Matthew Trueblood

Halfway through a successful but fragile-feeling April, the Chicago Cubs have to weather a major shakeup in their lineup. Their star right fielder (and perhaps their best overall hitter) will be gone for a while. Image courtesy of © Steven Bisig-USA TODAY Sports It felt ominous, early Monday morning, when Jesse Rogers reported that the Cubs were calling up outfielder Alexander Canario to meet the team in Arizona. Canario is off to a decent start with the Triple-A Iowa Cubs, but he wasn't first in line for a promotion based purely on performance. If the team only wanted to lengthen or reshape its bench, rehabbing veteran Patrick Wisdom would have been reinstated from his assignment to the I-Cubs. That's still coming, but it will wait a day or two. This can't. Seiya Suzuki suffered a strained right oblique, and has been placed on the 10-day injured list. Canario was the call-up, then, because the Cubs specifically need an outfielder to stop the gap left by Suzuki's absence. The good news is that, in Canario, they have what they hope will be a viable big-league corner outfielder, and that (unlike last year, when David Ross tried to patch similar holes by starting Wisdom, Miles Mastrobuoni, and Trey Mancini in right field) Craig Counsell recognized the need for a legitimate replacement for Suzuki. The very, very bad news, of course, is that Canario isn't nearly an adequate replacement for the Japanese star, who was the everyday No. 2 hitter and most well-rounded offensive threat the team had. Last year, a similar injury to his other side shelved Suzuki for nearly six weeks, but that was early in spring training, when teams are likely to slow-play treatment of such maladies a bit more. Over the last four years, the average time missed for oblique strains is about a week less than that, around 34 days. That could put Suzuki back in the lineup in time for a crucial stretch in mid- and late May, when the Cubs welcome in Atlanta and then go on a Memorial Day road trip to St. Louis and Milwaukee. Still, it's an excruciating loss, for however long it lasts. The team will be much more dependent, now, on Ian Happ, Cody Bellinger, Christopher Morel, and Michael Busch, the latter of whom is one candidate to slide up in the batting order by more than one spot in response to this shift. Canario figures to platoon with Mike Tauchman in right field for the time being. You have to think the Cubs would have liked to be in a position to call up Pete Crow-Armstrong on this occasion, sliding Bellinger over to right field. Crow-Armstrong is off to a manically aggressive start at the plate, though, and doesn't look like a credible big-league hitter right now. Given the offense the Cubs need from anyone tasked with replacing Suzuki, that made Crow-Armstrong a non-option here. It does remain possible, of course, that he'll make a couple of key adjustments and be ready to step into the void before Suzuki is ready to return. In the meantime, this is Canario's chance to shine. How hopeful are you that the Cubs can survive this loss? What do you want to see Counsell do to manage the situation? Join the discusssion with a comment below. View full article

The Chicago Cubs announced Sunday that Ben Brown will make his second career start Monday night in Arizona. Brown has been a revelation for the starter-needy Cubs this April, but can he hold up? That delays any answer as to whether Brown will stay in the rotation after Taillon is reinstated on a full-time basis. The Cubs could go to a six-man rotation, to maximize the likelihood of keeping their mix of veterans without premium arm strength and youngsters in need of some protection healthy. Alternatively, they could slide Javier Assad to the bullpen, given the versatility he's shown during his brief career and his capacity to give them multiple innings in a contest in relief. Brown is the other candidate for demotion, either to the pen or back to Triple-A Iowa. After what he showed Tuesday, though, another strong start Monday would make that an awfully tough call. In a start confined to just 77 total offerings by the team's knowledge that Brown wasn't fully stretched out to pitch in a traditional version of that role, Brown threw 37 pitches in excess of 96 miles per hour, and 27 north of 97 MPH. He's also a pitcher who achieves above-average extension, covering just under 7 feet of the 60 feet, six inches between mound and plate before releasing the ball, on average. That's a rare and dazzling combination of sheer power and the ability to sustain it throughout an appearance. How rare? Over the last six-plus seasons (the ones for which we have reliable data on exactly where a hurler released the ball), only 32 pitchers have met one of the thresholds set by those velocity standards: 35 or more heaters at 96+, or 20 or more at 97+, all with at least 6.7 feet of extension. It's a list populated densely by stars and award winners. The four pitchers who have done it most often during that period are Zack Wheeler, Spencer Strider, Jacob deGrom, and Tyler Glasnow. That indicates the level of intensity of stuff we're talking about, and the astronomical contracts each of them have signed reflect the value the game places on this kind of skill set. As I wrote last week, too, Brown's curveball is no minor secondary weapon. His upside is impossible to ignore. I bet you also can't bring yourself to ignore something else, though--something all four of the names above have in common, and many more members of that fraternity of 32, besides. Strider had Tommy John surgery late last week, leaving a second scar on his elbow after he got the same procedure in college in 2019. He's one of 17 on this list of 32 who have had that procedure--including Brown, who had it in 2019, too, after he'd already signed with the Phillies and turned pro. Pitcher TJS Year TJS Age Zack Wheeler 2015 24 Spencer Strider 2019 20* Jacob deGrom 2011 23 Tyler Glasnow 2021 27 Bobby Miller - - Grayson Rodriguez - - Logan Gilbert - - Shohei Ohtani 2018 24* Blake Snell - - Eury Pérez 2024 20 MacKenzie Gore - - Johan Oviedo 2024 25 Gavin Williams - - Shane McClanahan 2015 18* Michael Kopech 2018 22 Carlos Hernández - - Gerrit Cole - - Alex Meyer - - Garrett Crochet 2022 23 Luis L. Ortiz - - Mason Miller - - Brandon Woodruff - - Luis Gil 2022 24 Drew Rasmussen 2016 20* Nathan Eovaldi 2007 17* Jared Jones - - Joe Boyle - - Jordan Hicks 2019 22 Tylor Megill - - Dustin May 2021 23* Noah Syndergaard 2020 27 Ben Brown 2019 19 Over the last few years, the share of all MLB pitchers who have undergone Tommy John surgery at least once has crept from just under one-third to just over that mark. That's alarming enough, but the rate in this subset of power arms is north of 50 percent. More concerning, still, is the fact that it's easy to imagine the number rising from here. Brandon Woodruff, Gerrit Cole, and Blake Snell head a group of veterans who appear to have come through this much flamethrowing intact, and who are relatively unlikely to succumb now, but there are a number of young hurlers here who are still very much in the injury nexus: they're throwing hard, they've done it a large number of times even within individual games, and their elbow ligaments are (in all likelihood, based on everything we know about the anatomy of that part of the body) not yet fully developed. This list could be pushing twice the global injury rate, within a year. One more piece of bad news, before we take a step back to examine this through less alarmist lenses: Six of the 17 players listed here who have had the surgery once needed it again, later in their careers. Brown, who (like Strider, Drew Rasmussen, Nathan Eovaldi, Shane McClanahan, and Eury Perez) had the surgery at a very young age, is hardly out of the woods. Of the other five guys who throw this hard and had surgery at or before age 20, the only ones who haven't required a revision are Pérez (the inclusion of whom is almost black humor, because he just had the surgery this month) and Brown. Ok, now for that promised wider angle. Obviously, throwing the way Brown does--with all that extension, straining his limbs to their utmost, and with such explosive (both in performance terms and, alas, in terms of health risk) speed--comes with enormous risk. At the same time, it's almost a surefire way to be successful in the modern game, and there's almost no other surefire way. The Cubs have, for much of the last decade, been less exposed to the Tommy John epidemic than most of the rest of the league, but that's been largely because they don't throw hard, don't miss bats, and lean on amalgamating traits to prevent enough runs to win. They've needed great defense, great depth, and great pitch framing to win games ever since Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer pulled into town. For the first time, there are some signs that that might not be true anymore. Brown is the tip of the spear, but they've also had some very hard throwers in the bullpen recently, and they're developing a pipeline of pitchers who look more like Brown than (for instance) Kyle Hendricks, who has had some injury issues of his own but was never in much danger of shredding his UCL, including top prospect Cade Horton. They've tried to resist the pull toward dangerous velocity for years, while still assembling competitive pitching staffs. It's proved impossible, or at least prohibitively difficult, and they're now embracing a bit more risk. Where do they now draw the line? Can they coach the likes of Brown, Horton, and other electric arms up so well that they can dominate opponents without tendon-shearing violence? Can they balance investment in that kind of pitcher with commitment to the kind of touch of which Hendricks, Jon Lester, Justin Steele and others have proved some efficacy? Or do they have no choice, if they want to get back over the hump and into World Series consideration, but to risk running through pitchers with the cold purposefulness of a surgeon's scalpel, the way the Astros and Dodgers (among others) have been doing for a decade? If there were easy answers to these questions, we'd already have them. These types of conversations are happening in dugouts, front offices, and agents' offices throughout the baseball world right now, but the right answer for each team is not a destination at which to arrive; it's just a checkpoint. By the time you slide into one base, safe and sure enough of your approach to dust yourself off and look around, the ball is in play again, and you have to be running. The Marlins tried desperately to shield Pérez from the buzzsaw inside his own arm, with radical limitations on his workload. It didn't work. The A's have moved Mason Miller to the bullpen, where they hope all that velocity won't have the same cumulative impact. Soon, that will become a viable choice for the Cubs, though it'd be a tough one to make. The Cubs face a dilemma with Brown, because his elbow is a bomb that has gone off once before, and it could well explode again. They have a responsibility to him, to protect his arm as best they can as he nears the point where he can make real money in the game, but they have one to themselves and their fans, too. It's an agonizing set of discussions, but one we can no longer avoid, even between surgery announcements. View full article

The Chicago Cubs retained the best hitter from their 2023 team, but didn't bring in the supplementary slugger for whom fans pined throughout the winter. As it turns out, they might have a budding monster who justifies that inaction. Image courtesy of © Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports The more we come to understand hitting, the more clearly we come to see that it's not just about timing, the way the first guardians of the craft told us it was. It is, as the iconoclastic but utterly brilliant Ted Williams started telling people 75 years ago, about getting on plane with the incoming pitch. That's why pitchers, in the modern game, don't just focus on disrupting timing. They're also trying to force a hitter to attack on the wrong plane. Teams know this, too. Famously, the 2021 San Francisco Giants ran platoons based as much on their hitters' swing planes and the repertoire of the opposing starter as on handedness. Less famously, plenty of other teams do similar matchup work. Some swings are well-built to attack the high fastball. Others are great at handling the plunging breaking ball. The best swings are at least somewhat adaptable, of course. A great hitter knows how to manipulate his barrel without giving up all of his bat speed, especially when he can anticipate a given pitch and/or location based on count or scouting report. Most hitters have a bat path wired into their muscle memory, though, and pitchers' focus now is on exploiting that wiring. In his first two seasons in MLB, Christopher Morel had an exploitable swing, because while he generated plenty of bat speed to be dangerous when he met the ball just right, he often entered the hitting zone with the bat too flat or even angled downward. That led to a surfeit of hard-hit but misaligned batted balls: he was in the league's 16th percentile for Sweet Spot % (the share of batted balls clustered in the most valuable band of launch angles) in 2022 and the 8th percentile in 2023. His average launch angle across those two seasons was 10.8 degrees, which isn't bad, but it reflects that tendency toward topping and/or tapping the ball when he was caught off-balance. In this way, his plane problem did become a timing problem. With a swing as flat as the one he was cutting loose, he had to time the pitch just right to make the kind of thunderous contact of which he's capable. Here's Morel last May, swinging at a slider with a good piece of the plate, but which was swerving away from him. Morel Whiff May 23.mp4 Last season, he did a lot of that. Morel tries to drop the barrel below his hands and find the ball, here, but his actual swing path just doesn't get beneath the flight path of the ball and up into its plane until far too close to the theoretical contact point. Therefore, absent perfect timing, he was doomed to whiff, and that's just what he did. A daunting, dragging 43.9 percent of his swings against breaking stuff last year ended in nothing but a whoosh and the thud of ball into catcher's mitt. Now, consider this pitch from last week against the Rockies, when Morel saw a similar slider on the outer third of the plate. Morel Fly Ball April 24.mp4 The choice of a flyout here was a conscious one. We're not trying to evaluate Morel's perfect swings, here. This is about what happens when he's imperfect, It's about the extra margin for error he's creating for himself. Watch the barrel of his bat as he starts each swing. In 2023, the stick took a steep downward angle into the back end of the hitting zone, and then he was able to correct it upward only slightly as he flashed it through that space. This season, his barrel drops and moves backward, taking up more space behind the zone and entering it at a positive angle, working up toward the incoming pitch. The change looks very subtle, especially from the center-field camera, but it's an important one. That the barrel of one's bat can or should move backward at the initiation of a swing is still highly controversial in hitting circles. Some coaches swear by it, and others swear it's a recipe for being disastrously rushed, late, or loopy. In truth, of course, much depends on the person swinging the lumber. Aaron Judge is a disciple of one iconoclastic coach who avers carrying the barrel backward, and it's worked out ok for him. Morel, like Judge, belongs to the special brotherhood of players who are strong and twitchy enough to generate sufficient bat speed to get away with going backward before moving forward. Watch both clips again, and notice that that move (while seemingly forcing him to hurry to get the barrel to the zone on time) creates strength and tension throughout the rest of the swing, speeding up his moves without compromising his control of them. By whatever mechanical means a batter chooses, getting on plane early this way is hugely valuable. The hitters who give you that tingle on the back of your neck when you see them--Mike Trout is the best example of his generation--specialize in getting the bat moving so neatly in line with the incoming baseball that the collision feels almost pristine. Anyone who has played the game knows the unmatchable feeling of perfect contact. Just watching Trout square up a ball can give one a frisson of that, and Morel's swing tweak has made him a bit more that way, too. Though the full suite of tools isn't yet available, Baseball Savant will soon make bat tracking data available on a much bigger scale. In the meantime, we have a few peeks into what it looks like and what it can tell us, because the MLB App has been generating data visualizations with swing-tracking technology on some home runs since last season. Let's use snapshots of these to further clarify what Morel is doing differently. Here's his bat path from a home run at the very end of last season, along with some of the data on it. Morel crashed into this ball with tremendous force, and happened to catch it above the center of the barrel by the perfect fraction to lift it out of the park. That bat path is very flat, though, all the way from its entry into the zone through contact. Here's the same tracking data for the homer he hit in Texas on Easter Sunday this year. You can see just from the single-number summary that his attack angle is slightly steeper, but go even further. Note the sweep of his bat from the back side of the hitting zone through the contact point. Morel was on plane early. That meant less need to manipulate the barrel and more bat speed at the time of the collision between wood and leather. His margin for error--the window within which he might have slightly missed, but hit a single or a double or a higher home run--is much wider here than on the ball he launched last September. Throughout baseball history, pitchers have tried to frustrate hitters who showed a knack for getting on plane. Sandy Koufax was great, more than anything else, because he paired a fastball that rode high and hard at the top of the strike zone with a plunging, high-spin curveball that entered the zone at a viciously steep angle. His spiritual ancestor, Clayton Kershaw, has built his own Hall of Fame career on the same foundation, with a filthy slider as his answer to the great sophistication and athleticism of the hitters he's had to face, relative to those Koufax saw. Unique, very flat and/or very steep vertical approach angles are the best way to frustrate hitters trying to square the ball up and lift it consistently, which is why VAA has become all the rage among pitching nerds. Indeed, batters had the most success last year on pitches in the middle range of VAA--those that, whether because their primary movement vector was horizontal or because the pitcher couldn't execute either a hard, flat fastball or a steeper offspeed pitch, entered the zone right around the angle at which most bats come through it. Last year, Morel had most of his success in that league-wide sweet spot, because his swing happened to have that same flat, unremarkable plane. On fairly steep or very flat pitches, though, he was helpless. The samples for 2024 are too small to set too much store by the differences, but the differences are exactly what you'd think they would be--only even more stark. VAA 2023 wOBA 2023 Swing% 2023 Miss% 2024 wOBA 2024 Swing% 2024 Miss% Under -10 degrees 0.234 41.30% 50.00% 0.311 58.30% 57.10% -10 to <-9 degrees 0.226 42.00% 60.30% 1.569 25.00% 0.00% -9 to <-8 degrees 0.178 47.10% 51.70% 0.353 37.50% 0.00% -8 to <-7 degrees 0.431 55.00% 36.80% 0.357 57.90% 22.70% -7 to <-6 degrees 0.421 53.90% 25.60% 0.398 50.00% 21.40% -6 to <-5 degrees 0.343 53.00% 18.20% 0.147 50.00% 0.00% -5 to <-4 degrees 0.437 57.70% 36.30% 0.754 71.40% 20.00% -4 to <-3 degrees 0.282 32.10% 79.40% 0.696 75.00% 33.30% -3 to <-2 degrees 0.232 14.30% 100.00% - - - -2 to <-1 degrees - 0.00% - - - - -1 to <0 degrees - - - - - - Hitters who get on plane early don't just hit the ball in the air more often (though Morel has, with a 16.4-degree launch angle and his Sweet Spot % up to the 42nd percentile on the young season). They don't just hit the ball harder, thanks to not having to significantly change the direction of their swing on the fly. They also make a lot more contact, and Morel's dramatically reduced whiff rate (across the VAA spectrum) and stellar strikeout rate affirm that. The league will counter-adjust. While Morel has better than halved his whiff rate on breaking pitches this year (to 20%), he still misses plenty often against offspeed stuff, because he's taking such a pull-focused, aggressive overall approach. He's also slightly more vulnerable to the high, flat fastball after making this change to his swing path. Pitchers haven't caught onto that yet. He's seeing fewer fastballs this year, as the league tries to pick on a guy who whiffed so often on breaking balls last year, but they'll eventually force him to cover the top third of the zone more often against heaters, and that will force him to adjust, too. Still, this change is a small thing with big implications. Morel isn't just on a hot streak, seeing the ball well. He's made a concrete change in his swing path and the approach it informs, and he's ahead of the adjustment curve by plenty. Research assistance provided by TruMedia. View full article

With two of the veterans on whom they were relying heavily to bear the innings load in the starting rotation shelved, the Chicago Cubs turn to a rookie Tuesday night in need of something great. With a lively fastball and a newfangled Death Ball, he's ready to answer that call. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports In his first big-league appearance, Ben Brown wasn't quite ready for the robustness of the Texas Rangers, and to spare the rest of the Cubs' bullpen, Craig Counsell had to let his rookie wear it. Brown got his revenge in his sensational stint against the Rockies Wednesday night, though, and now, he'll be asked to take a full-fledged start against the San Diego Padres. That offense is closer to being the Rangers than it is to being the Rockies, and he'll be pitching in front of a hostile crowd again, but Brown's stuff is good enough to give Cubs fans some reason for optimism, anyway. Let's talk about it a little bit. Firstly, Brown throws hard, and he uses his tall, lanky frame well. His heater sits 96 and touches 98, and his extension lets both those figures play up a tick when he's going well. His delivery is more downhill than the low-release, flat-vertical approach angle (VAA) mixture that makes (for instance) Shota Imanaga's heater special, but he still gets good enough carry and a bit of armside run on it to make it more than a mere exercise in arm strength. It's Brown's curveball, though, that makes him fascinating, and that gives him upside as either a mid-rotation starter or a downright dominant reliever this season. Almost no one in baseball throws a harder curveball than Brown, but he doesn't have exceptional raw movement or a high spin rate on the pitch. How, then, did he get 10 whiffs on 18 swings and five more called strikes on 35 total curves thrown in his first two big-league games? Fastballs are, in part, about VAA. Curveballs, more often, are about VRA: vertical release angle. Brown's is special, and it's what makes his curve work. If you've heard anything this spring about the Death Ball (a definitely not new but somewhat reimagined short, overhand curve becoming popular among high-arm slot pitchers who don't supinate well enough for more traditional breaking balls to work well), what you've been hearing about is what Brown is throwing. Vertical release angle is what it sounds like. When the ball comes off a pitcher's fingertips, is it rising, falling, or going straight? Much of this is a function of pitch type, because how you release the ball depends on which pitch you're throwing: how you've gripped it, how you're turning your fingers, wrist, and/or forearm as you reach the release point, and where you want it to end up. Perhaps counterintuitively, most curveballs have a positive (that is, upward) VRA, because when most pitchers throw a curve, they're getting around the ball and trying to create topspin. To do that, they often hump it up a little, rolling it over their fingers. This is why you hear batters talk about looking for the hump of a curve. They can recognize it, sometimes, by noticing when the ball goes up slightly out of the hand, more so than it does when a pitcher throws a fastball (wherein the fingers stay behind the ball to create backspin). Last month at Brewer Fanatic, I wrote about Trevor Megill, a one-time Cub who has found success after landing in the Milwaukee bullpen. Part of what makes him special is that his curveball has a negative VRA. In other words, he gets over the top of it and steers the ball downhill, without creating that hump out of the hand. It adds to the deception of that pitch, and Megill (like Brown) doesn't need much more than that, because he throws so hard that he compresses the time the batter might otherwise have to recognize the pitch and make a decision about whether and/or how to swing at it. The key statistical takeaway is a simple one: VRA correlates pretty strongly (and negatively) with whiff rate on the curveball. If you want batters to whiff on your hook, make it go downward right out of your hand. No one in baseball--no one--does that better than Brown. I've highlighted Brown here, but also three other pitchers, because comparing him to each of them will help us better understand his curveball--and perhaps, curves in general. To do so, let's take a look at them one at a time. Using Statcast data from Baseball Savant, we can look at the flight path of all of a hurler's pitches from any given outing, from a variety of angles. For ease of comparison and power of illustration, I've chosen the third-base side view, and I've selected the option to show estimated "recognition" and "commitment" points for the batter. Those are the positions the ball reaches in flight at which the batter can first easily recognize a pitch and at which he has to have committed to his swing, respectively. First, let's look at Jordan Montgomery, whom the Cubs should have signed this winter, but who instead signed a bargain-basement deal with the Diamondbacks on the eve of Opening Day. He's the face you see blown up nearest to Montgomery; he throws the trendy new Death Ball. This is his start against those same Arizona batters, in the World Series last fall. There are mild complications here, because Montgomery (like each of the other pitchers to whom we'll compare Brown, but unlike Brown himself, at this stage of his development) has more than two pitches that are essential to his arsenal, but we can safely paint in broad strokes here. The single green cluster is, of course, Montgomery's release points. The white clusters a bit to their right are the positions of those pitches at the batter's recognition point. As you'd intuit, the fastballs are the ones closer to the plate. His changeup is the lower portion of the cluster closer to the mound. The pitch is on plane with his fastball at that stage, but behind it, because it's moving slower. The commitment points are the looser pink clusters nearer to home, and here, you have to think backward. The decision point is calculated not in time since release by the pitcher, but in time until the ball reaches the plate, so the fastballs are now the cluster farthest from home and the curves are the ones closest to it. His changeups are the strip in the middle of the two. Positionally, the fastball and curve still aren't consistently distinct, and the batter has only been able to tell one from another if he's spotted a difference in either spin or angle. Montgomery's curve works because of that deception. Neither its movement nor its spin are exceptional; it just looks a lot like the fastball. Ok, let's study someone who uses their curve to great effect, but gets there very differently. Here's Yoshinobu Yamamoto's start against the Cubs this weekend. There's considerably more separation, in terms of vertical position, between Yamamoto's fastball and his curveball when they reach the recognition point. It persists even through the commitment point. That's a key part of his curve's effectiveness, though, because unlike those of Montgomery and Brown, he has a curve with sub-80 MPH velocity and a ton of spin, generating downward movement. By the time it reaches the plate, the curve bends below the path of most of his fastballs, but that movement comes late. It's the way it forces the batter to adjust to such a steep entry to the zone (and the attendant velocity separation) that makes his curve work. Alec Marsh, of the Royals, has a curveball that doesn't really work, and that's because it doesn't possess either exceptional spin and movement or especially good deception. Here's his latest outing, against the White Sox. The tight clustering at each measurement point might seem like it would generate deception, but there's not enough of a separation there for the deception to matter. Marsh doesn't throw as hard as Yamamoto (let alone Brown), and his fastball doesn't have as much carry as Brown's does. Also, though we can't read well it from this angle, there's a huge horizontal differential between his fastball and his hook. His curve is a two-plane operation, which is sometimes good, but which works better if it's either thrown harder than his is or has that match of VRA to the fastball. At that point, it's more slider than curve. The Death Ball and the Yamamoto big breaker work by achieving extremes. Marsh's is in the unhappy medium. Ok, enough faffing around. Here's Brown himself, on the night when he flummoxed the Rockies. The downward angle of the curve out of his hand makes it look like it's on the same plane as the fastball, even though most of his curves are still a bit higher than his fastballs when they reach that recognition point and enter the decision zone. By the point when a batter has to commit, they have virtually no hints based on location, as you can see by the way those pink clusters align with each other. They have no hints based on spin or tilt, either. Again, it's hidden from us, but the verticality of Brown's curve makes it much harder to see a difference from the fastball. He mirrors the spin of the fastball with the curve--that is, one pitch spins almost exactly the opposite way as the other, on the same axis, and hitters see the seams form the same blur pattern in either case. This is Montgomery, but at 96+, rather than 93. He doesn't generate the same depth with the curve or have great spin on it like Yamamoto. He has a slider-like gap between fastball velocity and curveball velocity, without the slider's horizontal sweep. Yet, the pitch is devastating. It's all about deception, just as it is for Montgomery, but this helping of deception comes with extra spice. Now, Brown has yet to show command commensurate to Montgomery's. He doesn't have the third and fourth pitch that let Montgomery utilize his stuff so well. He's not as good as Montgomery is, at this moment. With electric heat and a Death Ball every bit as devastating as Montgomery's, though, he has major upside in any role, in the short term. Starting Tuesday night, Cubs fans will get to find out whether he can make it work as a starter, continuing to fool hitters with the fastball and the Death Ball as he goes a second and third time through the order. Research assistance provided by TruMedia. View full article

Thanks. It's one of those early-season that both is and isn't a huge deal, and it's weirdly important that we capture both, I think.

The near-immaculate vibes of the Chicago Cubs season went up in smoke Monday night, with one of the worst early-season losses imaginable. All is not lost, but their utter collapse in that game reflects real and worrisome vulnerabilities by which the team will be plagued for a while. Image courtesy of © Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports You could see it in Craig Counsell's body language. Oddly, that's sort of comforting. Amid a first week and a half that saw the Cubs win six of nine, score runs by the fistful, and establish some real optimism in a half-wary fan base, Counsell always knew Monday night was coming, and that's a testament to his managerial and tactical nous. As the bottom of the sixth began Monday, Javier Assad took the mound with an 8-0 lead, but Counsell looked restless and worried. Never the type to cut a stern and immovable figure atop the dugout step, Counsell gave in to the opposite end of the spectrum in the sixth. He was pacing like a caged animal, but the emotion he was trying to contain by clenching his way and rolling his neck to look skyward wasn't fury or ferocity; it was worry. It was a set of movements unique to a man who knows he's in good position, but that it might not be good enough. The Cubs have been hurtling toward a pitching implosion--the genuine article, even bigger than the one that almost cost them the last game of the Rockies series Wednesday night--almost since the moment the season began. They have several pitchers about whom there's ample reason for optimism, but they also have an extreme dearth of depth, particularly in light of Yency Almonte and José Cuas being unreliable and Jameson Taillon, Justin Steele, and Julian Merryweather being unavailable. This was a failure of the front office; they should have done more to reinforce the pitching staff this winter. It was Counsell on whom the problem landed like an anvil, though. Merryweather's loss feels especially glaring, and the pit in Cubs fans' stomachs surely only deepened when the team provided a dim-sounding update on his status Monday. As gutty and exciting and talented as Adbert Alzolay is, it's Merryweather who held real elite upside for the team in the bullpen. He's their flamethrower and their bat-misser. It's Merryweather's absence, in the present and as far into the future as any manager can really afford to look, that gave Counsell that dyspeptic look even while his team led 8-0. He not only knew that he was (bizarrely) in trouble in that game, but knows that there might be a lot more nights like that one ahead. It's not all that helpful to neatly apportion blame for what happened next. Certainly, Counsell himself can come in for some. Bringing in Nick Madrigal to shore up the defense once the contest tightened, while understandable (in light of the bullpen failing to miss bats for most of the season so far), seemed like a desperation move this time. It was likely, by the time Madrigal entered, that the Cubs would need to score again in order to win. As it turned out, Garrett Cooper had to come in and pinch-hit for Madrigal with the Cubs down to their last out in the ninth, and had that button never been pressed, Christopher Morel would have been up as the tying run. Bringing in Alzolay for a five-out save was the act of a desperate man, too, and it's the kind of aggressive relief-ace usage that should be reserved for relief aces a tier better than Alzolay is. I'll admit that this is a wild theory, but I think the psychological barrier--the enormity of the task in the pitcher's head--involved in asking a closer to go five or six outs with almost no margin for error tightens them up so much that they become disastrously mistake-prone, and therefore, that teams should only do it in the most urgent circumstances, with the most bulletproof star relievers. Neither Game 10 of the regular season nor Alzolay meet those criteria for me. Again, though, Counsell was put into a no-win situation, first by a neglectful front office, then by buzzard's luck--to wit, Shota Imanaga's stellar start Sunday being cut short by a rain delay, forcing him to ask an extra inning or two of an already tired bullpen--and finally by players who failed in their most essential responsibilities, even with huge margins for error. While Counsell was apace in the dugout, Assad and Miguel Amaya were miles too cute with Fernando Tatis Jr. to lead off the sixth, going to a second straight slider low and away on 3-2. In that situation (leading off an inning, up by eight), asking a player to chase a breaking ball outside the zone is not only a low-percentage play, but a rude declaration that you don't believe that player has any feel for the game at all. Tatis has that feel. The situation called for a fastball, to whatever sector of the zone Assad was most confident about locating that pitch by that stage in the game. Instead, two young players made an error in game planning, and a floodgate was opened. Perhaps the free pass frustrated Assad. Perhaps he was shaken by the near-homer Jake Cronenworth hit almost as soon as he stepped into the batter's box as the next batter, just foul down the right-field line. Perhaps he was just gassed, as he reached 100 pitches. In all likelihood, (Counsell didn't really want Assad out there, but he was down behind the stairs in the dugout, pacing and trying to figure out who the hell might get him 12 more outs, when he had three guys (Mark Leiter Jr., Almonte, and Daniel Palencia) down for the night based on their usage Saturday and Sunday. He was trying to steal an extra out or two with his starter, even if it cost him a run or two.) Whatever the reason, though, Assad's body language got utterly atrocious in the blink of an eye. He got antsy about Tatis at first, suddenly seemed to be rushed by the 18-second pitch clock, and showed visible frustration with the umpire when a pitch outside the zone wasn't called a strike. He was already pitching like it was 8-7, not 8-0. Cuas is a different problem. Counsell clearly hoped that the Cronenworth homer that chased Assad would pop the tiny tension bubble that had bloomed on the field before it, and that Cuas could come in and be breezy, with a clean inning and a six-run lead. Alas, right now, Cuas is beyond even that kind of ease. It would be a surprise if he isn't optioned to the minors Tuesday, as the Cubs try to patch together a pitching staff that can survive the rest of this West Coast trip. Luke Little and Héctor Neris were little better, though. It was just a night filled with chickens coming home to roost. In a way, it's good. Each of those pitchers are going to have nights like that; none of them are good enough to be trusted the way you can trust a Josh Hader or a Devin Williams. Crowding a clunker from each into a single game led to a nightmare of a loss, but it's only one loss. Had each of them had a similar implosion in sequence over a week or two, the Cubs could be under .500 right now, or they could lose an extra game or two on the balance of this trip. As it is, while the ugliness of that defeat will linger a while, and while it laid bare some very real issues the team needs to address, it's just one loss. Ben Brown will start Tuesday, and while you'd rather have a player with more experience and a greater chance of going six or seven innings pitching after that kind of game, Brown looked terrific last time he pitched. Leiter, Almonte, and Drew Smyly will probably be the first three out of the pen behind him, in some order, each freshened by a much-needed day of rest. The team will make at least one roster move, too, to shake up the bullpen. The team can leave that game behind. It's just important to remember that that failure didn't come out of nowhere. View full article

Though his final lines have looked underwhelming in each start, the Cubs have an impressive, homegrown mid-rotation rookie at the heart of their rotation. This is the story of how he got there. Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports It was an awfully tall order, asking Jordan Wicks to go after the lineups of the Texas Rangers and Los Angeles Dodgers in the first two outings of his 2024 season. They were two of the top three teams in baseball in runs last year, and two of the top four in wRC+. That was before the Dodgers added Shohei Ohtani, and before the Rangers fully installed elite prospects Evan Carter and Wyatt Langford in their lineup. It shouldn't come as any kind of shock that he only made it through 8 2/3 total innings, or that he allowed seven runs. We don't have to make excuses or apologies (like pointing out that three of the runs he's surrendered were technically unearned) for Wicks, though, because despite the surface-level numbers, he's been profoundly impressive. Against two of the toughest offenses in the game, he rarely looked endangered and occasionally looked dominant, striking out 13 and walking just four of the 43 batters he's faced. He's not getting the ball on the ground or minimizing hard contact the way he'll need to do in the future, but that's because he was facing some of the best hitters on Earth. During spring training, I wrote about the understandable but untenable mess that was Wicks's pitch mix in 2023. His arsenal featured three fastball looks, a changeup, and two breaking pitches, but at least one of the fastballs was redundant, and the slider and curveball seemed to interfere with each other, in terms of execution. At the time, I suggested cutting way back on the sinker and cutter and ditching his curveball. That's not quite what Wicks has done, but he's certainly made big adjustments. We can confidently distill those changes down to three concepts, each of which responds in some way to what I wrote during camp. The Four-Seamer is Rising Wicks already had a bit of the cut-ride (that is, with more movement toward an opposite-handed batter than a typical fastball has and an above-average amount of carry) action that the Cubs prize in their starting pitchers. This year, though, he has more than a bit of it. His heater is both cutting and rising an extra couple of inches, relative to its 2023 averages, which is why you've seen him able to miss bats up in the zone with it in a way that he couldn't last year. Wicks has worked to the glove side (in on right-handed batters) and up in the zone with his four-seamer often over two starts, setting up the rest of his arsenal beautifully and overpowering hitters, despite less-than-overpowering sheer stuff. It helps that, despite it being early in April and the cold weather in one of his two starts, his velocity itself is also incrementally higher than last year. The Cutter Is Gone As I wrote in February, the utility of Wicks's cutter in the context of an arsenal centered around a fastball that already had some cut-ride action on it was limited. It wasn't a hard enough, sharp enough, or distinct enough pitch to do anything for him except make it harder to command the rest of his stuff, and through two starts, he's thrown it exactly once. It feels like he's elected to focus on getting more cut and ride on the four-seamer, and to eschew the cutter itself for the sake of simplicity. That's the right call, made easier by the change in the fastball's movement. Wicks has an arsenal that can assail right-handed batters at multiple angles without the cutter, with good command of the changeup at the bottom of the zone and the fastball at the top, plus the curve coming in from a different angle to steal called strikes. Here's a chart I originally showed you in February, of Wicks's movement by pitch type in 2023: Here's the same chart of his pitches so far in 2024. With the cutter out of the way. his slider has taken on a much more consistent shape, and he's added more sweep to that pitch in some instances. There's a clear set of pitch pairings he can use with this arsenal, much more so than with the six-pitch muddle of 2023. Two More Distinct Breaking Ball Shapes More conviction in the four-seamer and sinker, as situation and platoon circumstance dictate, has meant more clarity about which breaking ball to throw when, and eliminating the cutter seems to have eased his effort to keep his hook and slider separate from one another. Let's break him down into two pitchers. Against righties, he's heavily reliant on the four-seamer and changeup, with a few sinkers to stretch the outer edge and set up the high, inside fastball, and a few fairly big, fairly vertical curves. Against lefties, though, it's a more power-focused array, with the sinker and four-seamer playing off each other differently (the sinker running in on the hitter sets up the slider away; the four-seamer is meant as a surprise attack when the hitter gets used to the heavier action of the sinker) and the slider widening the outside corner. There's little reason for Wicks to throw his changeup or his curve to lefties, nor his slider to righties. He's clearer on that, now, thanks to a slimmer but more robust repertoire that slots each pitch into a specific role. Wicks's next two starts figure to be against the Mariners and Diamondbacks. Those two are no picnic, themselves, but they might feel like one, after the Dodgers and Rangers. Wicks will put up better numbers in future starts, if he sticks to the tweaks that made him good enough to fight both of those championship-caliber lineups to a draw. View full article

In the frigid cold of this week's series between the Colorado Rockies and the Chicago Cubs, the North Siders' young catcher got back-to-back starts. It protected their aged backstop from the cold, but it might also be the first glow of a star on the rise. Image courtesy of © Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports Miguel Amaya hasn't put all the pieces of his offensive profile together yet. He's still figuring out how to consistently deliver the barrel of the bat to the ball, on an upward swing plane. He's hitting the ball much harder in 2024 than he did as a rookie last year, with seven of his first 10 batted balls harder than 95 miles per hour and an extra few miles per hour on his 90th-percentile exit velocity. He's only struck out twice, and has greatly reduced his whiff rate on a per-swing basis. Still, because most of his contact has been on the ground so far, he's a step or two away from becoming a hitter Craig Counsell can slot in any higher than eighth in his lineup. Defensively, though, Amaya has already made his most important strides. Last season, he was the Cubs' best pitch framer, but he was far from a finished product. Without losing anything but the very top of the zone, Amaya slightly underachieved, because he also didn't gain his pitchers anything extra, save along the bottom edge of the strike zone. Until August, he was still using the old-fashioned catcher's squat, rather than the newly popular setup with one knee down. It allowed him to sturdily steer the ball upward when it had the plate but was dipping below the knees, but it limited his ability to claim the lateral edges of the plate. As you can see, things have changed this year. Amaya ranks sixth among the 35 catchers who have been behind the plate for at least 100 plate appearances on the young season in Adjusted Strikes Looking (SL+), the proprietary metric TruMedia uses to evaluate catcher framing. According to Baseball Prospectus, among the 39 catchers who have caught at least 20 innings, Amaya ranks first. Although the large samples (pretty much every pitch a batter doesn't swing at) help pitch framing become a telling statistic much sooner than most others, it's too early to say with any certitude that this will stick. Amaya is off to a great start, but you can see the noise in the data at a mere glance above. There have only been two opposing lineups and a couple of umpires in the mix. Even if it turns out that Amaya is maturing into one of the game's best framers, it will look different than it has in the first week of the season. There's something material to see here, though, and that reinforces the reality of the improvement. Here's Amaya, last June, not quite able to earn a strike call on a glove-side sinker trying to come back to the edge of the plate. Amaya Squat and Loss 6 23.mp4 Notice how, because of the two-footed crouch, Amaya has to turn his trunk and reach across for the ball. He still extends his arm through the ball at the catch point, but he doesn't smoothly restore it to the middle of the zone. There's a jab to it, because he has to twist his upper body in addition to carrying his mitt up and to the left. Now, here's the new, improved Amaya, earning Javier Assad a strike that wasn't his on Tuesday night. Amaya Stealing Inside Corner 4 2 24.mp4 There's much in the setup change here. His splayed legs let him shift more fluidly in multiple directions. He's lower, so he doesn't have to reach down as much for a ball at the same height, easing the steering motion after ball hits mitt. Subtly, as many catchers do in this stance, he also sets his shoulders slightly at an angle, with the left one forward. That lets him get his arm out to the ball without an apparent movement of the torso, so the umpire doesn't think he's reaching more than he is. The real magic, though, is in the catch itself. Watch slowly, a few times, the moment when he goes and gets the pitch. All the best framers of the last handful of seasons have excelled in precisely this motion. Anticipating the location and getting a pitch close enough to that prescription to make life easy, Amaya doesn't catch and freeze with the mitt. Nor does he catch it and then carry the ball across. Rather, catching the ball is a snatching motion that unavoidably entails that leftward move. Between the timing of the extension and the preset of his shoulders, Amaya doesn't show the umpire how he's moving the ball a foot toward the center of the zone. It just looks like he's reaching forward. Nailing detail work like this is how the Brewers have become reliably excellent at pitch framing. From 2018 through 2023, under Counsell, they were 78 runs better than average, the best in baseball. The Cubs, meanwhile, were 11 runs worse than average. Counsell himself doesn't carry the wisdom and genius of the Milwaukee catching cabal with him, but he hired old baseball acquaintance Mark Strittmatter away from the Rockies to be the new catching coach, perhaps hoping to bring his new team up to date in this vital sector. Amaya is still young enough, and has varied enough talents, that he could yet blossom into a star-caliber catcher--even a fixture behind the plate, for years to come. It didn't seem likely even a year ago, and there are things left to shore up to make it come to fruition, but the progress he's already made is both encouraging and massively valuable. View full article

The Chicago Cubs have nosed back over .500, thanks to a three-game winning streak on the heels of dropping the first two contests of their season. Their fifth starter gave them an encouraging first outing Tuesday night. Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports One year ago Wednesday, I wrote about Javier Assad's pitch mix, as he tried to establish himself as a multi-inning (but fairly high-leverage) relief weapon for the Cubs. Specifically, I recommended that he lean considerably harder on his sinker and slider against right-handed batters, and on his four-seamer and changeup against left-handed ones. He was, at the time, a kitchen-sink guy, and it didn't seem likely to be a sustainably successful approach. In one sense, I was demonstrably wrong. For the second year in a row, Assad was effective, despite less-than-dominant peripheral numbers. He entered 2024 with nearly 150 innings of big-league work under his belt, and a 3.06 ERA, despite a more pedestrian 4.34 FIP. His six-pitch mix--four-seamer, sinker, changeup, cutter, slider, curve--doesn't include any superior weapons, but he found ways to defy the regression monster all the way through his first full season. To really keep that monster at bay, though, a player has to be proactive about adjustments. If you wait until the league figures you out to start making changes, you'll fall behind in the constant battle for an advantage. Thus, although we have to be careful not to extrapolate too much from a single (frigid) game's worth of data compiled against the execrable Rockies, it's worth taking note of some big changes Assad made in his 2024 debut Tuesday night. Firstly, his pitch mix was drastically different. Here's how Assad's pitch usage broke down by handedness in 2023. Batter Hand BF P 4Seam% Sink2Seam% Cutter% Slider% Curve% Change% Righty 274 1012 11.40% 40.40% 22.50% 25.00% 0.70% 0.00% Lefty 239 948 30.00% 17.90% 32.00% 0.60% 10.80% 8.80% Here's the same breakdown for Tuesday's 89-pitch effort. Batter Hand BF P 4Seam% Sink2Seam% Cutter% Slider% Curve% Change% Righty 12 45 4.40% 42.20% 8.90% 42.20% 2.20% 0.00% Lefty 10 44 50.00% 13.60% 18.20% 2.30% 4.50% 11.40% This version of Assad is essentially the one I proposed last year, but as a starter. He went pretty much right after lefties with his fastball, and he dramatically increased his slider usage against righties, each at the expense of the cutter. It led to six scoreless innings in which he allowed just six baserunners and struck out five. Again, this is the Rockies, and it was a miserable night for baseball--especially if you were a hitter. We can't assume that what worked Tuesday will work going forward. Still, this is a significant development. Going away from a kitchen-sink approach doesn't have to mean giving up the advantages Assad gleaned from his previous style. He can pitch with touch and feel even within this framework. To wit, if you cut his four-seamer samples for each of his three big-league seasons in half based on their horizontal movement, and then examine the movement patterns, he was getting more rising action on the half of his heaters that cut more (i,e., effectively creating a cut-ride look) last night than he had in either previous campaign: 17.5 inches of induced vertical break, compared to 16.0 inches in 2022 and 2023. He got a couple of called strikes in the up-and-away quadrant of the zone to lefties Tuesday, with the pitch virtually acting as a harder backdoor cutter, with less chance of a mistake in the heart of the zone. Assad also seems to have tweaked his slider, in addition to throwing it more often. The sample is too small to assume this will hold, but the slider had two more inches of sweep and a bit more depth Tuesday night than it had in 2022 and 2023. When you consider that it was also playing off more sinkers (as opposed to the cutter), that adjustment means hitters really have to feel like they're covering a plate about two feet wide. Miguel Amaya did well to steal Assad a couple of called strikes at the low, outside corner of the zone, making things even tougher on the helpless Colorado hitters. I don't believe Assad can pitch to an ERA just over 3.00 again this year. If he's able to persist with these changes in pitch mix and movement using his excellent pitchability, though, I do think he can stay on the low side of 4.00. That would be a huge development for the Cubs, since they need him more acutely than expected in the early going. We're going to see at least another handful of Assad starts, and perhaps several more than that. We'll have plenty of chances to suss out how real his transformation is, but given what we've seen so far, it's fair to be a bit more optimistic than we expected to be. View full article

When the Chicago Cubs ponied up an unprecedented sum (somewhere on the other side of $40 million) for the best managerial free agent in recent memory, they conferred significant power upon him. He's using it. Image courtesy of © Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports Whereas the Cubs were persistently cautious about investing playing time in Christopher Morel over the last two seasons, Craig Counsell immediately made it clear that he wanted him in the lineup every day. Before Counsell came aboard, the team envisioned an offseason move that could land Morel permanently at first base, but Counsell elected to give him a wide-open lane via which to reach the everyday job at third. Right from the jump, in spring training, Counsell batted Morel in the cleanup spot alongside other regulars, marking him as a linchpin of the lineup. A contract like Counsell's implicitly includes the right to much more influence on roster construction than the typical modern manager has, and you can see that Counsell has that, in places. He's not an old-fashioned manager (or 1990s NFL-style coach-slash-GM), but the faith the Cubs showed by paying this much for his services naturally extends itself into the selection of players. Morel is here, and certainly is playing third base, as much because of Counsell as because of any attachment to him Jed Hoyer or Carter Hawkins harbor. It's been fascinating to watch Counsell solve a problem of his own voluntary creation within games. Except when grounder-friendly lefty Justin Steele was on the mound on Opening Day, Counsell has stuck to Morel as his starting third baseman, and he's locked him into the cleanup spot. As soon as possible within each competitive contest, though, he's lifted Morel for Nick Madrigal. The last two days, that's meant letting Madrigal occupy the cleanup spot (between Cody Bellinger and Dansby Swanson) for the last three or four innings, but if Counsell were desperately disturbed by the prospect of having Madrigal come up in a big spot, he wouldn't keep writing Morel in as the cleanup guy, or at the hot corner. Last week at Baseball Prospectus, I wrote about this very subject, although with the lens inverted: I foresaw a setup whereby Morel would sit the first part of the game and come in midway through, to maximize the leverage of some offensive situation in which he might contribute. The main point is the same, though: managers have traditionally been too reluctant to make early tactical substitutions. Counsell is exploring that frontier in his treatment of Morel and Madrigal, and the radical nature of his approach would make it tough to support for any skipper with less power and leverage than this one has. Counsell also told Mike Tauchman he would be on the 26-man roster right at the beginning of camp, even as many fans speculated that he would be a casualty if and when the team re-signed Bellinger. Not only is Tauchman around, but he's started a game in each corner already, spelling and saving the legs of Ian Happ and Seiya Suzuki. Tauchman is a Counsell-style player, and guaranteeing his spot on the roster was no happenstance. While fans might have wrung their hands over the possibility that Tauchman would spend a big chunk of another season as the leadoff man, Counsell properly noticed that he's a useful fourth outfielder and lineup lengthener against right-handed pitching. Taking Happ and Suzuki off their feet defensively for a game each in the early going is also a hallmark of Counsell's style. He thinks well ahead and views the whole calendar of the season--the full, 162-game grind--as carefully as any manager in baseball. This is also why he let Ben Brown stay out there and wear hideous numbers in his big-league debut, and why he asked Drew Smyly for two innings to close out the win in the home opener. Unlike David Ross, Counsell assiduously avoids "chasing" wins by using high-leverage arms when the team is trailing, and he tries to reserve his best hurlers for the moments when they matter most. Expect Counsell to keep getting chances to shape the roster, and to use that roster in creative and interesting ways. If Morel can't improve at least somewhat, the team's experiment with him at third base will end soon, but Counsell seems likely to keep batting him fourth most days, either way. If that means bringing on Madrigal at the earliest moment when that opportunity presents itself, so be it. Over the last 50 seasons, only four teams have given 50 or more plate appearances to substitutes in the cleanup spot from the fifth inning on. Only 13 have allotted 40 or more such plate appearances. Only 36 have had at least 30. Madrigal already has two sub plate appearances, through four games. Counsell believes he can consistently find the right moment to make that substitution, and coming from him, that's a bold but credible choice. When he was at the helm of a series of Brewers teams who kicked out the Cubs at the sprinting finish of the marathon season, Counsell owned September. Brewers fans took to calling the month "Craigtember," because he had learned his own roster and managed his resources so much better than many of his colleagues that his team had a persistent advantage in that month. The Cubs are hoping the same thing will be true in 2024, and Counsell has set just such a tone with his selection and deployment of the roster in the very early going. View full article

The Chicago Cubs' lineup is only going to produce adequately if they get big hits from their rookie first baseman. Sunday provided some interesting insight into his upside, and into what he still needs to learn. Image courtesy of © Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports If you just looked at the exit velocity and launch angle, Michael Busch appears to have gotten unlucky in the third inning Sunday. He sent Rangers center fielder back to the warning track on a long fly ball, hit at 106 miles per hour. If it flew exactly the same distance, to the same part of the park, it would have been a home run at Wrigley Field--and at 19 other MLB parks. It just died a bit shy of the deep wall to the left of dead center in Arlington. Fans who were watching, though, know that the fault was not in his stars, but in his start time. Busch was up with Dansby Swanson in scoring position, in a game the Cubs led 3-2. He had gotten ahead of Texas starter Jon Gray 2-0, and he got a fastball, middle-middle, at 94 miles per hour. Busch 2 0 FA MdMd F8 106 EV 3 31 24.mp4 It's a well-struck ball, sure, but a ball in that spot, in that count, with a chance to drive in a run, has to be pulled. There's no reason to be using the big part of the field when it's 2-0, and when you have as discerning an eye as Busch does. He needed to be sitting fastball, and if he got a fat one, it needed to be bouncing around in the corner or spilling a fan's beer. Otherwise, he could always hold his fire and wait for a cookie on 2-1 or 3-0. Hitters have a saying: You have to be yes, yes, yes, no. You can't start with the intention of taking a pitch, ever, and then catch up to the ball. You have to think 'swing' until some visual cue tells you to take, or take all the way without reserving an alternative. Obviously, the cues to which that change of plan can be pegged and the degree of aggressiveness in one's mindset will change slightly based on count, opponent, defensive alignment, and game situation, based on expectations and payoffs, but you have to get started on time and find ways to stop when necessary. If you have any other mental machinery in place, you'll never survive against big-league pitchers, with their overwhelming velocity, devastating secondary options, and ability to command the lot. I'm not suggesting Busch doesn't have that mental machinery, or that he wasn't thinking 'yes, yes, yes' going into that 2-0 pitch. Clearly, though, he didn't quite have an aggressive enough mindset to get the bat head out and pull that ball into the gap, or over the wall. Busch generates good opposite-field power, which is why he's able to wait back and take such a patient tack at the plate. Sometimes, though, that's a double-edged sword. If that hit had happened, and then the rest of the game had been perfectly normal, I wouldn't remark on this. Even veteran sluggers are sometimes late on fastballs--even ones in the middle of the zone, at non-elite velocities, with the count in their favor. One swing indicates little. Over his next three plate appearances, though, Busch swung at the next five pitches he saw. I went through all the games since the start of 2023 for which we have pitch-by-pitch data on Busch's plate appearances. Do you know how many other times he swung at six straight pitches, across any number of trips to the plate? None. In fact, he never swung at six out of any seven pitches, or six out of eight. Busch is as patient as hitters come. It's a huge part of his game. Clearly, he himself was frustrated by that fly out that could have been more, because it pulled him out of his most comfortable and fruitful approach for most of the rest of the game. Crucially, though, when he came up in the ninth, Busch returned to himself. Under plenty of pressure, in a tie game and with no one on base and one out, he drew a six-pitch walk against José Leclerc. Maybe that marks a minor retreat, back to the approach with which he's more comfortable, anyway, but it suited the situation gorgeously. For the second time in his first three games as a Cub, he scored the go-ahead run for the team in the ninth inning. He's going to get on base plenty, because he's a disciplined hitter and gets back into his comfort zone quickly when something throws off his equilibrium. The big question for Busch is whether he can also be that other guy--the one who drives an RBI double or two-run homer in that third-inning situation, when aggressiveness is the order of the moment. If so, he can be a star, not much less productive than Anthony Rizzo was. We've already seen evidence of his raw power, two-strike approach, and even baserunning nous. If not, then he'll be confined to the bottom half of the lineup, where his job will be to keep lengthening games and ensuring extra chances for the real boppers at the top of the lineup. That's not a bad floor. Still, Sunday's game was a good reminder both of the impressiveness of his ceiling, and of the work left for him to reach it. View full article

The Chicago Cubs' ace southpaw was forced from his Opening Day start with a strained left hamstring, and Craig Counsell is already forecasting a stint on the injured list. How can the team weather this massive blow? Image courtesy of © Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports Though the team has insisted otherwise, and proved their faith by refusing to meet an extremely low asking price for Jordan Montgomery earlier this week, the Cubs' pitching was thin even entering Opening Day. Their modest projected win totals in each of the major projection systems (always right around .500, always second in the compact NL Central race) have been held down by those systems' mistrust of their pitching. The Cubs and their fans pinned their hopes for confounding those expectations to Justin Steele. Now, those hopes have been punctured. If this ain't a mess, it'll do til the mess gets here. That Counsell called Steele's hamstring injury a strain right after the game and admitted he expects him to go on the injured list, even before the hurler goes for an MRI Friday, is tellingly ominous. The Cubs have to assume (and act as though) they will be without Steele for a month or more, especially because this injury comes at such an inopportune time. It could force him to spend a long time ramping back up to be ready to start, even after he gets the leg healthy. In the meantime, and with Jameson Taillon also on the shelf, the Cubs have Kyle Hendricks, Shota Imanaga, Jordan Wicks, Javier Assad, and a big old question mark in their starting rotation. They've stated a (wise) desire to give Imanaga an extra day whenever possible, as he adapts to the tighter rotation schedule of Stateside ball after a decade in NPB, so shortening the rotation will be a non-option, even given the off days they have early in their schedule. The Cubs need a fifth starter, and they will need them for a while. It's Ben Brown time. The easiest choices would be to call up a reliever like Daniel Palencia and install veteran southpaw Drew Smyly, or to change course and recall Hayden Wesneski, after he planned to go to Triple-A Iowa and stretch out to start, but the Cubs shouldn't do either. They need real upside in their rotation, especially with Steele removed from it. Brown looked terrific this spring. He's already on the 40-man roster. He has great stuff. He could make his debut Wednesday, against the hopelessly bad Colorado Rockies in what figures to be a chilly Wrigley Field. That's a nice, soft landing. If the Cubs are destined to make the playoffs this year, they need Brown to make a fistful of good starts (or more). They need Cade Horton to come up later this summer and be good, too. Those guys are the quiet, not-quite-confident answers reasonable people have given to the questions raised by projection systems about the team's pitching outlook, even before the Steele injury. The team's need for them has come much sooner than expected, but they need to resist the temptation to shy away and default to more conventional, easier choices. Within a fortnight or so, Taillon might be ready to re-join the rotation, bumping Brown back to Iowa. In the meantime, they should be angling to learn more about one of their most important young arms. How would you fill the void left by Steele's injury? What is your level of concern over the Cubs' ace, and/or over Taillon? Jump in below to steer the discussion. View full article

As everyone expected, the new rules confining infielders to the dirt and to their traditional sides of second base had an impact on the batting average on ground balls in MLB last year. It wasn't an across-the-board effect, though. Image courtesy of © Rick Scuteri-USA TODAY Sports One of my predictions about the new rules that took effect last season was that we would see more hits than in previous years, not just on scalded line drives off the bats of left-handed hitters, but from righties, too. I expected that, with second basemen unable to swing to the left side of second and shortstops forced not only to play a step closer to the middle of the diamond but to stay off the outfield grass (where many of them used to position themselves against hard-hitting or slow-footed righties), we would see a few more balls sneak through, but also that more batters would reach on infield hits or errors. I was way, way wrong. Rob Mains broke down the effects of the rules changes (including the shift ban) in Baseball Prospectus 2024, and one of his fascinating findings was that the increase in BABIP throughout baseball in 2023 was not confined to grounders (liners and even fly balls also turned into hits slightly more often), but was confined to left-handed batters. Righties saw virtually no change in BABIP on grounders or liners, and only a small bump on fly balls. As I read Rob's excellent essay, I immediately thought, "Ok, but that doesn't account for errors. There were, surely, more errors." There weren't. On the contrary, on pulled ground balls by right-handed batters, the Out Rate (1-((H+ROE-HR)/Balls in Play)) was 76.4 percent, the highest for the 20-plus years for which we have good data on batted ball trajectory and direction. The league's aggregate fielding percentage was the highest it's been in that time. Despite fielders theoretically having to move five or six steps instead of three or four more often, and despite having their range cut down by half a step because they can't play as deep and have to account for a greater distance between themselves and either their teammate or the foul line, we saw the left sides of big-league infields play better than ever in 2023. Next, I checked to see whether there was a change in the quality of contact the league made. Maybe righty batters, who never have had as strong an incentive to use the whole field as lefty ones, hit weaker or bouncier grounders (ones with launch angles south of about -8 degrees, where expected BABIP begins to plunge because even hard-hit balls are two- or three-hoppers), or otherwise had lower expected value on them. Nope. Albeit by an infinitesimal amount, the league's righties hit harder pulled grounders and had a higher probability of hitting them 95 miles per hour or harder than in any previous year of the Statcast Era. The launch angle was the same. Based on exit velocity and launch angle, the expected singles rate of right-handed hitters' pulled grounders last year was 21.9%, the highest on record. The actual singles rate was 17.7%, the lowest on record. Go figure. Contact just as good against theoretically suboptimal infield alignments produced, if anything, worse results than in the past. I like being wrong, sometimes. Being wrong means learning something, and baseball is one of my favorite things to learn about. We can't say anything for certain here, and we shouldn't rush to overstate these effects, but I think we just learned that shifts against right-handed batters were only hurting team defense, anyway. Maybe that was because too many weak-armed second basemen were being asked to make backhanded plays on the far side of second base, even if they were mostly ones that should have been routine-looking. Maybe there was discomfort or miscommunication between the middle infielders in their interactions on the left side of second that was absent when the shortstop made the move in the opposite direction, because the angles at which they'd move toward each other on balls hit between them were so different and their relative depths had to be much more similar than on the right side. Maybe third basemen were being needlessly marginalized by the pinch of the shortstop covering the hole with the shift on. Any way you slice it, it's a fun finding. It might also give us a bit more confidence in Christopher Morel, as he fights to make up for what figure to be way too many errors early in his trial at the hot corner. We did just see Nick Madrigal have a defensively superb season in 2023, and this could be part of the reason. The circumscription of positioning didn't erase the major strides the league has made in identifying the best places for each fielder to play against each batter; the left side of every infield might have benefited from being in great position even after a rule came in forcing them to be a bit less algorithmically perfected than in the recent past. If it can work for Madrigal, maybe it can work for Morel, too. On the flip side, one thing the Cubs need to take away from this is to ensure that their righty batters are pulling fewer ground balls, period. They had the eighth-most such batted balls in MLB in 2023, which is no recipe for success. Swanson hit 118 grounders to the left side, 11th-most in MLB among righty batters, and Nico Hoerner hit 110, 15th-most. Combined, the two hit just .215 on those batted balls, so it's not like either specializes in blasting one-hoppers through the hole. Hoerner, of course, does much of his best work when he uses the opposite field. Swanson simply has to drive the ball in the air more often; his 44.1% ground-ball rate was the highest he'd posted since 2018. We could still see some of this change. With the effects of the pitch clock on baserunning and the increasing value of defensive range, we're going to see the league get faster over the next half-decade. A version of MLB with more speedy right-handed batters could be one that finally makes life hard on trapped left-side infielders. The margin for error could shrink so much that it does finally start forcing guys to play a step too shallow, or to rush throws. So far, though, banning the shift has only made shortstops and third basemen better. Research assistance provided by TruMedia. View full article