Matthew Trueblood

It's not shocking that Ben Brown has struck out nearly 29 percent of the batters he's faced in his first ride of the senior circuit. Although he only has two pitches on which he can consistently rely, they're two devastating offerings: a fastball that sits 96-97 and touches 99 miles per hour, and a power curveball that looks just like that heater to overwhelmed hitters. Much more surprising, though, is the fact that Brown is throwing strikes enough to rack up those strikeouts, and to keep runners from piling up on the bases. His walk rate is 8.8%, which is a hair worse than the league average, but it's felt more like a matter of feeling, testing, and trying to induce chases on close pitches than like a young hurler who ever loses contact with the zone. Because he doesn't have a third pitch with which to change lanes and force hitters to become more defensive, Brown has to try to prey on their aggressiveness. That's led to a few walks, but those walks are almost salubrious; they're necessary to threading the needle and getting strikeouts without giving up hard contact. For a pitcher with stuff as intense as Brown's (but also a spotty track record of strike-throwing in the minors, as Brown has), even average control is immensely valuable. He's thrown 84.6% of his pitches within 18 inches of the center of the strike zone, which constitutes a competitive pitch. That's almost exactly the league-average mark for pitchers who have faced at least 100 batters. He's throwing 90.4% of his fastballs in competitive locations, a full percentage point better than the league's average for four-seamers. Without a doubt, the Cubs and their young pitcher each deserve credit for that. Brown has had to work hard to get his control and command to this point, given the velocity with which he attacks on both pitches, his injury history, and the fact that control didn't come easily to him. As recently as last season, Brown looked too wild to merit a call-up to the big leagues. After being promoted to Double-A upon the Cubs trading for him in mid-2022, Brown walked 9.3% of opposing batters at that level between the second half of that year and the early part of 2023. When he went to Triple-A Iowa last summer, he walked a ghastly 16.2% of opponents. That was the key moment, though, because it was in Iowa that he was subjected to an automated strike zone--and forced to learn to drop the ball on the head of a pin. The Triple-A strike zone is shaped by technology, with two different modes of umpire assistance in force at different times during the weekly cycle of games. The computers believe umpires have been far too generous over the years. The zone at the highest level of the minors is minuscule; the global walk rate is 11.4% this year. Last season, it was an even more unseemly 12.0%. Those zones are, overall, bad for development, and they make for bad baseball. They're a superb reminder that we're not especially close to being ready to have robots call strikes for the best hitters and pitchers in the world. However, there's one redeeming caveat at play: Triple-A has become a crucible in which pitchers have to withstand severe heat and pressure, and the ones who survive it and matriculate to the majors have unusually good control by the time they come up. As you would guess, historically, rookies have been a bit more scattershot than the average pitcher when they arrive in the majors. These are guys who were in the minors, until now, for a reason, and for many of them, that reason is a dearth of control. They're trying to adjust, they're trying to handle the mental challenge of pitching in the big leagues for the first time, and they're working against a lack of reputation-driven help from umpires. In general, they throw fewer strikes, and have more bad misses than more experienced hurlers. Balls and strikes came under the direct influence of the machines in Triple-A at the start of 2023. Since then, we've seen a sharp change in the ability of rookies to throw strikes. Zone Rate and Competitive Pitch Location %, MLB Rookies, 2015-24 Season Zone % Comp Loc % 2015 48.7 83.5 2016 48.8 83.8 2017 49.9 84.6 2018 49.3 83.8 2019 47.9 82.9 2021 49.3 83.3 2022 48.9 83.3 2023 50.2 84 2024 51.1 84.7 Since the advent of the very strict computerized zones, rookies have had to wriggle through an unforgiving bottleneck to reach the majors. The only ones who do so are those who prove at least able to bite at the edges of the zone--and ideally, to consistently pound it with quality strikes. Brown is impressive, but he's not special. Right now, he's just another of several examples of pitchers who had to pass a more rigorous test to reach the majors than they had until last season. Again, overall, these non-human zones are bad for the game. Hitters matter, too, and if you're wondering why guys like Matt Mervis can put up such gaudy numbers in Triple-A but fall flat upon coming up to the big leagues, look no further than this very thing. Nor is having to fill up the zone or risk a great many walks the best way to develop many pitchers. Brown belongs to the class of those who have benefited greatly from this change, though. He just needed the control to tap into the ferocity of his stuff, and with each solid (and occasionally dominant) start he makes for the Cubs, we should all be reminded that his ruthless robot trainers helped mold him into this caliber of hurler.

Four teams have surrendered more stolen bases than the Cubs have this season. That's the good news here. No team has caught fewer would-be base stealers than the Cubs have, and the Cubs possess the worst caught-stealing rate of any team in big-league baseball. Moreover, they've allowed 29 wild pitches and passed balls, a total exceeded by only three other teams. Add in their two balks, and they've given up 90 extra feet 87 times this year. That's not even the bad news, though. The bad news is that, of the eight times the Cubs have caught runners stealing this year, five of them were actually pickoffs. When a runner tries to advance or ends up in a rundown instead of simply being thrown out retreating to a base, the play is scored as a caught stealing, in addition to a pickoff. Miguel Amaya and Yan Gomes have only actually thrown out three of the 59 runners who have taken off against them this year. The dates of those outs were Apr. 8, Apr. 15, and May 6. Since that last date, the Cubs have played 30 games, and opponents have 31 steals. There's nothing more the pitchers can do for these two. They lead MLB in pickoffs, although that's made a bit easier by the fact that every team they see is itching and leaping to run. In addition to those five pickoffs that were also scored caught stealing, the team has seven straight pickoffs, the most in baseball. They're trying to slow runners down, but they're constrained by the new rules that took effect at the start of last season. Right at this moment, though, there's also little the front office can do--or at least that they should do. A trade for a stronger-armed catcher is certainly in order, but few teams are out of the race at this point in the season, and fewer still want to trade a catcher with this skill set, given the increasing importance of the running game throughout the league. Nor has this team done anywhere near enough to justify an expenditure of significant future value to get better in the short term. Right now, the Cubs shouldn't be thinking like buyers. Instead, they need to do some in-house problem-solving. Their options are extremely limited, but the winning one should be obvious: it's time to start pitching out. If the Cubs do that, they'll be pretty much on an island. The pitchout is dead; some stubborn nurse just refuses to unplug its life support. Right now, the league is on pace for around 40 pitchouts this year. That's 40 or so, in total, for all 30 teams. They might hit 50, which would mark a third straight season of increase, but it would also mean a seventh straight season with fewer than 100 pitchouts attempted across MLB. As recently as a decade ago, there had never been a campaign in which fewer than 300 were attempted. The above only goes back to 2008, which makes the trend look less stark and shocking than it actually is. The data is a bit less clean for the 20 years from the dawn of the pitch-by-pitch tracking era in 1988 through the arrival of PITCHf/x, but there were around 1,000 pitchouts league-wide in some of those campaigns. Obviously, there are good reasons for this. The stolen base became much less prevalent in the 1990s and 2000s than it had been in the 1970s and 1980s, and it got even less prevalent in the 2010s than in the 1990s and 2000s. Fewer dangerous runners means less need to throw an intentional ball in order to thwart them; that's one reason for the dwindling number of pitchouts. Another is that they don't work all that well. Sam Miller showed that managers don't guess right often enough, and that catchers don't get their man often enough, to justify pitchouts, back in 2013. Two years later, Ben Lindbergh documented the trend and quantified the gains most teams realize in caught-stealing rate when they pitch out, ending up at the same conclusion. It doesn't really surprise me, and probably doesn't surprise you, that the new rules and the attendant rise in stolen bases haven't begotten more than a few extra pitchouts. Sabermetric orthodoxy sets hard, just like the much less closely interrogated conventional wisdom that preceded it. Without those new rules, the tactic might have died out altogether within a few more years. The pitchout makes the sacrifice bunt look downright popular. Time to change that. The Cubs' catching corps, under the present rules, breaks all the normal math that makes pitchouts bad ideas. They've caught a whopping 5% of basestealers this year, and none in the last five weeks, with runners going more than once a game. The numerical framework that killed the pitchout assumed a normal distribution of caught-stealing percentage centered around 25-30%. The worst teams in baseball rarely dipped below 20%, which is closer to the average in 2024. Most teams saw opponents attempt a steal maybe four times a week, but not six or seven. In Lindbergh's piece from almost a decade ago, he found that catchers take about 0.1 seconds off their pop time when the team pitches out, and that they catch runners at about twice the normal rate (it was 52% in his sample) because of it. He also gave a "guess right" rate of 19%, from the manager's side. In other words, 19 percent of pitchouts coincided with steal attempts. Miller, though, also found that the more a team pitched out, the more they tended to be right about when to do so. Then, too, we can assume that the Cubs would be right more than 19 percent of the time, because runners are going against them so often. Let's bring the expected out rate on pitchouts that are also steal attempts all the way down to 40%, because Amaya and Gomes are below-average throwers. Given that number, a 20% correct guess rate would yield outs on 8% of all their pitchouts. If they do it 50 times the rest of the year, they'll only catch four runners. They'll throw 40 extra balls for no reason at all, and fail to stop six runners, despite the pitchout. That doesn't sound like an awesome set of tradeoffs. Turning a strike into a ball is worth about 0.1 runs to the offense. Of the 50 extra balls thrown, 18 probably would have been balls anyway, Still, that means that throwing 50 pitchouts would cost the Cubs 3.2 runs, based just on the impact they would have on the count. Based on the relative values of steals (around 0.19 runs) and outs via caught stealing (around -0.44 runs), Amaya and Gomes would thus have to catch four more runners than expected in that sample of 10, or the Cubs would have to guess right more than 20 percent of the time. The thing is, that's all perfectly plausible. If Gomes and Amaya did throw out four of 10 runners with the pitchout on, that would be four more than we should expect them to throw out without one, based on the progress of this season. If they throw out five of 10, then they've definitely exceeded their expected success rate by enough to justify the pitchout, because their expected success rate on stopping runners is in the mid-single digits, if it's not zero. Again, too, the team might guess right more like 25 percent of the time, at least until runners get wise to the tactic and stop going so often. More than the math, though, there's psychology and common sense here. The Cubs are enduring too many long innings, too many stressful situations for their pitchers, and too many helpless moments for their defenders in the field. Too many walks, singles, and fielder's choices are turning into doubles. They don't strike out enough batters to live that way. They need runners who reach base to remain potential outs via force play, rather than immediately transforming into imminent scoring threats. The team needs to assert itself against the running game. The pitchout is an imperfect, almost defunct way to do it, but it's what they have left in the options box.

It hasn't been a matter of winning blowouts and losing nail-biters--although, to be fair, it also hasn't been the other way around. Sixty-five games into the long grind of 162, the Chicago Cubs are at the bottom of the NL Central standings, and they've been outscored by 16 runs. They're below .500, and based on the runs they've scored and allowed, that's where they belong. Most preseason projections had them a bit better than this, and many pundits projected them to be a little bit better even than those projections. There are some track records and some contracts and some tantalizing tools here, all saying that this team could be even better than the 83-win season they had last year. Not least among the evidence, of course, is that their runs ledger from last year said they should have won more than 83 games, anyway. Alas, nothing is quite working in sync for them this year. When the offense has been able to push runs across relatively consistently, the pitching has faltered. When the pitching has hit its sweet spot (both healthy and competent), it's been the offense's turn to scuffle. The result is a lot of close games, but not enough wins. All else equal, it would be slightly preferable to have things go the other way. More blowout wins would mean a greater ability to moderate the workloads of key relievers and injury-prone position players, and that might mean hanging tougher when both the offense and the run-prevention unit go out of phase at once. Running hot and cold as a team leads to better outcomes than doing so as individual units, moving separately. That said, the real problem here is growing more obvious to everyone watching the Cubs closely, with each passing day: neither phase is quite good enough, and as a team, they're vulnerable to brutal stretches of play like the one they hit about a month ago. To avoid being that way, they'd need to do one simple but very difficult thing: be better, in one phase or the other. This is where their unexpectedly deficient defense looms large, along with the pitching injuries that have depleted both their rotation and their bullpen for much of the season. As the offensive production has ebbed and flowed, the pitching's inability to hover around average during their toughest stretches has cost them some of the close wins they could otherwise have eked out. That was the story early in the season, even as the offense played very well and kept them well above .500, and it's been the story recently, as the offense has come out of what was a month-long fug of ineptitude. Given a more competent Kyle Hendricks, a steadier Héctor Neris, or a healthy season for any of Justin Steele, Adbert Alzolay, and Julian Merryweather, the Cubs would have more wins right now. They might well on the right side of .500, and right on the heels of the Brewers. That's not how things have actually gone, though. Nor have the position players been especially healthy, and nor have the up-the-middle defenders around whom the team was theoretically built played according to preseason expectations or the team's needs. With all that happening, it shouldn't surprise us much that they're where they are. The fault, however, is not in the team's stars--or, in another sense of the word, it is. The front office, with its conservative approach to spending (especially on high-priced star players), exposed itself to the risk of this kind of frustrating underachievement. The Ricketts family, with its reluctance to spend the $250-300 million that should be their annual payroll budget, forced the front office to think like a more constrained club (think the Brewers or the Rays), knowing they aren't really set up to match those types of teams in terms of proactivity and ingenuity. Eventually, the team might get into a groove, with both the hitters and the pitchers healthy and hot at the same time for a long time. That happened last summer, albeit only at the last possible moment to avoid a July sell-off, and it lasted until mid-September, giving them a good chance to win 90 games and claim the NL Central--though ultimately, they squandered that chance. Unless and until they do get synced up that way, though, they'll remain maddeningly below-average. It's a product of bad luck, but that bad luck is a residue of bad design.

When last Jordan Wicks appeared on a big-league mound for the Cubs, the rotation was so incomplete that it was unfathomable that they would not need him as a starter any time soon. Kyle Hendricks's struggles were becoming more obvious by the day. Justin Steele was not yet back from his hamstring strain, and Jameson Taillon was still ramping up. The Cubs were scrambling. In the final 10 days of April, alone, they used seven different starters. Paradoxically, though, it was that version of the Cubs that played exceptionally well and sprang out to a 17-9 start. Since then, they're 14-23, even as the rotation has finally found some better health and stability. The reasons for that have been on display over the last week, as Shota Imanaga and Javier Assad have each been bitten by the regression bug; Taillon has continued to fail at the crucial task of stemming the tide when opponents start a rally within a given inning; and Steele searches for the next step in his evolution after a peculiar ace-caliber 2023. For weeks, the Cubs struggled to score, and the thin leads handed off by the rotation to an often-shaky bullpen always seemed to disappear, irretrievably. Now, the offense has revved up its engine, but the starters are unable to deliver larger leads (or often any lead at all), and the bullpen is struggling as much as ever. Thursday night in Cincinnati, Assad got hit a bit, and when Craig Counsell was forced to turn to Luke Little and Porter Hodge in high-leverage situations, they both failed to keep the lid on the game. Kyle Hendricks, still admirably trying it, couldn't even keep the game close when he was brought in to try and clean up Hodge's mess. Though they're now making a habit of calling up impressive-looking, hard-throwing homegrown relievers, the Cubs still haven't had much success developing them into actually useful pitchers. Jeremiah Estrada is having a marvelous season, but only after having been waived by Chicago and picked up by the Padres. Meanwhile, Keegan Thompson remains in the wilderness. Daniel Palencia and Adbert Alzolay both got sidetracked by injuries early on this year, but Palencia's inconsistency and unreliability pre-date the flareup that now has him shelved. Hodge and Little look like the latest in a parade of talented throwers who aren't going to translate that into skilled, productive pitching--at least in the short term, and perhaps not until they're wearing another uniform in a few years. That's what makes Wicks so important. He's on the cusp of a return, be it this weekend or after one more rehab appearance with Triple-A Iowa. Based on his performance before landing on the injured list, there are reasons for both optimism and caution. Yes, he's throwing harder and has a revised arsenal this year, but he wasn't actually piling up outs or keeping opponents off the board all that effectively before he got hurt. Given that fact, maybe it makes the most sense to insert him right into the bullpen. He could be a direct replacement for Little, in the short term, able to give the team more length when needed and certainly more capable of getting people out, for however long he's asked to do so. Having an actual lefty for medium-leverage situations--one more trustworthy than Drew Smyly and Little--would take some pressure off Mark Leiter Jr., who's been overworked and overexposed again this year. One could make an equally compelling case, of course, for unplugging Assad and plugging him back in, via a bullpen reset. The portly starboard slinger has run into some issues lately, and given his stuff, that's not a huge surprise. At the same time, Assad is a competitor and a command artist, and he's likely to get back on track soon. It might just make sense to let him slide into relief and pare down his arsenal for a few weeks, before bringing him back to the rotation when next a slot opens up. The most logical, obvious move, though, is to move Brown into high-leverage relief and set Wicks up as the fifth starter for the long term. Brown is a risk as a back-end reliever; he's going to give up home runs. He's also racked up strikeouts at an awesome rate early in his big-league career, though, and given the combination of his fastball velocity and the unique traits of his curveball, that doesn't figure to abate any time soon. Sliding him into the pen--with the mandate being that he keep exploring ways of locating and mixing his two great pitches to minimize the risk of giving up power--is the natural move. He could finish this season as the team's closer, and even in the meantime, the fit of skill sets and roles that would result from Wicks being the fifth starter and Brown taking Hodge's place in the bullpen is too good to ignore. None of this needs to be permanent. As we've previously reported here, Hendricks will reach 10 years of MLB service on June 26, at which point the Cubs can release him without interfering with his chance to claim full MLB pension and other benefits for the rest of his life. Given the way things have gone for him this year, that seems almost certain to happen, so another place in the staff will open. For the next two or three weeks, though, Wicks will be an important part of the team's plan, as they try to work around two highly-paid low-leverage long men they can't trust; a rotation full of players doing daily battle with the regression monster; and a deficient back end of the pen. They have to survive this tough stretch to advance into July as a serious contender, and Wicks might be the help they need to do so.

It was just cute, at first. It was a nice little story. Mike Tauchman was a nice little complementary piece on a scrappy Cubs team, and he was from Palatine, Ill., so there was a nice little zing of extra emotion attached to him finding success with the club. He gave the media the saccharine storyline denied them when the Trey Mancini signing fell flat. Tauchman's arrival (and the way he quickly assumed a meaningful role) took some of the sting out of the Cody Bellinger injury last May and June. As that season progressed, though, Tauchman became unexpectedly indispensable. His availability and his broad-spectrum competence allowed the Cubs to use Bellinger at first base for much of the second half. He came up with huge at-bats throughout the month of July: a two-run, game-tying, ninth-inning double in Milwaukee; a homer and two RBI doubles in a night game against the Nationals at Wrigley Field; a leadoff single and a bases-loaded walk in the fifth-inning rally on the South Side a week later that sealed the Cubs front office's decision to buy instead of selling. Then, there was that magical catch to save and win a game in St. Louis. Tauchman lacks significant power, which puts a ceiling on his potential production and shrinks his margin for error. When he's not getting on base at an exceptional rate, his utility becomes fringy. He's now 619 plate appearances into his Cubs career, though, and he owns a .366 OBP. Even better, when the stakes get higher, he gets better. When you think of Tauchman, you think of patience and pitch recognition, and with good reason. He excels at fighting off tough pitches, and at discerning balls and strikes. This season, throughout MLB, there have been 12 plate appearances leading off a game in which the batter forced the starting pitcher to throw five different pitch types--to empty their arsenal one plate appearance into the game. Two of them were Tauchman, at the end of last month, against Miles Mikolas of the Cardinals and Colin Rea of the Brewers. He grinds his way through every trip, giving his teammates extra looks at a pitcher, wearing that pitcher down, and increasing his own chances of reaching base. To that end, Tauchman transforms as a hitter when the count reaches two strikes. Before that point, he covers the whole strike zone, but he doesn't get aggressive, at all. His swing rate is 41.7%, and he only chases 17.2% of pitches outside the strike zone. With two strikes, though, Tauchman goes into protect mode. He chases 32% of pitches outside the zone, and swings at 61.5% of all offerings, refusing to give away an at-bat by taking a third strike unless he's completely fooled. That's most of the time, anyway. In low- and medium-leverage situations, with fewer than two strikes, Tauchman swings just 40.4% of the time. In high-leverage situations, in the same counts, that number shoots up to 53.8%. In fact, overall, Tauchman becomes a different hitter (though, remarkably, no more prone to expanding his zone) when the stakes get high. Leverage Swing % Chase % High 54.6 19 Medium 47.9 20.2 Low 47.8 24.8 The ferocious energy that bursts out of him when he comes up clutch--the outbursts we saw when he stole that home run last July, or when he homered to tie the game late on Sunday Night Baseball in Boston earlier this year--stays well under control. It's there, though, and it subtly transforms him. You can get away with pitches to him in relatively unimportant situations that he will punish violently if it's time to cut it loose. Tauch to Tie.mp4 In his paean to Ted Williams in the wake of Williams's last game at Fenway Park, author John Updike wrote this: "Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money." Tauchman is hitting .476/.520/.762 in high-leverage situations this year. Is he, then, a vulgarity? No. What Updike said carried real merit, and echoes through the six-plus decades since for that reason. It overlooked something about the interaction between human nature and the gut-wrenching difficulty of hitting big-league pitching, though. Tauchman couldn't sustain the approach he uses to get on base so frequently and grind down opponents so effectively if he were even this small fraction more aggressive all the time. He might have a harder time staying healthy, since his swing gets a bit more violent in those situations. He might also just not be able to consistently barrel the ball with the same precision, owing not to a character defect, but to the fact that adrenaline naturally heightens a person's concentration and sharpens their vision. Tauch Off.mp4 If the balance of this season goes the way the Cubs hope it will, Tauchman won't finish the campaign as their top WAR guy. In a perfect world, he probably wouldn't start against most left-handed pitchers. Still, he's indispensable--still, again, and for the foreseeable future. Craig Counsell surprised some by revealing, late in spring training, that he had told Tauchman not to sweat about his roster spot when the outfielder showed up in mid-February. By now, it should be obvious why he did that. Tauchman adapts and excels by knowing and managing situations, and he's right at the center of what the Cubs want to do this year.

Yesterday, I wrote at length about Christopher Morel, and the fact that he shows up as one of the most unlucky hitters in baseball this year. Specifically, I broke down seven of the outs on which the models that drive those labels say he suffered the worst misfortune, looking for patterns and meaning. Today, let's finish that walkthrough and draw some broader conclusions (though not carve any in stone). Let's pick up right where we left off. We last found Morel at the end of April in New York. Here he is back in Chicago in early May, with the Brewers in town. Morel 8.mp4 If you read last night's piece, you've already seen a pattern develop, and this continues it. Morel chased a pitch way off the plate inside. Many hitters would whiff on it. Few of those who make contact on it would keep it fair, and fewer still would keep it fair while making solid contact. This could easily have been a double down into the left-field corner. Again, we see Morel being an extraordinarily talented hitter. Again, though, it feels like the bad luck factor should take a backseat to the question of whether he should be swinging at that pitch at all, and that when we do weigh the impact of the bad luck, we should ask ourselves whether any other outcome was really possible, given the pitch location and the nature of Morel's swing. Ok, next, from the following series against the Padres. Morel 9.mp4 This one really is brutal. That's 99 on the inner edge, and Morel gets the barrel to it while staying through the ball well enough to take it to right-center field. It's an impressive swing. It's also another case where you have to ask: Was any other outcome actually possible? In the comment section of Part 1 of this two-part series, site member @We Got The Whole 9astutely observed that most of the Cubs' alleged bad luck seems to come when they hit to the middle of the diamond, and asked whether that's true, in more than an anecdotal sense. Naturally, it is. This is, in no small part, because expected outcome models for batted balls don't take spray angle into account. That sounds like a massive failure of the models, but there are some sound reasons to exclude that input. For one thing, it's often hard for a hitter to manipulate the direction of the ball, more than influencing it through their tendency to either pull the ball or hit it the other way. For another, once you start accounting for direction, you have to account for the positions of fielders before the ball is hit, at which point you're not only measuring the hitter's ability to hit. Still, it's a major factor. Balls hit equally hard and on the same launch angle might be 50 feet over the wall if hit to straightaway right or left field, at some parks, but die on the track if hit to center field. Morel crushed this ball, and on one of those high-school fields with uniform fence distances all the way around, he'd have had an easy homer. That's not big-league ball. The fact that Robert Suarez was able to hit his spot with a fastball just shy of 100 MPH on the inside corner made it almost impossible for Morel to pull the ball, at least with the authority with which he hit this ball back up the middle. Some credit there has to go to Suarez, and we have to acknowledge that while Morel did well, he didn't exactly get unlucky. He got beaten, despite a great swing. Against pitchers as good and in ballparks as big as the big leagues have, that's going to happen. On to the next one. Morel 10.mp4 Here's where things get crazy. This ball left Morel's bat at just 81.2 miles per hour, with a launch angle of 29 degrees. That's not exactly blistered, and it ended up looking like a lazy fly ball. Why was it tagged as a ball with a good chance of being a hit? Because most balls hit that hard, on that trajectory, fly 20 or more feet fewer than that one did. With the wind blowing out to left, this one settled into the glove roughly 304 feet from home plate; the average for balls hit like that this year is 283. Often, outfielders have to run a bit farther to get to balls hit like this one was, and (as was the case here) they sometimes have to do so after initially seeing a hitter with power take a healthy swing. This was good hitting by Morel. It was a mistake breaking ball up in the zone, in a situation when lifting the ball and making contact were imperative. He didn't get off his hardest swing on it, and that meant an out, but there was good process here, and it's fair to say that he did get some bad luck. With a generally less favorable wind at his back, he might have ended up with a game-changing double instead of a sacrifice fly. Morel 11.mp4 Finally! We've found one. This is just plain bad luck. Baseball is a game of millimeters, played on nearly three acres of land. Morel hit this 105 miles per hour, at a 34-degree launch angle, and he ever-so-slightly pulled it. Obviously, to get the payoff on a day when the wind was swirling and sideways, he needed to lean on it a hair more or get it a hair more toward left field, but this was a pitch out over the plate, and he put a superb swing on it. I'm happy to call this one pure, unadulterated bad luck. Morel 12.mp4 This clip is a perfect distillation of the reasons why so many teams now emphasize pulling fly balls to an extreme degree. There's just so much frustration to be found for anyone shy of elite, monstrous humans when they try to find their power in the opposite-field gap, especially in the modern game. Morel did everything right here. On a fastball away, he aggressively drove through the ball, slicing a 108.5-MPH drive at a launch angle of 17 degrees. Yet, he never seemed to have much chance of getting a hit, once it left his bat. This is another easy catch for the outfielder, even though it shows up as a should-be hit. File this one away. We'll discuss it further in a bit. Morel 13.mp4 After that streak of bad-luck outs on balls inside, now we're seeing some where he went and got a pitch solidly on the outer part, but the defense was ready for him. The shift is banned, but it's still a shaded-infield league, and this line drive (while well-hit enough to be a clean single much of the time) wasn't crunched hard enough to get past a second baseman positioned almost behind the bag even before the pitch was thrown. As with some of the early non-hits we saw, the upside of this one was a single, and it doesn't feel like cruelty from the fates that he was retired, but it certainly could have been a knock. Ok, let's recall the most painful of these examples. Ugh. It's hard to imagine a clearer demonstration of how hard being a great hitter in MLB is than this. The team, fans, and analysts have all rightly commended Morel for being more under control this year, especially in deep counts and with runners on base, which was the situation here. He still gets off a great swing against a fine pitch on the outer edge, and crushes it 405 feet to dead center field. But, there's that admonition against hitting it a long way in the air to center instead of to left, again. This time, it's because you have to clear the wall by more than you used to (in most places and with most center fielders), because the defense will take back your homers if you let them. But could Morel really have hit this any better, without being the lunging, strikeout-prone, pitchable hitter he was for too many long stretches the last two years? It's hard to imagine how. Last video: Morel 15.mp4 We've come full circle. This is much how his first couple bad breaks of the year looked. He hits it sharply, and again, this is a "high" ground ball, which has some expected utility. Still, it's a ground ball to the pull side. Defenses are ready for those, and it's hard to chalk them up as bad luck when they get gobbled up--especially when hit right at a defender, more or less. It's time to synthesize some of what we've seen here. I think I'd sum it up thusly: Don't set too much store by expected batted-ball stats, period. Don't expect Morel to get better just because he's due to do so, because I don't think he is. That said, do expect Morel to improve, if he continues to evolve and learns to lay off or adjust his swing a bit more on the ball in and off the plate. He has a unique swing. He gets the barrel way out in front, the same way great sluggers like Nolan Arenado do, but Arenado has learned to consistently elevate and pull the ball. He's similar to Willy Adames, whom he loves and respects, but like Adames, he can end up with deep funks and ugly OBPs when he doesn't have his approach perfectly tuned. Given the current bat path he uses, Morel will continue to hit into bad "luck" on a lot of pitches inside. We can see some of the reasons, but not all of them, absent more data on batted-ball spin and attack angle (which might well become public in the next year or two). He has to cover the whole plate, because his whiff rate will always be too high for him to simply cut it in half and work back from deep counts without running up his strikeout rate. Morel will do better, though, if he either tweaks that swing path or gets more selective on pitches that run off the plate inside. Changing his visual cues or mindset might also help him get around and pull the ball more sharply when it's on the outer third, too, and that's a vital component of whatever changes he'll continue to undertake. A few more of his well-struck fly balls have to go to left and left-center, rather than to center and right-center. We've seen evidence of him doing all of that over the last week or two, which has helped him come out of his latest slump and approach the production the team needs from him. That has to continue, but the signs point in exciting directions. Morel might not have gotten as unlucky as some stats say, but he's also not a finished product--and a breakout might be around the corner, if more because of an evolving process than because of a simple course correction in outcomes.

Almost everywhere you turn in the midst of conversations of everything going wrong for the Cubs right now, you hear the name Christopher Morel. His defense at third base has been genuinely problematic this year, and the decision to install him as the regular at that position looks pretty bad, but he's made some improvements since Opening Day, so the agreed-upon course for the moment there is patience. As Morel's offensive struggles pertain to the team's overall difficulty in consistently scoring runs, though, the conversation is even more complex. Seasoned baseball viewers have seen a more disciplined, controlled Morel in the batter's box this year. Without a doubt, he's taking better, smarter at-bats. He jumps at the ball much less often than was the case a year ago, and he did so less then than one year earlier. Statheads will note not only his elite raw swing speed, according to new bat-tracking data available via Statcast, but the numbers that show he's been very unlucky this season--in essence, that more of his batted balls should have gone for hits than have actually done so, based on their exit velocity and launch angle. Yet, some fans also cast a more skeptical eye on Morel, and on those who would hype his burgeoning skills despite his ugly overall numbers. They point out, firstly, that he remains one of the streakiest hitters you'll ever see. Even while looking more competitive than he did during a hideous slump last summer, Morel has already gone through a funk in which he not only didn't produce hits or get on base, but rarely even put the ball in play. He goes dormant for longer periods than you would like to see a cleanup hitter do, and for those disinclined to accept broad-brush numbers in making a granular assessment, the expected batted-ball data fails the sniff test. Let's meet in the middle, and engage with Morel's very strange season to date on the simplest terms possible. He's tied for 15th in MLB this year, with 15 outs on batted balls that had an expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) of .500 or higher when they left his bat. What if we just watched them all, to try and digest what they're telling us and hone our projections of Morel's future production? We'll start at the very beginning. Here's one from the very first weekend of the season, in Texas. Morel 1.mp4 Mm. Ok. Before we talk about that one at all, here's another, from the Cubs' opening series at home, against the Rockies. Morel 2.mp4 Ok, these aren''t that impressive so far, are they? Each is hit at more than 95 miles per hour, but they're just grounders to third base. The expected outcomes model is catching something real, in that they're well-struck and (this is a subtle but important factor) are what we might classify as "high" ground balls. They come more or less straight off Morel's bat, before gravity goes to work on them, rather than being hit downward and bouncing within 30 or 40 feet of the plate. I did research on this going back almost half a decade, and it's a real consideration. Higher grounders, as you'd guess, have a better chance to get through or force defensive mistakes than do choppers. Still, neither of these had any chance to be more than a single, and it doesn't even feel that unjust that they went for outs instead. Let's take a look at the next time he was cheated, in San Diego a week later. Morel 3.mp4 Line drive this time, but similar story. Morel hit that hard, but he didn't blister it or lift it much. It could have been a single. Despite the expected batted-ball data, it doesn't feel like it should have been one, exactly, and it wasn't splitting any gaps. The next day, he hit one considerably better, with some air beneath it. Morel 4.mp4 This, at last, is the kind of batted ball we're really thinking of when we say Morel has been unlucky, right? It jumped off his bat at 108 miles per hour, with some loft on it. It went to the biggest part of the park, in a setting (April in San Diego) that isn't terribly conducive to getting extra carry on the ball, but there's not much more you can ask of a hitter than to hit the ball that way. Maybe we'll come back to this one for further discussion later, but hitting the ball that hard and on a high line is surely a sign of a good (or at least gifted) hitter. Later in that road trip, as Morel settled into what would be a long and ugly slump, he nearly had a slump-preempter. Morel 5.mp4 Again, the expected metrics are being a little bit friendly, right? The probability of this ball (hit only 94 miles per hour) being any kind of hit is tiny. The thing is, if it's a hit at all, it's gonna be a home run. And look, it almost was one! Hitting long, high fly balls to the pull field is the single more valuable thing a hitter can do, before we bake in the costs (usually, a lot of extra strikeouts) of an approach centered around hitting them. Morel did that here. He wasn't rewarded. Gosh, that West Coast trip was long. The day after the above, in Arizona: Morel 6.mp4 To me, this is one of the most tricky and telling batted balls we'll study in this sequence. Morel got way out on (and a bit around) a ball off the plate inside, and he kept it fair, hit it squarely, elevated it at 106 miles per hour. If the ball is 20 feet to either the left or the right, it's a sure double, and if it's even 10 feet in either of those directions, it's a very tough play for the left fielder. At the same time, look at that swing. Was there any version of it where he could have hit that ball either 20 feet to the left or to the right? To me, it looks like he either could have yanked it foul or hit a much less potent strike to another part of the field. This was a good pitch, and Morel put a freakishly good swing on it, but that might not quite mean that he deserved any more than he got out of that swing. The thing about Morel slumps is, he gets going so badly that he doesn't even have bad luck. That lineout in Arizona came on Apr. 15. Over the next fortnight, he went 7-43 with 13 strikeouts and zero home runs. He only managed two doubles, and his OPS was barely over .500. He didn't have another hard-luck out, by our measurements, until Apr. 29. Morel 7.mp4 See, and that's not the kind of hard luck we've been hunting either. Morel got jammed badly. He still showed good bat speed and muscled a looping, hopeful liner toward right-center, and balls hit that softly but with that kind of loft very often drop into the grass beyond the reach of the infielder. When you think of bad luck, though, this isn't what it looks like. For today, we'll pause this revue here. Tomorrow, we'll tour the other eight instances in which Morel got jobbed, according to the expected numbers. At this halfway point, though, it's worth making a few observations: Some guys seem to hit screaming line-drive outs that look much more like the bad luck we picture when we say the words. Seiya Suzuki is a good example. Morel runs into misfortune at a different angle, figuratively and literally. Almost all of these came on inside pitches. That's something to watch, especially given the way Morel's swing works. He loves to get his arms extended. Maybe we need to give a bit more credit to pitchers when they successfully jam the very jammable Morel, and maybe Morel needs to cut down his swing rate on those offerings on the inner edge--and beyond it. Morel is a pivotal part of the Cubs' medium-term organizational plan, one way or another. This is an important topic to understand as best we can, so it's worth another round of conversation and breakdowns tomorrow.

Like player aging curves, naturally, managerial aging curves are imperfect descriptions of individual performance. There are guys who peak early and guys who bloom late, on the field and on the top step of the dugout. In general, though, great managers were and are younger than you might realize. There's a plasticity to your thinking and a willingness to change around age 40 that dissipates as you enter and travel through your 50s. It's also much easier to relate to players (most of whom are between 22 and 32) when you're roughly 42 than when you're 52, and easier then than when you're 62. Craig Counsell will turn 54 this August. He has a youthful look that is only possible, at this age, in 2024, but that's his age. That's notable, because: Sparky Anderson took over the Cincinnati Reds at age 36. He had his last 90-win season, with the Detroit Tigers, at age 53, in 1987. Earl Weaver took over the Baltimore Orioles at age 37. He retired after the 1982 season, at 51. He made a brief return later in the decade, but without success. Counsell is entering an age range in which managers tend to struggle, in the middle of their 50s. The best and most successful managers (other than Counsell himself) of the last two decades--A.J. Hinch, Alex Cora, Dave Roberts, Brian Snitker, Terry Francona, Bruce Bochy, and Dusty Baker--all are either younger than Counsell or considerably older. Again, aging curves don't even apply smoothly to players, for whom physical changes during one's peak seasons have huge and obvious ramifications. At the moment, it looks like anyone who bet against Aaron Judge aging well after his historic 2022 season just because he was already past 30 were wrong to do so. Justin Verlander is still going strong in his 40s. Even more plainly, manager aging curves are going to be noisy, especially because we live in an era of better physical health and more continual intergenerational interaction than those of, for instance, Anderson and Weaver. The Cubs found their World Series-winning manager when he was already past 60. The last three World Series-winning skippers have been 65, 73, and 68 years old, respectively. However, when a manager who has had success in the past begins running into more adversity with teams as he enters his mid-50s, we have to pay some extra attention to it--just as we would if an All-Star shortstop's production cratered just as they hit 30. It's possible that both parties recover, and that their difficult stretch proves to be just that, but it's harder to dismiss as inconsequential at 30 (for a player) or 53 (for a manager) than at 25 or 40, respectively. That makes this a very uncomfortable moment for the Cubs. While he had a tricky gauntlet to run and still managed (no pun intended) to pull out an NL Central title in 2023, that final season in Milwaukee was arguably his worst at the helm of the Brewers--not in terms of achievement, but in the way he handled the clubhouse and pulled levers within games. That was the season after he had failed to hold the team together in the wake of the Brewers trading Josh Hader in uly 2022. At the time, I was inclined to write off those issues as the result of an uncomfortable relationship between ownership, the front office, and the field staff, largely beyond his control. David Stearns left the Brewers to run the New York Mets at the end of last season, but before that, he'd stepped back into semi-resignation, after the team prevented him from making that very move to New York a year sooner. It was an awkward situation, especially in the shadow of the Hader trade, and the contentiousness that arose between the team and ace Corbin Burnes last spring exacerbated things--again, in a way not within Counsell's influence. Now, however, there's more to consider. As was true last year in Milwaukee, Counsell has been given a deeply imperfect roster and asked to turn it into a playoff team in Chicago--but this time, we can assume that he had as much influence over the construction of that roster as any manager in baseball. The ink on his record-setting contract is barely dry. He was vocal all winter about the way he expected things to work. He was in a position to succeed. Yet, two months in, Counsell is failing--outright, this time, instead of on some vague level rooted in very high expectations. The Cubs are below .500, and they've lost 14 of their last 19. Not since late 2015, after the Brewers had fallen far out of the race, has a Counsell-led team gone 5-14 over any stretch of 19 games. His trademark was the exceptionally strong finish, which he effected in 2018, 2019, and 2023 in breathtaking ways, but the secret ingredient to that success was an exceptional ability to avert long stretches of lousy play early. Counsell's teams would enter September within striking distance and then get hot, and the rest became history. Again, though, none of those teams ever lost 14 of 19. On Friday, Counsell used Patrick Wisdom (defensibly) as a pinch-hitter for Mike Tauchman, against a left-handed Reds reliever. At the end of the game, though, he then used Nick Madrigal as a pinch-hitter for Wisdom, with the tying run at first base and the winning one in the batter's box. He justified that choice after the game by noting that Wisdom faced a bad matchup in Reds closer Alexis Díaz. That's not untrue; it's just irrelevant. Madrigal also faced a bad matchup in Díaz, in that Díaz is an MLB-caliber right-handed pitcher. Wisdom could, by some happy accident, have run into a walkoff home run. The most likely outcome was a strikeout, but that would have been just fine. It would have brought Seiya Suzuki to the plate with Michael Busch still anchored at first as the tying run. If Suzuki had hit the same line drive into the corner that he hit when he actually came to the plate, Busch might very well have scored. Madrigal, of course, didn't score. He didn't come especially close to doing so, because he's a much worse and slower baserunner than Busch is. That Madrigal even got the privilege of being thrown out on that would-be huge hit, though, is a product mostly of good luck and bad Reds defense. Had they not flubbed a potential double play, Suzuki would have been up representing the tying run, with two outs, instead of as the winning one. Madrigal nearly grounded into a double play, which felt about as likely as a Wisdom strikeout, and his chances of coming up with a hit against Díaz were virtually nil. Putting Madrigal in for Wisdom there was a shockingly bad managerial decision--the kind we might have expected from David Ross, on occasion, but that Counsell was supposed to avoid assiduously. It's emblematic of a much bigger problem, too, which is that the manager doesn't seem to have figured out how to use this roster at all. He might still be an upgrade on Ross, but he might also be a skipper in decline. Worse, we can't even categorize this as "early" decline, exactly. Managers run into ruts around this stage of their careers, unless they're all-time greats and/or are equipped with excellent talent. The Cubs gambled on the idea that Counsell is an all-time great, with the deal to which they signed him, and they might yet turn out to be correct. They certainly didn't equip him with elite talent, though, and that might result in a setback they can't afford.

Nick Madrigal heads back to Iowa in exchange for Bote, with Adbert Alzolay hitting the 60-day injured list to accommodate the reinstatement of Bote to the 40-man roster. It's a move that signals, in no small measure, a defeat for the Cubs front office, because they fought hard to make one of Madrigal, Miles Mastrobuoni, Matt Mervis, Alexander Canario, or Garrett Cooper stick to that roster spot, instead. Nothing worked, and now they're going back to Bote, which they desperately did not want to do. Presumably, Bote will become the de facto backup third baseman and second baseman, taking Madrigal's place in that role and keeping Patrick Wisdom's just about the same as it was. He's not the defender Madrigal is, but Bote has a chance to have some kind of positive offensive impact, and he won't embarrass himself when asked to man the hot corner or the keystone. If Madrigal were a successful version of his own profile, he'd be a better bench player than Bote. Ditto for Mastrobuoni. After months of failures from each, though, the Cubs have finally buckled and turned to an old friend to rescue them from the unrealized potential of his two younger teammates. You can make a case for the way the Cubs have handled Bote since outrighting him off the 40-man roster in November 2022. Once they did that, bringing him back came with risks. Gone is the luxury-tax loophole that kept Red Sox outfielder Rusney Castillo stranded in Triple-A for years after he busted as a big-leaguer, but even without that incentive to keep Bote stashed, the team had to think about what would happen if and when they did recall him. Firstly, barring a 60-day injured list placement, bringing Bote back had to mean losing another player, or passing up the opportunity to acquire one. That's a hurdle to bringing up any player who isn't on the 40-man roster, but it's a smaller one for teams when the player in question is a top prospect (or any young player) whom they hope will be part of the team for another half-decade or more. It's a trickier thing when it's someone like Bote, on the wrong side of 30 and with little time left on his contract. Perhaps more importantly, the team also knows they could lose Bote altogether if they bring him back and then need to outright him again--hardly a difficult scenario to imagine, given the way his last couple of seasons in the big leagues panned out. One thing front offices desperately try to avoid is having a player who couldn't succeed for them thrive elsewhere, on their dime. Bote is guaranteed $5.5 million this year, and that was one reason why he didn't get a call last season, even as he hit fairly well and the team went through a similar churn of options to round out their infield mix. This season, since this is the last year of the deal and we're already in June, it's less of a concern. That helped him finally get the call. Furthermore, though, they clearly just did not believe in Bote, and after his last couple years of big-league performance, that's understandable. Yet, he did hit .259/.356/.476 since the start of 2023, with a very playable strikeout rate and a great walk rate. In addition to concerns about the gap in talent and opponent quality between Triple-A and the majors, we might note the specific issue of the technology-driven, minuscule Triple-A strike zone, which would tend to juice the numbers for a player like Bote--especially with regard to those walks. His swing was always a grooved one, too, which meant that a smaller zone made it easier for him to cover everything a pitcher could really throw at him. He didn't post elite batted-ball data, especially for a player of his age and previous experience. He still hits a good number of pop-ups and ground balls. He does hit it fairly hard, though, and at this point, the combination of his ability to do that and his defensive versatility made it impossible to justify continuing to try to make Madrigal work instead of him. Whether Bote can recapture the magic he had in 2018 remains to be seen, but it certainly seems unlikely. Happily, this time around, he's a purely complementary piece, and he's spent the last year-plus in Iowa, becoming a better leader and getting comfortable with his non-priority place in the organizational hierarchy. He's as well-positioned to succeed now as ever, even if success will be defined in a smaller way than in the past.

It's a hard thing to pin down and quantify, but anyone who has watched baseball for a long time can tell you: getting out of tough innings and minimizing damage is a real and invaluable skill for a pitcher. Bearing down and retiring a hitter with two on and two out is obviously important, but the way that moment changes a game goes beyond the run that goes up on the scoreboard if the batter gets a single. It cascades through the rest of the game, one way or another. Cubs fans know this well. Hall of Fame play-by-play man Pat Hughes is always quick to explicitly identify early turning points in games, and usually, those are two-out situations with runners on base. That might sound facile, and Hughes sometimes leans too far into the bit, but there's a real and more subtle reality to that phenomenon than we grok, sometimes. No Cubs hurler better embodies the concept than Jameson Taillon, and unfortunately, he's an example of the danger of not being good in those moments. Isolating high-leverage or men-on-base situations can muddy and confuse the issue, when we talk about how a pitcher manages either a game or an inning. Let's try a new method. Before I introduce it, though, walk through Taillon's Thursday start with me. Here's how it went, inning by inning: First Inning: Walk, double play, strikeout. 3 batters, 3 outs. Second Inning: Double, groundout, sacrifice fly, single, double, single, strikeout. 7 batters faced, 3 runs home. Third Inning: Flyout, popout, single, flyout. 4 batters, 3 outs. Fourth Inning: Strikeout, single, flyout, flyout. 4 batters, 3 outs. Fifth Inning: Groundout, lineout, groundout. 3 batters, 3 outs. Sixth Inning: Strikeout, groundout, flyout. 3 batters, 3 outs. Taillon came so, so close to a downright dominant outing. In fact, if you examine that chain of events in the second inning, you can see that he had a clean slate with one run in and two outs, before surrendering three straight hits and two more tallies. It was still a quality start, but... well, the scoreboard tells the story. It wasn't enough to win, and it so easily could have been. And the turning point, perhaps, wasn't one Hughes would have spotted. It was that first single after clearing the bases on the sac fly in the second. That's because, if Taillon can't hold you to a short inning in which he's in control all along, you can quickly unravel him a bit. I divided all completed innings by starting pitchers (in other words, ones in which the manager didn't remove them in favor of a reliever) since the start of 2023 into three categories: Quick Innings: 3 or 4 batters faced. If you only allow one baserunner, most of the time, you're not giving up a run. You can't, by definition, give up a crooked number. Maybe they got you for a solo homer, but it's 2024. Solo homers happen. An inning where you face only four batters is a successful one. Medium Innings: 5 or 6 batters faced. A lot can happen in those extra three batters, if you get to six within a frame, but you can still theoretically get through such an inning without allowing a run. Somewhat often, you're holding the opposing offense to one, and you were able to stop the bleeding there. You got the team back into the dugout, and you probably have a chance to pitch another inning, if it's not already the sixth or seventh. Long Innings: 7 or more batters faced. These are the killers. We all know them. We all feel a pitcher's pain when they happen. Often, a defensive lapse contributes to them. Maybe it's just bad BABIP luck. One way or another, the inning stretches out. It feels like you'll never escape. The only secret lies in not letting things get this far. No one's perfect, of course, but some guys only have a few innings like this all year. Others seem to have one every other start. Most innings are Quick Innings, of course--especially since we're removing innings in which the skipper yanks the starter. There are some five-, six-, and nine-batter innings we're throwing out, because we don't know when (or if) the hurler was ever going to earn his way back to the dugout the right way. We're also throwing out some of those times when a manager sends his starter out with a short leash and pulls them after one runner reaches base, but it doesn't even out, and anyway, we're selecting for the pitchers trusted enough to be given starts here. They wouldn't be big-league starters if a majority of their innings involved multiple runners reaching base. Some 118 pitchers have made 25 or more starts since the start of 2023. As you'd expect, there's a strong relationship between overall pitcher quality and the distribution of Quick, Medium, and Long innings. Tarik Skubal, Bobby Miller, Max Fried, Sandy Alcántara, and Gerrit Cole have the highest Quick Inning percentages in baseball, each coming in over 77 percent. Rich Hill, Tylor Megill, Ryne Nelson, Patrick Corbin, and Josiah Gray have the fewest Quick frames, all south of 63%. However, there's also variation from a perfect mapping of talent onto inning length distributions--enough to make things interesting. When looking this up, I hypothesized (as implied above) that Taillon would rank fairly highly in Quick and Long innings, and low in Medium ones. Sure enough, here are all the pitchers with at least a 71% Quick innings share, and at least a 6.5% Long innings share, with their breakdowns across all three categories: Pitcher Quick % Medium % Long % Reid Detmers 71.7 19.7 8.6 Jack Flaherty 71.3 21 7.7 Bryce Miller 76.1 16.4 7.5 Alex Cobb 72.1 20.4 7.5 Pablo López 72 20.7 7.3 Spencer Strider 75.7 17.5 6.9 Freddy Peralta 75.6 17.6 6.8 Jameson Taillon 74.2 19.2 6.6 As you can see, Taillon is barely sneaking into this club in terms of Long Inning%, but he's more than qualified based on Quick%. Of the aforementioned 118 guys, he ranks 27th in Quick innings, 27th in Long innings, and 109th in Medium ones. The above is a list of excellent pitchers--especially if we focus on the ones (Miller, Strider, Peralta) who are truly on Taillon's level in terms of being able to mow down opponents in clean innings. As Twins fans can tell you about López and Brewers fans will say about Peralta, though, it's also a list of frustrating pitchers. They tantalize. They clearly have the ability to be aces, but often, they fall short of that goal, and it's because of their inability to get out of tough innings expeditiously. Yes, luck and defense contribute to the ability to do those things, but so does the ability to avoid throwing the ball down the middle in spots when opposing hitters might be particularly disposed toward aggressiveness at the plate. So, too, does the mental toughness to shake off a bad break or a costly bobble. Taillon has to get better in those aspects, or he'll continue be a pedestrian mid-rotation starter, despite the capacity to be something better and more valuable to the playoff-hopeful Cubs.

It made sense to send Pete Crow-Armstrong back to Triple-A Iowa when Dansby Swanson came off the injured list a week and a half ago. It was a debatable choice, perhaps, but there was a logical, consistent argument to be made in favor of it. The Cubs clearly felt it was necessary, but after Crow-Armstrong went to Iowa and attacked minor-league pitchers like he was furious about something, they realized they had made the wrong call. On Thursday, they attempted to remediate the mistake. Surprisingly, perhaps, Crow-Armstrong returns to the big-league roster at the expense of Luis Vázquez, who got only extremely limited opportunities to demonstrate his ability to help the team during his cup of MLB coffee. Nick Madrigal survives yet again, like a cockroach ducking even a livid kitchen manager, though the stomping shoes and the snapped towels seem to come closer to their target every time. It's not at all surprising, however, that the swap is outfielder-for-infielder. We've just gotten some startling clarity on the plan for this roster over the coming weeks, and it's going to mean some major changes in roles throughout the team's positional corps. Cody Bellinger has started 35 times in center field this year. He's made just five starts as the DH, one in right field, and one at first base. Looking ahead, those ratios will change dramatically. This time around, Crow-Armstrong has to be the everyday center fielder against right-handed pitchers. Bellinger might start sometimes out there when the Cubs face left-handed starters, but he's just become a semi-fixture at DH. He can spell Michael Busch against some lefties, too, but he's not going to be needed in the outfield much at all. For the next month, at least, expect him to start about half the time at DH, a quarter of the time at first, and once in every 10 games or so in center. Busch will feel a slight squeeze on his playing time, then, unless and until he shows more consistency at the plate, but there's no reason for him to lose playing time against right-handed pitchers. Rather, he'll go to the bench against lefties, with Bellinger taking over his spot and Patrick Wisdom assuming DH duties. In all likelihood, we're seeing the simultaneous (though not necessarily permanent; much depends on how each hits and fields in the next few weeks) commitment to two young position players at individual spots, with Crow-Armstrong and Christopher Morel playing center and third base almost every day. Madrigal's role shrinks by the day, with Bellinger needing to DH almost all the time and Morel's bat being deemed indispensable for the time being. Wisdom's role is compressed, too, but there's still room for him against almost any lefty, be it at first base or DH. What's most interesting is the set of ramifications this move creates for the corner outfield positions. Mike Tauchman is leading off and playing right field Thursday. It's his 26th start at that position, but most of those came during Seiya Suzuki's stint on the injured list. He's made nine starts at DH, but with Crow-Armstrong coming back, Bellinger will make it harder to slot Tauchman in there. This is the 14th straight time that Tauchman has batted leadoff when the Cubs have faced right-handed starters, and before that, he'd batted second in 15 straight games against righties. The message is pretty clear: Craig Counsell (rightly, given the way things have gone so far) regards Tauchman as a vital part of the lineup. That means trouble, if you're Suzuki or Happ. It means that one of the two will sit in favor of Tauchman on a semi-regular basis, until they demonstrate that they deserve to play more than he does. It's a radical reality, given that Tauchman is a career journeyman over 30 years old and that both Happ and Suzuki have eight-figure salary commitments for the rest of this year and each of the next two, but it's the most logical reading of the team's latest sequence of decisions. That playing their three most talented young hitters--Morel, Busch, and Crow-Armstrong--enough to let them develop optimally means putting some measure of playing-time pinch on three guys (Bellinger, Happ, and Suzuki) on whom they're spending nearly $70 million this year is a minor indictment of the team's roster construction. Their appetite for the complex balancing of egos, skill sets, and matchup opportunities, however, is an affirmation of the fact that they have a better, more trustworthy manager on the top step this year. Counsell faces an unenviable task. Morel is far too inconsistent to be a cleanup hitter on a good team, but that's the role he's been pressed into, because the team lacks a superior alternative. Throttling the playing time of guys like Suzuki and Happ is difficult and frustrating, but it has to be done, because neither has performed like an adequate everyday corner outfielder whom the team needs to have in the heart of the batting order. Working around the offensive ineptitude and disappointingly average defense of Dansby Swanson and Nico Hoerner means making those other difficult decisions, and hoping one of the two comes out of their funk soon. If the Cubs didn't have unenviable tasks on their to-do list, they wouldn't have needed to hire the best and most expensive manager in baseball. He's about to earn his money, or not, in a crucial and fascinating stretch of the season.