their plan for right field going into next season. While Bellinger is gone, of course, the Cubs lineup will be diminished. He hasn't been the same star-caliber slugger he was in 2023 in his second go-around with the North Siders, but he's still been an essential cog. Without him, Christopher Morel is back in the top five of the batting order, which signifies an offense with insufficient depth. On the other hand, Bellinger's absence creates some opportunities for this team, too. Morel is slated to be the DH Thursday night, with Miles Mastrobuoni getting another start at third base. His glove makes his bat worth a little bit longer an audition, and the same goes for Pete Crow-Armstrong. The next few weeks will be a valuable audition period for Alexander Canario, allowing the team to assess whether he should be one of the players prioritized if and when Happ or Suzuki are dealt. Canario got the call to replace Bellinger on the roster. Morel can and should still occasionally start at third, so the team can get looks at Crow-Armstrong and Canario side-by-side in the outfield, with either Happ or Suzuki at DH. The team has had to patch holes and shift resources all season, so this won't be an unfamiliar feeling. It is, however, the latest uncomfortable reminder that Bellinger's durability is part of his long-term outlook. It was a pair of injuries (one to his shoulder, one to his knee) that derailed him after an MVP-caliber start to his career in Los Angeles, and injuries will have cost him at least a month of total time in each of his first two seasons with the Cubs, by the time he returns from this one. It's probably a bigger part of the reason why teams were reluctant to meet the Cubs' fairly conservative offers to him this winter than it was a part of the conversations about him, and now, it looms as a factor that mitigates any optimism about his future over what remains a player-friendly contract. If the Cubs were five games better, this injury would hurt worse. As it is, they weren't going anywhere, anyway. They still lose some value because of this development, but they also gain some chances to better understand and evaluate young players, so while Bellinger will be missed, the organization can benefit from his brief absence, in a couple of ways. Hopefully, his recovery time will be on the short end of the spectrum of possibilities, and the actual playing time lost will be minimized by the upcoming All-Star break. View full article

Well, even considering what a top-25 prospect is these days (less than it used to be!), there is NO WAY the Cubs are getting such a player for Jameson Taillon. So by your criteria, you can basically dismiss this idea and just hope it doesn't happen. I don't think it WILL happen, either. It's the kind of move I would only make if I were a new front office, taking over and clearing chaff, with the job security that comes with being new. It'd be the kind of thing the Mets did last year, resetting for that season and for 2024 and looking toward 2025 a year and a half ahead of time. With the same owner and execs doing the decision-making, I doubt we'll see the Cubs do the same thing. Now, if Hoyer is fired, either imminently or in the fall, Taillon immediately climbs four or five spots on my list of guys most likely to get traded. But I wouldn't hold my breath on that, anymore than on them getting a high-level prospect for him.

Although he started the season on the injured list, the man on whom the Cubs risked nearly $70 million for four years is having a strong second campaign with the team. As the front office ponders ways to restructure the roster, though, could he be on the move? Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports In his first 14 starts of the season, Jameson Taillon has thrown 81 innings and notched a 2.99 ERA. The latter figure would be the best of his big-league career, and there are some reasons to wonder how legitimate his success has been, but you can go all the way back to Jul. 1 of last year and find much the same narrative unfolding. Taillon has 177 innings pitched over that span and a 3.31 ERA, albeit with a FIP a fair bit higher than that. In the second season of a four-year deal worth $68 million, Taillon is coming as advertised--much more so than he did early last season, when the deal looked like an albatross. He's made some adjustments to his pitch mix to induce more weak contact, and it's worked beautifully. While he's not missing bats the way you want a front-of-the-rotation starter to, he's allowing hard-hit balls on a lower percentage of all balls in play than he has in any of his previous big-league seasons. Obviously, though, Taillon hasn't been able to save the Cubs' season. At 42-49, they're very likely to be sellers this month, and they need to reshape their roster in order to avoid being in the same place next year. They owe the burly righty about $8 million for the balance of this season, and $18 million for each of the next two seasons. A year ago, that contract looked like a nightmare. Now, could it be a movable one? Firstly, let's tackle the logistical hurdle to trading Taillon. He got limited no-trade protection in the deal, and can block trades to 10 teams of his choice each year. That narrows the market a bit, if Taillon is firm in his stance on certain clubs, and even if he's not, the Cubs might have to give him a concrete incentive or reward of some kind to work around that clause if they want to move him to a team on his list. No one I have yet spoken to knows who's on his list for 2024, so that's a huge variable. Next, we have to establish what an $18 million-per-year pitcher looks like in the current marketplace. Taillon only counts for $17 million against the competitive-balance tax threshold, because that's the annual average value of his deal, but last season was the cheap one. In real dollars, he'll cost $18 million in each of the next two seasons, and that's his total salary for this year, too. The Cubs signed Taillon during a lucrative offseason for free-agent starters. Taijuan Walker (to whom Taillon has been far superior, for the last calendar year) signed for $72 million over the same number of years. This past winter was much more spare, though, with several hurlers settling for less than they'd hoped to get. Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery were thought, at least, to be in a class above that of Taillon, but they had to settle for short-term deals. So did Jack Flaherty, Marcus Stroman, and others. The best comp for the Taillon deal signed this winter might be the four-year, $80-million contract Eduardo Rodríguez signed with the Diamondbacks, which is going very poorly so far. On balance, Taillon's salary is reasonable, for a pitcher with his skills and durability. The final questions are how sustainable the success he's had this year really is, and what teams might believe in it enough to give the Cubs young talent in exchange for him. To answer those, let's consider some numbers. Taillon's strikeout rate (19.2%, entering his start Tuesday night) is well below the league average, and would be the lowest of his career over anything like a full season. He's made up for it not only with his typical, superb control (a 5% walk rate that is one of the best in baseball), but by keeping the ball in the park. He averaged 26 home runs allowed per season over the last three, but is on pace to allow just 20 this year. Home-run prevention is tricky, though. It's not as easy a skill to sustain as strikeouts or walks, and giving up fly balls is still a dangerous way to live. He seems to have ironed out some of the issues created when he tried to change his arsenal upon joining the Cubs last spring. It's probably very safe to estimate his ERA for the rest of this season (and next year, too) around 4.00, which is very respectable. He's not at his true talent level right now, but there might be teams inclined to buy into him a bit based on the results, and the floor for him feels much higher than it did a year ago. Two teams stand out as potential suitors for Taillon's services, should the Cubs decide to pursue that opportunity. The Mets are a surprise contender (or semi-contender, but in New York, there's greater pressure to make the most of such moments), but their rotation started out thin and has gotten even thinner as they've battled injury issues. They could use an infusion of veteran stability, and Taillon's game would fit nicely in Citi Field, where long fly balls always seem to run out of steam shy of the wall. The Cubs could kick in some money to alleviate the painful tax burden of adding more salary for the $350-million 2024 Mets, but New York would then be able to bear the rest of the load, freeing up all the money owed to Taillon in 2025 and beyond. Because of the money and the team's position to leverage adding him, it's unlikely New York would give up all that much for Taillon. The primary benefit of trading him there would be the increased flexibility for the coming offseasons, with a vacated rotation spot for young hurlers and a mid-level prospect or two as nice kickers. The other interesting destination, though, would be a very different one: Cleveland. Taillon could help the AL Central-leading Guardians very much, as they've dealt with a barrage of injuries and will feel pressure from the Twins (and perhaps even the Royals) the rest of the way. That team isn't taking on anywhere close to $40 million in obligations to him, though. The Cubs would need to pay down half of the deal or more to facilitate a trade. In exchange, though, they'd get a better prospect return from Cleveland. Eating some money would force the Cubs to (at least partially) replace Taillon and deal with the specter of paying some luxury taxes themselves in the next year or two, but it would give them the kind of young talent that actually makes a difference. The Guardians' level of need and opportunity should make them reasonably motivated buyers, so while Taillon won't net elite talent anywhere, he could get the team something interesting in a trade to a team with whom he'd be virtually guaranteed to start playoff games. The likelihood of a Taillon trade this month is relatively low, but it's certainly not zero. For the first time in recent memory, the Cubs seem to have enough homegrown pitching depth to consider trading a productive veteran, and given their medium-term needs, that might be the wisest course. It's all about managing the situation, managing expectations, and pouncing if the right opportunity arises. View full article

As they begin a weeklong road trip to close out the first half, the Cubs are two months removed from their last series win on the road. The front office won't plot its trade market course until after these two series, but when they do, expect a couple of infielders to become focal points. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports When Cubs executive Jed Hoyer joined broadcasters Boog Sciambi and Jim Deshaies in the broadcast booth Saturday afternoon, the mess below them made clear the writing on the wall before them. Hoyer's frustration with a season full of bad injury luck and sloppy play was evident, as he gave an update on more bad injury luck (lower back soreness for Kyle Hendricks) and the team's sloppy play put them deep in a hole from which they were unable even to begin climbing out. During that interview, Hoyer used his favorite euphemism--"hard decisions"--a couple of times. He talked about how difficult it has been, on a couple of occasions since he took over the time, to feel pressed up to the trade deadline before he was able to confidently select between the courses of buying or selling at that deadline. He also mentioned, with a rueful chuckle, the crunch created by the league's decision to permanently move the MLB Draft into mid-July, forcing teams to wait until after the All-Star break to turn their full attention to the trade market. By laying out those threads, Hoyer all but invited fans to braid them up into a narrative that reads like this: The Cubs haven't fully committed to a single direction for this month's trade deadline, but they're heavily leaning toward selling. They'll make that determination for sure after this weekend's draft, and moves could start happening just after the All-Star break. In talking to members of two front offices who have been in contact with the Cubs recently, it sounds like that's exactly how things stand. This is largely a resource allocation thing, for the moment. The Cubs are closely watching a handful of farm systems belonging to rivals with whom they might match up on a trade soon, but many of their top staff in scouting and R&D are focused on the draft for the next week. Once that event takes place (starting Sunday), they and their potential suitors can start to match up and have more serious conversations. When they do, expect two names to come up with more frequency than you might have guessed: Nico Hoerner and Christopher Morel. For very different reasons, those two have drawn teams' interest, and the Cubs might feel that capitalizing on their trade value now is the best way to shake up their medium-term positional corps. Hoerner, of course, has two and a half years left on the contract extension he signed last spring. He's making $11.5 million this year and next, and $12 million in 2026. Compared to most extensions signed by arbitration-eligible players, this one is fairly frontloaded; that's how the Cubs got such a good deal on Hoerner's would-be free-agent season, the last one in the deal. That very characteristic will ensure that he retains some trade value, as long as some other team believes that his long recent slump (he's hitting an anemic .221/.295/.282 since missing a week in mid-May) belies a true talent level better reflected by he did before that (.269/.361/.391 through May 13) or even by what he did down the stretch last season (.297/.377/.391 after the 2023 All-Star break). The Cubs extended Hoerner successfully because his skill set (good defense up the middle, excellent contact skills, but very limited power) is one they value more highly than most of the other 29 teams. That said, there are a dozen or so teams who would have active interest in Hoerner, especially because of the affordability of the last two years of this deal. The Cubs will be unlikely to willingly eat the money attached to him this year, because they're very close to the first luxury tax threshold, but they could include a few million dollars in 2025 in order to ensure a solid return in a trade. Obviously, Morel is about as different a player from Hoerner as can be. He's had a difficult season, with some things to like but a lot of frustration. The team tried to help him transform from a low-OBP, high-strikeout slugger with 35-homer power into a more complete hitter, and eventually, that evolution could still play out. Right now, though, he's only benefited in one way (fewer strikeouts) and has seen both his raw hit tool and his game power take huge steps backward. By giving him a long audition at third base, too, the team has only confirmed to themselves and all potential suitors that he has no business playing there. Unlike Hoerner, though, Morel has a profile the rest of the league values (if anything) more highly than the Cubs do. His raw power is still impressive, and he's a good enough athlete to move back to second base (the only defensive position at which he's ever looked remotely at home) or settle into a corner outfield spot and acquit himself. Whereas the Cubs were unrealistic about his value as a headliner in trade talks this winter, they're now more clear-eyed about what he can be, what he can't be, and how he would fit into various trade scenarios. He's under team control for four more years beyond this one, and is likely to reach arbitration for the first time in 2026. While he can't command a controllable star as the centerpiece of a trade, Morel could be a secondary piece in such a deal. Alternatively, if the Cubs feel a need to get creative and clear some money, Morel could be attached to Cody Bellinger to make an acquiring team both more willing to surrender its own young talent and less wary of the poison pill that is Bellinger's pair of player options for 2025 and 2026. If you believe in the Cubs' player development staff at all, it makes sense for the team to open some space in its infield right now. Matt Shaw hasn't played since Jun. 27, and was briefly rumored to be promoted to Triple-A Iowa last week, but one way or another, he's knocking on the door. Shaw is undersized, and he has some work left to do, but in the right hands, he projects to be a better big-league hitter than Hoerner or Morel have been recently, and soon. It's fair to wonder whether the Cubs constitute "the right hands", but they believe they do, which is why they're increasingly open to moving one of their incumbents around the infield dirt. Even an undefeated week going into the All-Star break would not drag the Cubs up to .500, and since they're visiting two superior teams (the Orioles and Cardinals), a 3-3 or 2-4 trip is much more likely, anyway. A very strong surge into and out of the break could give Hoyer pause, but the team is positioning themselves as sellers behind the scenes, which is the only rational choice and an important one for them to maintain. They'll get one infusion of young talent beginning Sunday evening, and they need to focus on securing another one within the fortnight or so thereafter. View full article

The Chicago Cubs have a slugger with one of the fastest bats in baseball, and he's leading the team, on pace for nearly 30 home runs. Overall, though, that bat speed is going to waste, because it's a swing without barrel control and he rarely meets the ball squarely. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports When MLB released Statcast bat-tracking data for public consumption earlier this season, the headlines for Cubs partisans wrote themselves. Christopher Morel swings extraordinarily fast! It was one of those insights from advanced baseball data that are so obvious to even a casual observer that they border on redundant, but which so pleasingly confirm our priors that they also stir our excitement and passion for the game. Maybe we could all be scouts after all. Yes, Christopher Morel's bat speed is awesome. Alas, 347 plate appearances into his first full and undisrupted big-league season, Morel is hitting an unproductive, unimpressive .195/.304/.370. Everyone knew that having one of the five or 10 fastest swings in baseball didn't automatically make a player an elite hitter, but seeing Morel struggle this way--despite a strikeout rate on the right side of average and a walk rate in excess of 11%--is unsettling. When Giancarlo Stanton or Jo Adell fails to dominate offensively in spite of the raw materials for top-of-the-scale power, it makes sense. They strike out over 30% of the time. Morel, though, keeps swinging very fast, making contact, and making outs anyway. The problem is exactly what you'd probably guess: in addition to being insufficiently selective within the zone (even if he does do fairly well at not chasing outside the zone), Morel is swinging too wildly. Every hitter has to calibrate their own balance between swinging hard and fast enough to put some juice into the ball, and controlling their bat path well enough to bring the big parts of the bat and the ball together. Morel is out of balance. He swings very hard, and without much of a spread in his swing speed. He attacks the ball in a way few other hitters are capable of--or at least that few others are willing to. That doesn't translate, though, when it comes to raw exit velocity. As you'd expect, swing speed is closely correlated with exit velocity, but Morel belongs to the class of hitters who create less velocity off the bat than the velocity of their bat would imply. The problem is inefficient collisions between bat and ball, because while Morel has made some adjustments and increased the rate at which he makes contact this year, he's also mishitting it more often. His average exit velocity is higher than in 2022 or 2023, but he's hitting fewer line drives, and more of his hard-hit balls are grounders. Statcast keeps a statistic to count how often a batter's swing and the incoming pitch meet cleanly enough to generate 80% or more of the possible exit velocity, based on the speed of each. Morel rates poorly. Hitters like Morel can be lethal when they get hot. Whether it be because they see the ball especially well for a while or because they get a series of fat pitches over a particular stretch, they can run into a number of balls and generate some big power numbers. When things go wrong, though, they can go very, very wrong. Morel's been in a slump since mid-May, with a line of .171/.301/.308, and it's largely because he's not squaring up the ball. Again, this is something hitters with fast swings struggle with. You'll square it up better and more consistently if you're willing to moderate your swing speed to meet the ball squarely, and if you're not, you accept a certain risk of imperfect contact and/or whiffs. Morel, though, ends up hitting the ball efficiently only in locations where the ball just isn't going to take off very often. Squaring the ball up when it's down and inside, out of the zone, is a recipe for hitting it hard right off your shoe top, as Morel is infamously prone to doing. Compare Morel to Heliot Ramos, who also has a very fast swing and is also below-average at squaring it up, overall. Ramos is striking out more than Morel, but he's hitting a robust .298/.373/.524. How? He's squaring the ball up when it's over the heart of the plate, where squared-up balls tend to be fair, tend to be hit in the air, and tend to turn into big hits. It's easy to get discouraged about Morel's overall batting line. It's also easy to get excited about his improved contact rate and obvious power potential. He has the most important raw material for producing pop. The truth, though, is right in the middle, in the worst possible way. He's made up of extremes, and while there are still ample reasons for hope, the truth of this moment is that he's an incomplete hitter, lost on the winding road from where he was the last two years to the destination he and the team envision. View full article

Here's what we know for sure: the 2024 Chicago Cubs have a lousy offense, and along with an injury-depleted bullpen, it's sealed their fate for this season. Much of the blame for that has flowed toward the heart of the order, which feels like it's missing a genuine star. Is that fair? Image courtesy of © Michael McLoone-USA TODAY Sports The Cubs are below-average just about across the board, when it comes to run creation. They don't hit for enough power. They don't collect hits on balls in play, which is because their swings are largely geared toward power they don't have. They don't make enough contact to compensate for those shortcomings. It's an underwhelming group. For my part, I have tended to focus criticism and doubt on the best hitters in that lineup, because they don't seem stout enough. This team was meant to be built around defense, but inherent in such an approach is a certain degree of lineup top-heaviness. You can't build around up-the-middle defense without accepting some below-average offensive work from those four positions (shortstop, second base, center field, and catcher), and that applies pressure to the players at the other positions to be more than above-average. The Dodgers are built this way. Admittedly, it's more about resource allocation than about an emphasis on fielding, but the result is the same. When healthy, they feature Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Will Smith, and Teoscar Hernández at the top of the lineup. They've gotten good work from Jason Heyward near the bottom of that batting order this season, but for the most part, they're knowingly accepting subpar contributions from the last few slots in the order, because they spent huge money to give themselves the best top half of the lineup in MLB. The Yankees have taken a similar tack in recent years, and never more so than in 2024, as they're built around Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, and a whole lot of waiting for those two to come up to bat again. For the last few years, it's also been the Astros' modus operandi, with guys like Jake Meyers, Chas McCormick and Martín Maldonado getting ample playing time even when they weren't hitting. Houston has Kyle Tucker, Yordan Alvarez, José Altuve, and Alex Bregman to anchor their attack, so little else matters. To see how great hitters can cover for lousy ones, let's create a new mini-metric. It's a very simple one: in what percentage of a player's games do his total bases and walks drawn total four or more? That's not a perfect way to capture the value elite hitters create, but it does get us going in the right direction. Four total bases can come on a lone, solo homer, and that's not always especially valuable, but it is a run. It can be more than that. Why do teams value power so highly? It's because when a power hitter does his thing, he singlehandedly makes up for a teammate taking an 0-for-3. Four singles can be even more valuable than a homer, but that's very hard to do in a game. This way of boiling down offensive contributions within a game reflects the real value of hitting for average, avoiding making outs, and generating power, and balances them reasonably well, while keeping things simple. I'm calling this little number Big Game%. The average (among players with at least 100 plate appearances) Big Game% is 14.5 this year. Here's the (fairly satisfying) list of the 10 leading hitters in Big Game% for 2024. Player Big Game % Aaron Judge 42.90% Mike Trout 37.90% Kyle Tucker 35.00% Shohei Ohtani 34.10% Gunnar Henderson 32.50% Rafael Devers 31.00% Freddie Freeman 30.60% José Ramírez 30.40% Jarren Duran 30.10% Juan Soto 29.30% You won't find any Cubs there, and surely, you didn't expect to. The team leader in Big Game% is Seiya Suzuki, at 22.0%. He's 45th on the list, out of 365 qualifying hitters, and is one of four Cubs with above-average marks in both overall weighted on-base average (wOBA) and Big Game%. Joining him in that company are Ian Happ, Cody Bellinger, and Michael Busch. It's surprising, perhaps, to find not only those four, but below-average hitters Dansby Swanson, Christopher Morel, and Nico Hoerner at or above average in Big Game%. While they're not coming close to keeping pace with the league leaders in player Big Game% (the Dodgers, Yankees, Orioles, Astros, and Phillies) as a team, the Cubs have a good number of players seeing ample playing time and racking up an above-average frequency of Big Games. Here's the thing: they're not even coming close to making up for the ineptitude of their worst hitters. Mike Tauchman is a lovely, much-missed ingredient of a good offense, but as you can see, he's the keep-the-line-moving guy. He can catalyze an offense, but never carry it. Suzuki, Happ, and Morel, especially, make up for some bad hitters, but they're not stars of the caliber required to cancel out some of the worst hitters in all of baseball. Pete Crow-Armstrong, Miguel Amaya, and Tomás Nido are black holes on the lineup card. Not even pictured above are Nick Madrigal, Miles Mastrobuoni, and Yan Gomes, to whom the team has allocated 242 wasted plate appearances. Gomes and Mastrobuoni have Big Game rates similar to those of Crow-Armstrong and Amaya, but it would be far too generous to say that Madrigal does, too. He didn't have a single game this season that counts as Big by these criteria, which probably doesn't surprise any Cubs watchers. It's still plausible to read this as a problem with the best hitters on the team. Suzuki, Happ, and the rest are demonstrably incapable of carrying a team, the way that illustrious list of 10 (or Bryce Harper, 12th in Big Game%, or Pete Alson at 14th, or Christian Yelich at 17th, or Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at 20th) can often do. Just as importantly, though, they're being asked to make up for some of the very worst regular hitters in baseball--especially Crow-Armstrong and Amaya. The team is failing both to assemble a heart of the order on par with the best teams in baseball, and to put credible big-leaguers into the bottom third of the lineup. That's a recipe for persistent failure, and highlights how badly they need a positional overhaul this summer, fall, and winter. View full article

A brief study on an interesting theory about the nature of teams who play close games. Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports As the 2024 Chicago Cubs flail and flounder, one major source of frustration for fans has been their woeful record in one-run games. No team in baseball has played as many as the Cubs' 33 such nailbiters, and they're 14-19 in those games. Flip that record, and they'd be at least in contention for a playoff berth this season, As it is, they're cellar-dwelling sellers as the league approaches trade season. Last week, 670 The Score midday host Dan Bernstein raised a reasonable hypothesis about this interminable string of narrow defeats: maybe bad teams just play more one-run games. In other words, maybe the Cubs' tendency to play tight contests (and lose them) isn't driving their dismal showing in the standings, but rather a symptom of their overall lack of quality. Almost two years ago, Jed Hoyer (now-infamously) said, "Good teams blow teams out." He hasn't built a team that does that. Is that why he's now at the helm of a sinking ship? This is a testable theory, so let's test it. Here's a chart showing each team's number of one-run games played this season, and their overall winning percentage. Mm. That's not especially compelling. The Cubs and A's do stand out, and so do the Dodgers, but are the Red Sox the beacon you would want to make the point that good teams play fewer one-run contests? The correlation between number of one-run games played and winning percentage is -0.25, and usually, the weakest correlation you can call real or meaningful is 0.20, in either direction. Yes, this season, bad teams are a little more likely to play one-run games than others are, but it's not a strong relationship. Does it hold up when we look at a full season--say, last season? Alas, not really. The correlation factor here is -0.17, so we're on the wrong side of that (blurry) bright line between significant and random. The really, really good teams do seem to stay out of such games, so that's something, but the teams who play the most close games seem to be ones who hew close to .500 overall. That makes sense, right? Teams who often play what we understand to be coin-flip games are probably aggressively average, rather than truly bad. I wanted to check one sub-hypothesis, which is that maybe a tendency to play a lot of close games early says something about a team, over and apart from what it says about them to play a lot of those kinds of games over a full season. Here's every team from 2014-23 (except 2020, of course), plotted according to their number of one-run games and winning percentage through the end of June. No relationship. None. And if you can believe it, when I look at the same large sample of teams and remove the filter for months, it gets even weaker. These data could hide the impact of the fluctuating run environment on the global frequency of one-run games, but there's nothing here to suggest a relationship on the whole. Maybe what Bernstein really meant--I think it's probably the better way to formulate the argument--is that very, very good teams (the kind the Cubs should aspire to be) play fewer one-run games than others. That's a little bit more well-supported by the data above, so let's try to pursue that thread. Here are all teams from 2021-23, with their one-run games played and overall winning percentages. I've highlighted the eight teams--the Dodgers, Yankees, Astros, Brewers, Phillies, Rays, Mariners, and Atlanta--whom the Cubs would do well to imitate, given their results over those seasons. I would argue that the Cubs should most want to emulate the Dodgers and Astros, who have combined to appear in 11 League Championship Series since 2017. Those two do seem to habitually avoid playing a lot of close games. One way or another, they play decisive ball. They blow teams out. For everyone else, though, it's a mixed bag. The Rays, Brewers, and Phillies prove that you can live pretty well playing close games. The Mariners have had an underrated run the last few years (and are leading the AL West in 2024) despite playing cardiac baseball. You can win this way. You just have to be better. One shape of team is fairly certain to play more close games, of course: one with good pitching but relatively poor offense. Every team helps create their own run environment, and if you keep the other team off the board especially well but don't score at a very high rate yourself, you end up in a lot of scrappy games. Both runs per game and runs allowed per game have a negative correlation with one-run game frequency at least as strong as that of winning percentage. If you're above-average at preventing runs and below-average at scoring them, your margins are sure to be thin. Then it's just a question of whether you win or lose those close contests. The Mariners, built so heavily around pitching the last few years, are an excellent example. The 2024 Cubs are a below-average offense, which makes for a lot of their close games. The reason why they lose them, as cruel as this sounds, is that their pitching is just on the wrong side of average, so once games end up being decided by narrow margins late, they're in deep water and can't swim. The offense is helping ensure that the Cubs play close games. So is the fact that the league run environment is spare in the first place. The pitching is the reason they're losing them, because they lack the depth to get to the right side of average and stop a few more teams, for just a few more outs. That's all pretty obvious, but at least we're not learning that we were entirely wrong about what ails this team. Neither unit is quite good enough, and that's adding up to a team that doesn't feel within 'quite' range of being good enough, any time soon. View full article

Losing a series in Milwaukee over the weekend was the best thing that could possibly happen to the 2024 Chicago Cubs. They needed it, the way a person battling addiction needs to find rock bottom. The first step to solving a problem is admitting there is one. The Chicago Cubs are bad. Now, they can go about the business of becoming good. Image courtesy of © Michael McLoone-USA TODAY Sports Little mystery remains, because the choices the front office made this winter amounted to running back the same roster that won 83 games last season after a miraculous July turnaround that made them into contenders until the bottom fell out in September. The sample with which the Cubs front office can and should evaluate their own team is not half a season, but a season and a half, and that needs to be enough for them to see the obvious: they're not going anywhere with this group. That's not to cast aspersions on any of Nico Hoerner, Justin Steele, Ian Happ, Seiya Suzuki, Cody Bellinger, Jameson Taillon, or even Dansby Swanson, individually. That group just doesn't add up to an adequate core around which to build a legitimate or long-term winner, given the shape of the rest of their roster and aging curve's gravity beginning to tug some of them in the wrong direction. They're a very good supporting cast waiting only on the superstar around which the whole thing can revolve, but because this front office is eternally, deleteriously conservative, they aren't getting that player. They missed two chances to acquire such a player this winter, and the evidence that they even tried especially hard is mixed, at best. Jed Hoyer does not have it in him to add the kind of talent missing from this team, and despite so many revampings and reallocations that we've all lost count, the organization remains unable to develop their ostensibly promising young players into that kind of talent, either. The success stories (Ben Brown, Javier Assad, Jordan Wicks, Hoerner) all have to be qualified and caveated, while the failures (Hayden Wesneski, Miguel Amaya, Pete Crow-Armstrong) feel and appear abject. There's still time for all of those players, and a dozen others who have yet to debut, to take big steps forward, but the consistent improvement and the occasional breakout that good development organizations get from talented young players remain elusive for the Hoyer-run Cubs, as they were for the second half of the Theo Epstein Era. This weekend, the team needed to look no further than into the other dugout to see the team they have wanted (and, perhaps, ought) to be. The Brewers are multi-talented. They've been nimble and opportunistic, picking up Willy Adames and William Contreras in trades when hardly anyone else even realized they were available; Christian Yelich in a blockbuster trade the likes of which the Cubs last attempted with Nomar Garciaparra; and Rookie of the Year candidate Joey Ortiz in a trade for a player they had under team control for one more season. They've developed relief pitchers as successfully as the Cubs did for the decade prior to this season, but whereas the Cubs do it by finding guys with funky secondary skill sets and little velocity, they do it with guys who then strike out 30% of opposing batters and throw in the upper 90s. Most of all, because the Brewers not only have a fecund farm system but turn players who were not premium or high-bonus prospects into potential stars, they have a few of them on very team-friendly long-term deals. Freddy Peralta is still under team control on two team options after this season. Jackson Chourio, 20, could be retained at reasonable salaries until he's 30, if the Brewers want him for that long. They've done excellent scouting and player development, good coaching, and most importantly, proactive, fearless front-office work, across two and a half regimes. They're miles ahead of the Cubs, and not just in the 2024 NL Central standings. The Cubs, of course, had plenty to hold their attention in their own dugout Saturday, when the latest defensive calamities from a team theoretically built around defense prompted Justin Steele to explode into an expletive-laden exhortation as he stomped down the steps after a two-run inning. In that frame, Hoerner failed to execute a rundown properly, but Christopher Morel ensured the miscue would cost the team an out by flubbing his reception of Hoerner's tardy throw. Pete Crow-Armstrong didn't quite make a play that would have been extraordinary from an average center fielder, but which a player who had a .395 OPS for the month of June had better make in order to be a big-leaguer. Steele was right to be upset, but any satisfaction Cubs fans could find in his release of an emotion many of them have been feeling for weeks was extremely short-lived. On Sunday, another out-not-made by Morel (not an error, not quite even a misplay; just a ball that an above-average third baseman makes into an out, but on which he was nowhere close to doing so) and a fly ball Happ followed around the world but never could catch helped seal Kyle Hendricks's miserable fate, as the magic of Hendricks's June un-swoon faded and the Brewers crushed two home runs against him. It would be excruciating for the Cubs' decision-makers to have to lean into another rebuild, but they would be foolish not to sell--and sell aggressively--before this month ends. This would require a lot of proactivity and cleverness, and it's not clear that Hoyer is any more capable of that than he was of building a winning team. His only successful sell trades were, ultimately, reactive, and despite the ugly standings, these would have to be proactive. Already, we've brought you pieces advocating trading one of Happ and Suzuki; dealing Hoerner; or even getting value for Steele, while they can. Expect us to continue discussing those topics throughout the next 30 days. We'll also muse about whether the team can get any value in exchange for Héctor Neris, Drew Smyly, Mark Leiter Jr., or Tyson Miller, or even escape part of their financial obligations to one of the first two; what trying to trade Bellinger (with his complicated, player-friendly deal) would look like; and who should get the playing time trading any of those players might create. The team needs more information to make better decisions about key players for their future, so they had better make sure that those players have room in the lineup, rotation, or bullpen down the stretch. Most of those players are under team control well beyond this season, though, and a few of them have contractual situations that will make moving them difficult. The best guess is that Hoyer won't do very much, but it is the official editorial position of this website that he had better do so. The Cubs are bad in 2024. They probably won't be especially good in 2025, but there's still some room to make progress toward that goal by being aggressive immediately. If they sit on their hands and hope for things to get better, things will, instead, get much worse. There is a perfectly good chance that the next good Cubs team is five or six years away, and unless the front office wakes the [pick your word] up, that chance will only increase over the coming months. View full article

The Chicago Cubs' pitching staff has been depleted by injuries since before Opening Day, but it's getting worse by the day. The group is now a patchwork, and the team will have to scramble to stay afloat in the coming weeks. Image courtesy of © Darren Yamashita-USA TODAY Sports It was bad enough when Jameson Taillon had to open the season on the injured list, and then when he was joined there by Justin Steele after Steele's Opening Day hamstring strain. Barely a week later, Julian Merryweather was down with a serious ribcage injury, and the team has not been full strength since. Lately, though, things are taking a turn toward the darkly comic. In the last few days, alone, the team has lost their best remaining reliever (Mark Leiter Jr.) and their fifth starter (Javier Assad) to forearm strains. They've gotten Keegan Thompson and Colten Brewer, who are just barely big-league hurlers, back from injuries, and been compelled to thrust them directly into high-leverage work. They picked up reliever Vinny Nittoli while in San Francisco, after Nittoli was designated for assignment by the unfathomably bad Oakland Athletics, cleared waivers, and was released. Nittoli got a big-league deal, and could stick around for a while, because this team is even out of healthy arms to call up from Triple-A Iowa. Nittoli throws anywhere from five to seven different pitches, depending on how you interpret his data. Without question, he's a kitchen-sink guy, not unlike Assad, but his primary offering is a cutter that sits at just 90 miles per hour, and it's not clear whether he can throw strikes well enough to get big-leaguers out without living in the heart of the zone, where they will torch his underwhelming stuff. Nittoli does have a strikeout rate north of 31% for the season, but much of that work was done in Triple-A. In a brief stint with the A's, he had a nice-looking ERA and only walked 6.3% of opposing hitters, but his strikeout rate was also south of 16%. He's a low-slot, funky release point guy with heavy stuff, but he doesn't get as many grounders as that might imply. Little separates Nittoli from José Cuas, with whom the Cubs recently parted ways, other than his deeper repertoire. Porter Hodge is a very different story, of course. The rookie who (barely) closed out the team's win Thursday looks more like the typical modern high-leverage reliever, with a fastball that sits 95-97 and a sweeper that has fairly extreme movement. For Hodge, much of the challenge is just in throwing strikes. He comes from a pretty steep horizontal angle and is a big guy, and the movement profiles of his four-seamer and sweeper make filling up the zone difficult. If he can avoid walks, he should be an effective reliever. He might even emerge as the team's closer. Fastballs like his are rare; there are only a dozen pitchers anywhere in the league who have one quite like it. That chart includes some illustrious names, though of course, many of them (Tyler Glasnow and Dylan Cease, for instance) get a lot of their value from the extra inch or two of ride they get on the pitch, relative to Hodge. Pairing this kind of fastball with a sweeper, rather than a more vertical breaking ball, is especially unusual, and should make Hodge a headache for opposing batters. What it will not do, though, is generate the same kind of swing-and-miss that those overhand curveballs and gyro sliders do. He will therefore be susceptible to a little more fluky batted-ball luck than you'd think, for a pitcher with such a bully of a two-pitch mix. Nittoli (for however long he or Brewer stick around) and Hodge will be especially important pieces of the bullpen for a while, because Hayden Wesneski has had to be promoted to the starting rotation. The Cubs tried to avoid this, and understandably so. Wesneski just isn't a starter. That was clear by the end of 2023. This season, it's felt increasingly like his vulnerability to home runs will be disqualifying even in a relief role, but at least he has a chance of being good in that capacity. As a starter, he's going to get knocked around, and only because Assad, Jordan Wicks, Ben Brown, and Cade Horton are all hurt at once is he even getting this look again. No team would envy the position the Cubs are in. They brought some of this on themselves, by stubbornly refusing to spend more over the winter and reinforce themselves better. What they've run into would be hard for any club to overcome, though, so they have to get some grace from fans. They'll get none from opponents, though, so unless they get strong performances in key roles from Nittoli, Hodge, and Wesneski, the team remains very much in peril. They could be 10 games under .500 by the 4th of July, and while they should already be looking at ways to sell and pivot toward the future at the deadline, every loss over the next fortnight will force them further in that direction and damage their leverage in negotiations. View full article

A three-run lead disappeared in the blink of an eye for the Cubs Thursday afternoon, when an 0-2 fastball to Jorge Soler started a string of scoring plays that negated a 3-0 advantage the Cubs had built in the third frame. It was the latest in a string of instances recently in which the team's ace needed to trust a tertiary pitch a little bit more. Image courtesy of © Darren Yamashita-USA TODAY Sports It's fair to characterize Shota Imanaga's pitch usage this season as overwhelmingly reliant on two pitches: his good, high-ride, high-spin, flat-VAA fastball, and his unique lefty splitter. It's no surprise that he would lean on those offerings; he's been extremely effective that way. As recently as two starts ago, his ERA was under 2.00, and he was in the running for the NL Cy Young Award, not to mention Rookie of the Year. He was cruising again Thursday, with fewer than 60 pitches thrown through five scoreless innings and a comfortable lead with which to work. Then, after a couple of runners reached base and he got within one strike of getting out of the sixth unscathed, Imanaga gave up an automatic double to Jorge Soler. That put one run on the board. A wild pitch and an infield hit later, the score was tied. It was the 0-2 pitch on which Soler hit the ball on a hard line to the warning track in left-center that broke the inning open. After two quick, two-pitch outs against Soler early in the game, Imanaga went to five pitches in the third look, and Soler was finally able to take the measure of his high heat. As you can see, Soler had gotten a solitary glimpse of a sweeper in the second at-bat, and he saw a splitter in both the first and third times up. Six of the nine pitches Imanaga threw him, however, were fastballs. That's not unusual. Imanaga feels comfortable moving the fastball around the zone, and when he thinks a right-handed hitter is sitting on the splitter, he'll throw them a lot of heaters, trying to keep them on the defensive by varying the location. In choosing to stick to the fastball when the splitter doesn't feel like the right choice, though, Imanaga is overlooking the other viable option: his curve. Fifty times this year, he's thrown curves to righties, and he rarely gets hurt on the pitch: However, it's also the furthest possible thing from being an out pitch for him. In fact, he's only gotten one out with the curve against righties this year, and he's yet to get a strikeout with it. Why? Because he's using it exclusively as a show-me pitch, trying to steal a called strike early in counts. Of those 50 pitches: 38 were on the first pitch of a plate appearance 3 were on 0-1 3 were on 1-0 4 were on 1-1 Only twice all season has Imanaga thrown a righty a curveball as the fourth or later pitch in a plate appearance. On May 29, he threw one in the dirt on 2-2 against the Brewers' Gary Sánchez, and on Jun. 9, he threw a 2-1 curve to Stuart Fairchild, who fouled it off. Imanaga has no confidence at all in his curve, save as a change of speeds right at the front end of a plate appearance. He's not totally wrong to feel that way. The pitch is not devastating or sharp. In 11 swings, no righty has whiffed on the pitch all season. It's been six foul balls and five balls in play, and while none of those five have been very dangerous, that profile doesn't engender much confidence. However, the third time through and in such a big spot, you don't need a batter to whiff. Soler was clearly looking for a fastball he could get on top of, and keying on the ball up to know when it was that and not a splitter. In that moment, he might have jumped at the ball a bit and whiffed, even though no one else has yet. Many whiffs and mishits come from a hitter's anxiety, and the curve could increase and prey upon that anxiety for Imanaga in clutch situations. More likely, and more sustainably, though, Soler might have seen the curve as an errant fastball out of the hand and been locked up, leading to what would have been the 22nd called strike of the season on that pitch. Hitters don't just stare at those first-pitch curveballs because they're eager to get back to hitting Imanaga's almost unhittable fastball-splitter combo. They let it go because they're fooled, however briefly, by a pitch that departs from the profile and the expectations they have when they go up there against him. You're going to have hitters putting on more emergency hacks in two-strike counts than on 0-0, 0-1, or 1-0. But you're still going to get some freezes, and even when batters do swing, they'll suffer from having been ready for two other pitches, but not that one. Imanaga's curve, like his sweeper, is an extra pitch. His fastball and splitter are the big moneymakers. Yet, he has to learn to get more value from those breaking balls, and that means throwing them in more important stages of both an at-bat and a game. Thursday was a perfect object lesson in the importance of that adjustment. View full article