Matthew Trueblood

For far too many pitchers on MLB staffs in recent months, "forearm strain" has become as much euphemism as real diagnosis. That terminology often comes about a week before "Tommy John surgery" in the discussion of an ailing hurler. The Chicago Cubs have been an exception, and hope to remain so. By no means is Wicks out of the woods yet. Importantly, he will get an MRI on his elbow soon, and that could reveal much more damage than he believes is there. We also have to thread a needle here, by saying two seemingly dissonant things at once: The team deserves plenty of credit, for the way they've managed the arms of Steele, Alzolay, Wicks, and others, keeping their young hurlers healthy and amassing good organizational pitching depth. Their pitching development infrastructure, medical training staff, and sports science department (under Dr. Mike Sonne, who made huge inroads in the area of pitcher injury prediction and prevention even with deeply imperfect data during his time as a public analyst) seem to be communicating and cooperating effectively. The team was also negligent and culpable in not anticipating continued injury trouble, especially as they bring in more hard-throwing pitchers and try to boost the velocity of the guys they already have, and thus doing more to bolster their pitching depth this winter. Wicks going on the injured list hurts more because the team let Jordan Montgomery sign a shockingly team-friendly deal with a rival for the NL Wild Card, for instance. Ultimately, Item No. 1 is more important than Item No. 2, right now. It doesn't mean that they're safe; they could still suffer some major and devastating injuries almost at any moment. Right now, however, they've done right both by themselves and by Wicks. "The Tommy John ligament matures at about age 26," Dr. James Andrews said recently, on the occasion of his retirement after decades as one of baseball's foremost arm surgeons. "In high school, the red line where the forces go beyond the tensile properties of the [ulnar collateral] ligament is about 80 miles per hour." Jordan Wicks has been throwing harder than that since high school, and although his arm is now strong enough to withstand more force than that, he's still only 24 years old. Sitting 93 and touching 95 or 96 is almost certainly more than his arm could handle, without having some kind of reaction. That reaction has come, and the Cubs are doing their best to make sure it doesn't go from a reaction to an outright failure. Rest is the key. A pitcher whose arm begins to balk at the force they're using to throw can, by giving all the relevant tissues some time to recover, avoid disaster and build up their strength, so that their arm can better handle the same force in the future. That's the goal here. It's not a guaranteed outcome, but the Cubs have some recent successes to give them confidence in this approach, and it's the right way to attempt to solve the problem in front of them. Now, they just have to hope their pitching depth can withstand this stern April test. View full article

At a moment of dire need for a team battling mounting injuries, the big righthander has looked good and pitched well through two starts. His limitations remain, but so do his strengths. Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports No longer a spring chicken, the 32-year-old Jameson Taillon returned to the Chicago Cubs a bit less dynamic a pitcher than the team hoped they signed in late 2022. It's only been two starts, but Taillon seems not to have the same velocity with which he pitched most of last year. It's possible the back injury that delayed the start of his season is still having lingering effects, but it's also possible that the big righty will just continue to throw slower than he has for most of his career. That's not the end of the world. Taillon has pitched admirably around it, allowing just three runs in 10 2/3 innings so far. It helped that his re-introductory outing was against the lowly Marlins, but still, he's looked good. For one thing, though he's given up a tick in terms of velocity, he's gained a bit of rising action on that four-seamer, allowing him to stretch the zone vertically and give hitters a tough time in a different way. That's been an important development, as Taillon has sought to better neutralize left-handed batters this year. Last season, lefties hammered him, especially by piling up big power numbers. This year, the only home run he's allowed through two starts was to a right-handed batter (and even it was a bit of a cheapie). Lefties have still squared him up fairly often, but he's doing a better job of slowing down their bats. As we discussed multiple times last year, Taillon's pitch mix is always evolving, and he tried to do a lot of new things last year. This season, he seems to have found more of a comfort zone, and it's the mix that makes the most sense, given his movement patterns and velocity. Against righties, he mixes his four-seamer, his sweeper, and his cutter almost exactly evenly, and rarely throws anything else. Against lefties, it's mostly four-seamer and curveball, with a half-ration of cutters and a few other pitches that are just for show. Finding command of the sweeper and the right usage niche for the cutter took a while for Taillon, but he seems to be getting there. His cutter isn't one of those that stays close to the same plane as his fastball. He tried to use it like such a pitch last year, aiming it high and inside on left-handed batters, but neither the movement of the pitch itself nor his command of it made that workable. This year, he seems to have a better understanding of the fact that the pitch operates like a hard slider for him, and he's using it to change lanes against lefties and to keep righties from feeling confident in a read of either fastball or sweeper. Let's talk a little bit about spin direction, and seam-shifted wake. Taillon has always been pretty good at imparting and manipulating spin, and he's utilized that ability well in 2024. Out of his hand, his four-seamer and cutter have fairly close spin direction. So do his curveball and sweeper. Crucially, too, those spin directions mirror each other reasonably well, making it hard for the hitter to spot spin differences right out of the hand. By changing the seam orientation in his grips, though, Taillon can also create movement that isn't implied by the spin the batter sees out of the hand. This is just a new name for an old principle; it's the way sinkers and spitters, for instance, have always worked. Seam-shifted wake lets his cutter peel away from his four-seamer by much more than the spin direction would tell us, and separates the curveball (more influence from gravity) from the sweeper (less of that, and thus, more movement away from a right-handed batter). These are things Taillon worked toward throughout 2023, and he seems to have a firmer handle on them in 2024. That doesn't mean he's going to continue cruising, but his arsenal is taking a clearer shape and his early results look good. Pitching well as velocity abandons you is a tall order. Taillon has made some sound adjustments, though, and seems set to deliver the kind of stability and volume the Cubs' rotation needed so badly while he was absent from it. View full article

The Chicago Cubs placed outfielder Cody Bellinger on the 10-day injured list Wednesday, after imaging revealed a fracture in his right ribcage. They're recalling top prospect Pete Crow-Armstrong, who will join the team in Chicago. Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports This is not the news any Cubs fan was hoping for. It didn't look like Cody Bellinger took the full force of his collision with the wall in left-center field Tuesday night, but he displayed visible discomfort for the rest of the evening and left the Cubs' 7-2 win early. After a CT scan Wednesday morning, the team confirmed a diagnosis of a fractured rib, according to manager Craig Counsell in his weekly segment on 670 The Score with Matt Spiegel and Danny Parkins. In Bellinger's stead, the team will get another look at top outfield prospect Pete Crow-Armstrong, but this is not the circumstance under which anyone wanted that to happen, and this probably isn't the right time for it, either. Crow-Armstrong is hitting just .203/.241/.392 at Triple-A Iowa this spring, striking out nearly 30 percent of the time and taking a swing-mode approach that shows none of the refinement the team hoped he would add to his offensive game over the past offseason. Defensively, of course, Crow-Armstrong remains a highly valuable potential asset, but it's unlikely that he's ready to hit at a competent level against the best pitchers in the world right now. Counsell said the team will continue to post the best possible lineup every day, and that Crow-Armstrong will be included when he's part of that. It's hard to imagine that he'll be in there often at all, given that premise, so this only further slows his seemingly stunted development. Losing Bellinger is a crisis much more urgent than the stalled progress of a prospect, though. With Seiya Suzuki already sidelined, the Cubs' lineup has gone from formidable to fangless in a hurry. They now need Christopher Morel to rapidly rediscover his lost form, and/or for Michael Busch and Dansby Swanson to step up and hit the way they were previously expecting Bellinger to. It's a lot to ask; probably too much. Crow-Armstrong was the easiest, most obvious substitute for Bellinger in the short term, but after yesterday's flurry of roster moves opened a 40-man spot, it wouldn't be a surprise if the team soon turns to David Peralta, instead. Peralta can opt out of his minor-league deal on May 1 if not called up sooner, and he's a more qualified hitter than Crow-Armstrong at this juncture. Carrying him would strain the team defensively, forcing Mike Tauchman to be the everyday center fielder and Alexander Canario to be ready to sub in defensively in either center or right almost every night, but it might be necessary, barring big and sudden strides from someone named above, or from Matt Mervis. There are ample opportunities for a hero to emerge, here. Miguel Amaya has flashed the ability to produce like a fifth or sixth hitter. He might need to start batting there. Ian Happ hasn't yet hit his stride this April; he might need to do so. Failing any of that, though, this could be the cinderblock that breaks the back of the camel that is the Cubs' offense. They're in the danger zone, unless and until they prove otherwise. Crow-Armstrong is a wild card, but not the good kind. This team just became very dependent on its pitching and defense, and not in a good way. View full article

Two pitchers landed on the 15-day injured list for the Chicago Cubs Tuesday, but rather than feeling like a further strain for a roster that has already sustained some major blows this spring, this feels like a chance for the team to establish some stability on the pitching staff. Image courtesy of © Matt Kartozian-USA TODAY Sports It's bittersweet to see Kyle Hendricks land on the injured list for the Cubs, and just bitter to see Drew Smyly accompany him there. Hendricks was overdue to be taken out of the rotation based on the way he's pitched so far in 2024, but probably does have some real physical issues with which to deal. His injury designation is "lower back", which could provide a partial explanation for his poor command. Smyly has a hip impingement, according to the team. With those two shelved, though, the team gets to bring back Hayden Wesneski, who impressed all observers with his showing in Arizona to close out their road trip last week. As our Brandon Glick documented today, there's real hope yet for Wesneski, albeit most likely in a relief role. Luke Little also gains a firmer foothold than he's yet enjoyed in his big-league tenure, going back to last season. That's a mixed blessing, because Little hasn't yet shown the consistency required of a high-leverage reliever, but he might now see more regular chances to prove himself in that kind of role. One way or another, the pitching staff gets to settle in a bit, after a tumultuous first 22 games. Jameson Taillon's delayed start was relatively easy to handle, but Justin Steele's Opening Day injury was a nasty shock to the system that is the staff, and Julian Merryweather's literal stress fractures created some severe metaphorical ones for a team already a bit shy on depth. Add to that the early struggles of would-be relief ace Adbert Alzolay and Hendricks's mortifying ineptitude, and the snowball just seemed to keep rolling up bigger. Steele is, perhaps, 10 days to two weeks from a return to the rotation. In the meantime, Taillon and Shota Imanaga have the leadership of the rotation, and the spots of both Jordan Wicks and Javier Assad are safe. The slot vacated by Hendricks could be filled, not by either Ben Brown or Wesneski, but by both, since the Cubs have 16 games to play before their next day off. A six-man rotation was almost certainly part of the plan for this stretch when the team looked ahead at it from the safety and calm of spring training, and although it will now be tougher to use one, that's still the best bet. Steele should return near the end of that window, and before he does, both Wesneski and Brown figure to get starts, with someone else (perhaps Julio Teherán) called up along the way, to stretch things out and give Imanaga (among others) the rest needed to get him to the end of the season in one piece. Meanwhile, the bullpen will see a bit more stability, because there are fewer options with which to play. Alzolay, Héctor Neris, and Mark Leiter Jr. figure to remain the high-leverage options, with Little and Yency Almonte in roving roles in front of them. The rest will depend on how Craig Counsell deploys Brown, Wesneski, and whomever else the team turns to. It sounds highly fluid, and it is, but after the tempest of a fortnight the staff has just undergone, it will feel placid by comparison. View full article

Where the Chicago Cubs are going, Garrett Cooper cannot follow. The former All-Star was designated for assignment Tuesday afternoon, as the team shakes up its roster. Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-USA TODAY Sports This was not akin to the abortive Luis Torrens stint last April, or to the Cubs' doomed effort to resurrect the hype around Clint Frazier in 2022. Garrett Cooper didn't blow any doors off, but in 41 plate appearances distributed raggedly across the first 22 games of the season, he batted a respectable .270/.341/.432. There were even a few big hits mixed in there. With his strikeout rate obdurately high and nothing new or exciting happening with his batted-ball data, though, the Cubs elected to move on. Even after Seiya Suzuki went down with an oblique strain during the team's West Coast swing, Cooper and the returning Patrick Wisdom made an awkward pair on the team's bench. Of Cooper, Wisdom, and Alexander Canario, the only credible outfielder in the bunch is the rookie Canario, so the Cubs had to make a decision between Cooper and Wisdom when they elected to call up Matt Mervis for a portion of their schedule chock-full of right-handed pitching. Calling up Mervis at all was a proactive decision, of course, but it's an understandable one. The offense needs another infusion of competence from the left side. Cutting Cooper instead of Wisdom is, if nothing else, a good reminder that Wisdom is a valued and valuable clubhouse presence. It's also an acknowledgment that, even if he's best confined to the infield corners and to DH as much as possible, he offers more versatility and defensive value than does Cooper. Unlike most in-season DFA fodder, Cooper could have a bit of a trade market. Look for the Cubs to shop him around a bit in the coming couple of days, before waiving and/or releasing him. We'll have more right here in this post as we learn more about the team's roster moves today. (UPDATE: Since there was an extra move involved and the newsworthiness added up, we instead break down the pitching side of today's roster maneuvering here. Check it out.) View full article

If I could distill the genius of Craig Counsell's managerial style into a single insight, it would be this: Though the season is long, each win--and only each win--shortens it a bit. Counsell's Chicago Cubs still have a long season left. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports Just as a prison bid only lasts two days, a baseball season only lasts 90. The problem is, you have to earn the right to cross off each of those 90 days. Every win draws a contending team more than 1% closer to its goal, but every loss is a day lost, without progress. A hot start is a wonderful blessing; it makes the rest of the season feel easy and slow. A poor first half, like the 2023 Cubs had, makes the final two months feel like finals week for an overwhelmed freshman, and it fries pretty much everyone. The 2024 edition of the Cubs has a lot of season left before them. They're only 13 games into their 90-game journey, and that's a bit frustrating, because it's easy to point to days where they missed promising chances to make progress. Counsell, a master of chasing each win with a keen understanding of its value without losing sight of the fact that 90 of them are needed, has had a secondary remit during this first stage of the campaign, and he's doing it brilliantly. The manager, who is the leader of the season expedition and is tasked with setting its pace, direction, and strategies, has gained the most valuable resource he has in that job: information. While not all the news is good, the Cubs have a lot of new insight into their team--especially their pitching staff. Entering the season, there was unavoidable and considerable uncertainty about the best ways to use a large number of arms in the organization. Counsell and company have resolved some of that uncertainty already, sometimes by being willing to learn the truth about a guy the hard way. Let's quickly break down what they know. Traditional Starters: Justin Steele, Shota Imanaga, and Jameson Taillon Though Steele got hurt early and Taillon is just now returning from being hurt, the coaching staff and front office knew they would need to rely on each to give them 150-plus innings, before the team even arrived for spring training. It was impossible to be sure what Imanaga would be capable of, though, before seeing how he responded to the different ball in MLB, the elements at Wrigley Field in April, and the thump in American lineups. He's passed that test with flying colors. These three can and must be used as full-fledged starters, with the goal of pitching six innings or more every time they take the mound. Twice Through the Order: Jordan Wicks, Javier Assad, Ben Brown As I wrote two weeks ago, it caused Counsell obvious consternation to try to stretch Assad past 15 outs in the team's loss to open their series in San Diego. He was trying not to lose a day, but he also wanted to know whether he could steal an out or two in such situations by keeping Assad in games even when the expected performance was less than optimal. Counsell seemed a bit more ok with trying to get an extra out from Assad Saturday against Miami, and had it not been for another Adbert Alzolay blowup, he'd have gotten away with that one. What he's learned now, though, is that even if Alzolay appears to be cruising, he can't be trusted to try the opposing lineup a third time. The same is true of Wicks, so far. His evolving pitch mix gives him upside, but there are growing pains happening right now. It's clear that those two are going to need to be removed after 18 batters (if not sooner) in all but blowout situations, for as long as either has a spot in the rotation. That's fine. Counsell can work with that. He just needed to give them each an audition or two to be sure of their capacity. Brown is a wholly different story. Although the team has twice turned to him for full-length starts and sought to get innings from him (within the limits of his preparation during spring), they never envisioned having him pitching as a traditional starter for a sustained period in 2024. That he's shown the ability to turn over the lineup card and keep rolling is a delightful surprise, and a sustainable one. He's suddenly an arm you could picture giving the team 110 or so innings, and the gaps into which he can be plugged on this staff make that kind of bulk especially tantalizing. Versatile Bullpen Arms and Once-Through Piggybacks: Kyle Hendricks, Drew Smyly, Hayden Wesneski The limitations of Assad and Wicks (and the reality that the team will sometimes want to protect Steele, Taillon, and Imanaga by lifting them an inning earlier than absolutely necessary) mean that the Cubs will need relievers capable of multi-inning appearances and half-starts, wherein they face as many as nine batters in a game. Entering the season, we knew they had one such pitcher, in Smyly. Unfortunately, it's now clear that that's all Hendricks can be, although he'll probably be asked to do it on a scheduled basis from the front ends of games, for however long he remains on the active roster. On the other hand, Wesneski has stepped forward and announced himself as more than playable in this type of role. His competition for the rotation in spring training always seemed doomed, and it was still an open question whether he would be a usable reliever against both left- and right-handed batters, in more than single-inning bursts. That's now a bit less in doubt, though as the third guy in line for those kinds of innings, he might be up and down a few more times this year. High-Leverage Single-Inning Arms: Héctor Neris, Adbert Alzolay, Mark Leiter Jr., Yency Almonte Yes, Alzolay still counts as a trusted high-leverage guy, although his role will have to be modified to reflect the reality of his home-run problem until he proves he's fixed it. Neris and Leiter look more likely to close games in the near future, though, and while the former has made a lot of fans nervous, he's the type of pitcher (long track record, varied repertoire, rubber arm) who only inspires confidence in a manager. Counsell has learned the texture of a Neris inning, and now knows how best to deploy him. Leiter comes with a bit thinner a manual than Neris, but he and Counsell already seem to have developed trust. Ditto for Almonte, who needs to be used in a more limited way (on multiple fronts) than does Leiter but will dominate in the right matchups and situations. Counsell probably has quite a bit more confidence in this group than the fan base does, even if (as the responsible party when any of them fail) he will always look dyspeptic when talking about it and be quicker on the trigger to make changes than he would be with others. Extras, to Be Used as Needed: Keegan Thompson, Luke Little, Daniel Palencia, José Cuas, Colten Brewer, Julio Teherán Counsell already knows Teherán, after having him in his rotation with Milwaukee in 2023. The rest of these have been thrust upon him, and they're neither consistent nor excellent, but he's figured out where each one's strengths and weaknesses lie. Thompson, Little, and Palencia have upward mobility from this group, given the stuff the latter two have shown and the way the former has pitched since being called up from Iowa. For now, though, Counsell has found niches for each where they can help him, but can't hurt him. Similar things are happening on the positional side. Counsell has started to lean toward Miguel Amaya at catcher, and he's gotten a long look at Christopher Morel at third base. Injuries to Seiya Suzuki and Ian Happ have helped him clarify his own thinking about the best hitters on the team. There's still much intel left to gather on both sides of the roster list, but Counsell already knows more about the team he's running than he did three and a half weeks ago. Learning it all might have cost the team a game, but most of the missed opportunities to shorten the season have been the players' fault. Counsell has made a couple of necessary sacrifices, but he's also trying to stay ahead of the calendar, and so far, the team is doing that well. Given all the self-knowledge they've gained in the process, still having 77 days left in this season--rather than 74 or 75--is an acceptable outcome. View full article

We talk too much about relievers' talent and skill sets, which we have a hard time pinning down, anyway. We talk too little, by contrast, about relievers' usage, and the fact that their rest (or lack thereof) drives much of the performance we see. Image courtesy of © Joe Nicholson-USA TODAY Sports Although they had a winning road trip, the Cubs had their hearts broken twice in nine games. Adbert Alzolay was called upon to hold thin, late leads on Apr. 9 in San Diego, and again this Monday in Arizona, and each time, he gave up a game-changing home run. Alzolay is off to a very uneven start in 2024, and many fans are already wondering whether he can truly be trusted as the team's closer. Those concerns aren't unfounded, but they're not framed quite right. There's no lack of fortitude, intensity, or talent with Alzolay. He doesn't throw as hard as most of the game's elite closers, but his fastball sits 95 and noses above 97 frequently, and his slider and cutter can be devastating when he's right. He had a 21.4 K%-BB% last year, which is plenty impressive, especially for a guy who has two fastball looks and can (generally) avoid giving up the long ball. It's only a cruel taunt to say he 'should' be able to avoid that, though, because Alzolay has had much worse trouble with homers than you want from a closer. In addition to the telling blows each of the last two Mondays, he gave up the team's one-run lead by letting Travis Jankowski take him deep on Opening Day. Last year, he only gave up five homers all season, but three of them came after the All-Star break--a stretch during which, thanks to a forearm strain that sidelined him for much of September, he only made 25 appearances. In there, too, was the would-be home run robbed by Mike Tauchman in St. Louis in late July. Crucially, at his best, Alzolay really can stop opponents from hitting the ball over the fence, and he's a strike-throwing machine with sufficient bat-missing ability to be a dominant reliever. The question is how often he can be at his best, and to answer that question, we have to go a bit further than simple splits. Look up a player's splits on Baseball-Reference, and you can find out how he's pitched on various numbers of days of rest. That's about as far as easily queried public data takes us, though, and it's not nearly far enough. It doesn't just matter whether a pitcher worked the previous day, or two days ago, or three. It matters, at the very least, whether he's appeared on two of the last three days. It probably matters whether he's appeared on three of the last five, or four of the last seven. It also matters how many pitches a hurler threw in those games. Counting the days between throws off a game mound is grossly insufficient to tell us whether a reliever is fresh and operating at full capacity on a given day. I took one small step toward changing that. For each of Alzolay's 67 appearances since the start of 2023, I calculated a Comprehensive Rest Adjustment. I kept this very simple; I'm quite sure we'll work our way to something more robust in time. For now, though, the formula goes: (Pitches thrown over previous three days) * (Number of appearances over previous three days). Then, I added 15 to the score if Alzolay had pitched the previous day, and was therefore working back-to-back. This leads to plenty of outings where the CRA is zero; I think that's fine. If a pitcher hasn't worked in the previous three days (assuming it was anything short of a traditional start), he should be ready and fully rested for that day's game. Pitching in multiple contests in a three-day span is taxing, by contrast, and that should be reflected in any effort to capture the effects of reliever workload on reliever performance. We know, too, that working on back-to-back days is especially impactful. Once I had a CRA for each game, I divided them into three categories: Level I: Any appearance with a CRA of 15 or lower Level II: Any appearance with a CRA between 16 and 30 Level III: Any appearance with a CRA of 31 or higher The idea here was just to make sure that any game pitched on a second consecutive day would be distinct from one with multiple days of rest, but that it wouldn't automatically vault to Level III unless the previous day's appearance was a long one, or Alzolay had also pitched another contest within the three-day window. Unintentionally, though, this also distributed his outings about the way I'd have wanted them to be, if I'd been trying to create an artificially smooth breakdown. He had exactly 26 Level I and 26 Level II appearances, and 15 Level III ones. I didn't even check his ERAs or WHIPs for those games. Those numbers are too noisy for my liking, in samples of this size, and it's not results I wanted to know about, really. Instead, I pulled Alzolay's average fastball velocity (sinkers and four-seamers), his slider usage, the percentage of his pitches thrown inside the strike zone, opposing batters' chase rate, and their whiff rate on swings. In a nod toward results, though, I did also pull his strikeout and walk numbers. Here's what I found. Category FB Vel. Slider % Zone % Chase % Whiff % K % BB % Level I 95.4 45.7 50.9 31.8 29.5 25.7 7.1 Level II 95 41.8 49.7 32.5 26.3 28 4.2 Level III 95.6 55.9 56.6 29.4 26.9 23.5 3.9 I had various and (in some cases) contradictory hypotheses for this exploration, so the results didn't shock me, but there are surprises here. Some relievers get very wild when they've recently been overworked, but Alzolay actually throws more strikes. That might not shock you, and I bet the drastically higher slider usage doesn't, either. It was the slider on which Alzolay got burned against Ketel Marte Monday, and the slider on which Nick Martini took him deep in a crushing blown save last Sept. 1. Both of those games were Level III appearances. That problem isn't exclusive to Level III days, of course. It was a two-strike slider with too much of the plate on which Jankowski erased a Cubs lead on Opening Day, and obviously, that was a Level I game. When Fernando Tatis Jr. pummeled a slider to give the Padres the lead last week, it was in a Level II appearance, although one just shy of the barrier between that and Level III. Still, Level III comes with some special dangers, as we would guess. They just aren't the particular dangers we might guess. Alzolay doesn't lose any juice on the fastball when working on Level III days. On the contrary, he throws even harder. Perhaps trying to protect his tired arm in a different way, though, he gets so slider-heavy that hitters start looking for it and don't chase or whiff as often as they otherwise would. Anecdotally, it has also often seemed like he was trying too hard to economize on Level III days, refusing to stretch or nibble at the zone out of fear of a long outing. More sliders in the zone necessarily means a greater risk of home runs and other hard contact, and naturally, it also means fewer strikeouts. That version of Alzolay is still an effective pitcher. He's just a different one than when he's more rested. The Cubs could still stand to find a closer who misses a few more bats or is a bit less susceptible to the long ball, but Alzolay is a superb relief pitcher. What the team needs, really, is more protection for him--protection from heavy usage, and from situations in which his tendencies on days when he's recently been heavily used are most damaging. That's why Julian Merryweather was such a painful loss for the bullpen. This analysis doesn't capture the rising injury risk from one level to the next. It doesn't capture a lot of nuances of usage that teams build into their decisions about when to have a pitcher down and when to limit them to a shorter outing. It's just meant to illuminate Alzolay's problems a bit, by reminding us all that the difference between one reliever and another can often be smaller than that between one individual at full freshness and the same guy running on fumes. Alzolay and his catchers might need to adjust their approach on Level III days. That's a tough thing to do, though, because again, some of it might be about shielding himself from injury, and you don't want him careening from undue carefulness to recklessness. Nor is it easy to remember and execute a change in plans when tired, and a high-leverage reliever working for a third day in four or on the second of two consecutive days is mentally tired, as well as physically so. The most important takeaway here might be that Alzolay is clearly at his best in Level II outings. He gets fewer whiffs in those than in Level I appearances, but still racks up more strikeouts. He pounds the zone, but not to such an extent as to expose himself to too much risk of hard contact. I haven't yet run the numbers for others, but I suspect most relievers are best when their CRA is in a Level II range. Teams really might want to consider a relief rotation. In the meantime, the Cubs should avoid letting Alzolay get rusty, even (or especially) if it sometimes means letting others collect saves in games when Alzolay would otherwise be at Level III. He's not someone who wears down badly in such contests, but his margin for error thins out on him. View full article

Nothing ends pretty. As long as it stays pretty, it doesn't end. As long as it doesn't end, it stays at least partly pretty. Everything is all the way ugly for Kyle Hendricks right now. If this isn't the very end, it's pretty close, and Hendricks has to be shelved for a while. Image courtesy of © Matt Kartozian-USA TODAY Sports I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, or anything the Chicago Cubs front office or Craig Counsell or Tommy Hottovy or Kyle Hendricks himself doesn't already know. I'm also not suggesting anything radical. It's just this side of a fact. Sometime very soon (perhaps Thursday, when Jameson Taillon is activated and room needs to be made both on the active roster and in the starting rotation; perhaps sooner, like in time for Wednesday's game, since Hendricks is one culprit in the ruthless overworking of the team's bullpen that has taken place early this year), Hendricks is headed to the injured list. All the smart money says it won't even be a phantom IL stint--not really. Knowing Hendricks, who has done this before; who is a consummate teammate; who knew his team needed innings and stability here in the early going, he's probably been pitching through a legitimate injury, anyway. Four starts into his 11th season with the Cubs, though, it's safe to say that if that be the case, gutting it out isn't turning out to be helpful. If he's fully healthy, of course, that's even worse, but he's pitched long enough that someone will be able to find something to justify a sitdown for him. Either way, it has to happen. The string is out. Hendricks has been obliterated to start this season, and the only things he's doing differently or worse this year are minuscule or subtle--but that, like his hypothetically being fully healthy right now, is even worse than the alternative. There's no quick fix here. He's not pulling out of this, at least in the short term. I don't offer this diagnosis lightly. Hendricks has earned the respect of baseball fans everywhere, and deserves the love and loyalty of Cubs fans everywhere. There are some fans who have waited five years for Hendricks's low-velocity, low-strikeout approach to stop working, and who will snidely conclude that they were finally right, or that he merely ran out of smoke and mirrors. We're not here to do that. Let's run through a few of the many places I checked for something Hendricks could do differently, to make clear what's wrong (in case he's eventually able to correct it). Firstly, Hendricks has been especially nightmarish with runners on base this year. You remember Barry Bonds, from 2001-04? In none of those seasons was Bonds as good as hitters have been against Hendricks with anyone on base in 2024. He's been very bad with the bases empty, too, but it's gone to another level when anyone reaches. It wasn't like this in 2023. Split wOBA G BF P Swing% Whiff% InZone% Chase% CompLoc% Empty, 2023 0.295 29 385 1427 45.80% 20.20% 48.90% 32.40% 86.90% Men On, 2023 0.31 29 278 1019 48.30% 23.20% 43.70% 34.10% 86.30% Empty, 2024 0.423 4 47 164 52.40% 16.30% 49.40% 34.90% 87.20% Men On, 2024 0.571 4 41 152 42.10% 12.50% 40.80% 24.40% 87.50% Note that hitters aren't chasing at anywhere near the same rate when Hendricks isn't in the zone with runners on this year. That's not normal. Normalcy looks like that 2023 disparity: hitters get a little more aggressive, and a little more susceptible to manipulation, when there are ducks on the pond. Of course, look, too, at the in-zone rates for the two seasons. It's normal to nibble more and throw fewer strikes with men on base. It's not normal to see as steep a decline as Hendricks has this year. The rightmost column there is telling us something, too. "Competitive pitches" are all those within 18 inches of the center of the strike zone, be they inside or outside the zone. Hendricks hasn't been more erratic, in terms of wide misses. Rather, he's been just missing the edges, and hitters aren't biting at the bait. The reason why the share of competitive pitches hasn't really fallen, though, is just that Hendricks doesn't have stuff intense enough to generate very many non-competitive ones. The magnitude of his movement is too small. That's also why hitters aren't expanding their zones for him. Hendricks knows that. He's not trying to pitch outside the zone more. He's aiming for those edges; he just isn't hitting them. I'll propose one reason for that. I think Hendricks, who calls his own pitches using the hip-mounted version of PitchCom, has struggled to get a call in to his catchers, comfortably set himself on the rubber, and attend to the baserunner(s), then deliver the ball with any rhythm. That's not a complaint about the clock, which has been tightened from 20 seconds to 18 when runners are on this year. In fact, I was in favor of that constriction. It's also not an indictment of Hendricks for wanting to call his own game; he thrived doing things that way last year. It's a purely anecdotal bit of speculative observation. He looks a little rushed, this season, between getting the ball back, dialing in his selection, and getting it off in time. Let's dispense with speculative observation and examine some hard data, though. Here are Hendricks's pitch locations on sinkers to left-handed batters, last year and this year. Here is an indisputable failure of execution, where he was previously lethal in his accuracy. Sinkers don't work very well to opposite-handed batters. Sinkers that sit 88 and scrape 90 only when the sun shines on Tuesday afternoons in July almost never work to them at all. Hendricks, though, possessed deadeye precision with the pitch for years. Up and in, low and away, and he could reliably induce either jam-shots or end-of-the-bat squibbers. He's not that precise this year, and he's paid a heavy price--not only in not getting outs with the pitch, but in not even being able to use it as often, forcing him to turn to his four-seamer more and show lefties the changeup earlier in counts and games. He's not commanding the sinker as well to righties, either, though because he uses that pitch differently against them, it looks very different. Over the winter, I wrote about how Hendricks succeeded last year by almost never working inside. Away, away, away was his motto in 2023. This is the one place where I see a strategic misstep at play, because obviously, he's gone back to trying to get inside on righties with the sinker, but I also think a fair number of those inner-third sinkers were meant to be outer-third ones. That's how far from on-target he is, with a pitch that drives the rest of his arsenal. If you were hoping it would even be this neat with everything, though, I can't help you. Hendricks is locating his cut-change to righties just about as well as he did last year. He's not quite as fine on the outer third with four-seamers to lefties, but the difference doesn't come anywhere close to explaining the gap in results. I can squint my way through these and other, similar charts, slicing and dicing in several ways, and tell you that I see a pattern of missing to his arm side, with everything in his arsenal, and that it's slightly exaggerated with runners on, and that that is consistent with him rushing himself against the shortened clock, but the spin profile, movement, velocity, and release points of all of his pitches are virtually identical to last year. He's less fine, but not materially different in a way he'll be able to fix in a single side session. He might have an injury that is making it harder to manipulate the ball or perfectly time his release, or he might not, but there's no easy tweak to make. Hendricks got pretty lucky last year. He was genuinely good, much of the time, and it was delightful to watch him work with such fine control, but he still needed a lot of luck, because he doesn't miss enough bats to provide himself with a healthy margin for error and he's too vulnerable to the home run. His luck has run out this year, and his control has faltered, and his stuff is exactly the same as it was. A certain kind of statistically-inclined fan could look at Hendricks's data and take an optimistic tack. If not much has physically changed, maybe this is all a mirage, give or take. He's faced three lineups (Rangers, Dodgers, Padres) who have thunderous power, and one (Diamondbacks) who hardly ever swing and miss. All four were rough matchups for him. I want to muster that much hope. I just can't. Sometimes, when there's no explanation for something, its unbearably heavy reality just sits on your chest and crushes you, anyway. It's ugly, but it's also inescapable. Barring news that he's dealing with an injury that has limited him this year, I'm most inclined to think that Hendricks is simply cooked. It's a sad state to reach, especially so soon. It's enough to make one wish, a little bit, that Marcus Stroman hadn't opted out last winter, so that fans could remember Hendricks by a much better final season in a Cubs uniform. As it is, this isn't going to end pretty, unless Hottovy has a truly extreme makeover in store for Hendricks during his coming stint on the IL. From a team perspective, the news is much better. Hendricks has been blasted out of the rotation by opponents, but he's also being crowded out of it by talented hurlers. Steele, Shota Imanaga, Taillon, Ben Brown, and Javier Assad could yet turn out to be a strong rotation. Swap Brown out for Cade Horton, and perhaps it gets even better. The organization's pitching pipeline is more robust than it has been in years. This team might well be fine without Hendricks. In the short term, it will certainly be better off without him. On balance, though, that's a sad sentence. Cubs fans have to hope it's a poignant part of a story with a happier denouement. View full article

As the Chicago Cubs get ready to welcome one veteran starter back from the injured list, they face some interesting questions about their rotation. Hopefully, we're not far at all from seeing another key hurler, and even more difficult dilemmas. Image courtesy of © Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports Justin Steele went down with a hamstring strain on Opening Day, Mar. 28. Last week, on the debut episode of his new podcast (strictly speaking, I don't recommend listening to that show--it's not good--but there are some nuggets within), Steele talked about the quick thinking he did while making the play that resulted in the strain, and about his confidence that the injury isn't as bad as the similar one he suffered a few years ago. That's good news. Obviously, though, he's still dealing with the problem. He's kept his arm moving throughout this down time, but that won't matter until the injury itself is healed. Let's turn to Baseball Prospectus's Return to Play Dashboard to estimate how long it will be before that's the case. I searched for all instances of a pitcher (as opposed to a position player, who would face a different set of hurdles in rehabbing and taking such an injury back into game action) suffering an upper leg injury in either March or April, going back to 2021. Here's the snapshot of the data. There's good news here. The median number of days missed by pitchers who suffer this type of injury at this time of year is 22, a milestone Steele will reach Friday. The average time is probably more telling, though, because of the caution the team is likely to exercise with an early-season injury and the variables involved here. Steele will need a rehab outing, if only because his ramp-up to a full starter-level workload had been disrupted even in his final preparatory outing in March when he was struck in the knee by that comebacker. By all accounts, though, he's been able to do some work to stay ready while waiting for the injury to settle, and it's on the more mild end of what it might have been. It would be great if the Cubs could bring Steele back for the getaway day matinee against the Astros at Wrigley Field on Apr. 25, so he could pitch in front of the home crowd. It's probably more realistic, though, that he will return during their road trip to Boston and New York at the very end of the month, or at the start of May. That Houston series begins a stretch of 15 games without a scheduled off day for the Cubs, so bringing Steele back in the middle of that would be huge. Surely, the team is trying to manage the innings of (at least) Jordan Wicks and Ben Brown, and they'll be looking for times when they can give Shota Imanaga an extra day, as well, while he acclimates to the United States's customary starter schedule. Steele's return would make all of that easier, though it would also force the team into some tough choices about whom to demote, and in what way. Setbacks are always possible, but based on the type of injury he sustained and the scraps of news we've heard from him and the team about it, we should expect Steele back in roughly a fortnight. Until then, the team needs to stay afloat, but they've done so admirably to this point. View full article

In an exciting comeback win Monday night, the Chicago Cubs did just about everything right. They still required some good luck along the way, but at the end of the game, they sewed up the victory with savvy work by a veteran catcher and a pitcher on the brink. Image courtesy of © Michael Chow/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORK As we discussed over the weekend, Keegan Thompson didn't go down to Iowa this spring and magically ameliorate all the problems that plagued him in 2023. On the contrary, his performance data suggests that he's further from regaining high-end big-league stuff than ever. His first two appearances since being called up have been mightily encouraging, though, and whereas the first was easy to dismiss (low leverage, low stress, bad opposing offense), Monday night's win was much more difficult a test. The Diamondbacks are a tough team to get out, especially when there's a runner in scoring position whom you can't afford to allow to score. They don't swing and miss much, and have enough patience to force you into the strike zone. When Thompson entered the game in the bottom of the 10th Monday, that was the task he faced: keep a would-be comeback alive, with zero margin for error. Fortunately for him, there is a secret antidote to teams with good contact skills and patience, in extra innings: half of that skill set evaporates. Maybe it's the bizarreness of the artificial baserunner who starts each inning on base. Maybe it's just anxiety and an undue rush to finish off an opponent. One way or another, though, when the game goes past its usual stopping point, everyone's strike zone gets bigger. Though listed as "10," the rightmost entry above actually represents all extra frames. Hitters get antsy and chase bad pitches at a significantly higher rate under the pressure of an extra-inning game. As Bleacher Nation noted on Twitter Tuesday morning, Thompson and Yan Gomes seized upon that vulnerability and induced some bad swings from the Diamondbacks, helping the team hold onto the one-run lead they scratched out in the top of the 11th. I'm not sure that, had the situation demanded hammering away within the zone, Thompson could have done so successfully. He was, delightfully and somewhat stunningly, back up to 94 miles per hour last night, after sitting 90-91 in his appearances in Iowa. Maybe his stuff has been unlocked again, through some mechanical tweak or some major mental breakthrough. For now, though, it's healthy to maintain some skepticism of Thompson. The genius in his appearance Monday night, especially in his second inning of work, was in not trying to dominate within the zone. The credit for that call can be divided evenly between Thompson and Gomes, perhaps, but the credit for executing it so well goes mostly to Thompson. This is a road map to success for other middle relievers thrust into dangerous extra-inning situations: take advantage of a global hyper-aggressiveness that sets in when the Manfred Man takes his lead off second. Looking forward, too, we'll want to watch Thompson's velocity closely. Throwing in the mid-90s is essential to his effectiveness. When he dipped down to barely bumping 92 late last season and opened his Triple-A campaign the same way in 2024, there was cause for major concern. Perhaps he was sandbagging a little, rather than risk injury in the minor leagues. Perhaps he and Tommy Hottovy found something in a side session upon his return to the team last week. Either way, if he starts throwing 94 on a regular basis again, Thompson has a chance to resurrect his career. If he can take advantage of hitters' aggressiveness as well as he did Monday night, that goes double. The pitching-thin Cubs could benefit hugely from a Thompson revival. View full article

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