Matthew Trueblood

On Wednesday afternoon, New York Mets owner Steve Cohen indicated that his team would become sellers ahead of next month's trade deadline, if they didn't start winning games. They lost in maddening fashion Wednesday night. Sharks are circling the $400-million beast that is the 2023 Mets roster. Could the Chicago Cubs be one of them, with an eye on New York's star first baseman? In a 1-to-1 deal, barely more than a quarter of respondents are down with giving up the organization's top prospect, even for a sure-thing slugger with a year and a half of team control remaining. That's probably about right, really. Crow-Armstrong has significant upside, and the Cubs have control of his services until at least 2030, without commitment or a major financial outlay in the short term. Most importantly, perhaps, it doesn't feel as though Alonso would put the current team over the top, although it might make them favorites in the anemic NL Central. Another 14 percent of voters, though, would consider a deal in which some other pieces changed hands, and the Cubs and Mets have a lot of ways to balance the scales in such a deal. Coming off back-to-back implosions by Jameson Taillon and Drew Smyly, the Cubs might feel that they need help in their starting rotation, and the Mets have some guys in whom the team could be interested. New York also has veteran relievers who could give a boost to the bullpen. Even with a sweetener, it would be difficult to part with a player who some project to play elite defense in center field and produce at an above-average clip at the plate for one at the bottom of the defensive spectrum, despite the unimpeachable track record of the latter. To do it, one would need to believe highly in Alonso. As I've probably implied heavily enough already, I meet that criterion. Having Alonso for two potential pennant races has value, but landing him this summer would also set the stage for a potential contract extension with him. Alonso's body might not look like one that will age well, but his skill set says he'll keep slugging into his 30s. One should never, ever pay more in a trade based on the ability to extend a player's contract, though, unless the whole deal is contingent on that extension. That wouldn't be the case here, so we need to focus on the term of team control Alonso has at the moment, not on how much longer he could theoretically be a Cub if they traded for him. The benefits to the big-league team from the acquisition of Alonso would be huge, but would they be enough? And do they outstrip the alternatives by enough to justify such a high cost? Let's answer the second of those questions first. Even if Paul Goldschmidt becomes available next month, the Cardinals and Cubs are not getting together on a deal like that. C.J. Cron is the poor man's Alonso, the one the Cubs could land at a much lower price. He's on a very cheap deal that expires at the end of this season, and although he's been limited by injuries and looked a bit depleted this year, he had good seasons in 2021 and 2022. That's the bargain deal available as a short-term patch. Otherwise, the Cubs would have to ride out 2023 with Jared Young, Trey Mancini, and Matt Mervis at first base, and hope to see enough from either Young or Mervis to give them faith in them for 2024. It's possible the Cubs could win the division without getting better at first base. Those three incumbents have the talent to produce more than they have to this point. Christopher Morel and Patrick Wisdom could spend a little time there down the stretch, and each of them has power to contribute to the lineup. The team's viability this year depends more on getting Taillon and Smyly back on track, and on the production of their long-term core hitters, than on any addition they might make. Still, Alonso would be a huge improvement, and he'd materially increase their chances of reaching the postseason. He'd also solve the position for 2024, whereas (at least absent a hot and seemingly sustainable finish by Young or Mervis) they currently have a hole there, and would be looking at Cron, Rhys Hoskins, Garrett Cooper, or Brandon Belt in free agency. As Mancini has ably demonstrated, buying second-tier bats at offense-first positions is often an unhappy business. The final question to answer is whether it would really take Crow-Armstrong to get Alonso. When a multi-time All-Star with more than a year of team control is available, and the selling club has leverage, it's fair to start with any team's top prospect. The Cubs have great depth in their system, though. Could they do a more desirable deal that doesn't involve Crow-Armstrong? It's plausible. It would probably cost them one of Cade Horton, Jordan Wicks, and Ben Brown, plus Kevin Alcantara, but it's plausible. Is giving up two of that group, and perhaps another sweetener, better than doing what the Mets did when they traded for Javier Baez in 2021, and just giving up one prospect with major upside? I can see a case for either side. There's even more to consider here, like whether Cody Bellinger fits into an Alonso conversation, but that can wait for another time. For now, I'm eager to hear whether others feel that Alonso is worth all this commotion--let alone one of the best prospects the Cubs have had since their super-core of 2015 and 2016. View full article

Frustrating inconsistency and buzzard's luck have defined Jameson Taillon's first season with the Cubs. Tuesday night's start was sadly typical. At times, Taillon cruised, and showed the stuff that made Chicago want him, even at a hefty price. Two home runs ruined his night, though, and they could have been avoided. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports It seemed like Brandon Marsh spotted something extremely early against Jameson Taillon. Over a month in to a fairly grisly slump, Marsh suddenly found the aggressive, powerful swing that went missing for him during that period of struggle. He hit two home runs against Taillon, accounting for over half the Phillies' runs in the game, but they weren't lightning bolts that struck without warning. The first pitch Taillon threw to Marsh in the game was a fastball in the upper half of the zone. It had too much of the plate, and wasn't quite high enough, which was one of Taillon's big problems all night. Marsh fouled it off, but his swing was absolutely vicious and the exit velocity on that foul ball was (unofficially) a billion miles per hour. Taillon was, sensibly, more careful with his next pitch, another fastball that was called a ball, up and away. On 1-1, though, Taillon and Yan Gomes tried to come inside on Marsh. The pitch was a cutter, above the belt and on the inside corner, but Marsh obliterated it. One might fairly have said, as the Cubs broadcast did on Marquee, that it was a good pitch--at least in a vacuum. No pitch is thrown in a vacuum, though. Given what Marsh looked like on the first pitch of that plate appearance, the pitch Taillon threw on 1-1 wasn't a good one at all. An even worse sequence happened the next time Marsh stepped to the plate. Taillon and Gomes got ahead of Marsh this time, with a fastball that was called a strike on the outer edge and a changeup Marsh fouled off, just off the corner. Again, though, Marsh's swing was an aggressive and dangerous one, and the foul ball was struck sharply. On 0-2, the Cubs went with a fastball above the zone. Marsh laid off, but Taillon and Gomes were still in good position, ahead 1-2. They tried to put him away with a curveball low and in. It stayed both over the plate and above the knees, though, and again, Marsh left no doubt. Good pitchers (and catchers) read opponents' swings. It's one of the very important mystical aspects of the art and craft of pitching. It's related to another one, too. Good pitchers also know how to work around a hitter when they don't have a good way to get them out. In neither situation Tuesday night should Taillon have simply given up and walked Marsh. There has to be some middle ground, though--some way to pitch around a guy without completely capitulating. It takes command, and unfortunately, Taillon's control is far ahead of his command right now. It also takes the right mental approach. At some point in an at-bat in which a hitter is taking swings like those two foul balls by Marsh, a pitcher has to start thinking of a walk as an acceptable, even noble outcome. They have to flip a switch and begin thinking that the hitter will need to expand the strike zone and get themselves out, and that that's ok. Marsh, as it happens, was an especially good candidate for that treatment Tuesday night. He's been swinging at too much junk for the last month; it's why his power disappeared for a while. Maybe he would have laid off Taillon's stuff outside the zine, but it's perfectly possible he would have gotten himself out. We'll never know, because Taillon (as too often happens for him) was unwilling to take that chance and stay well out of the area where damage can be done. The aggravations went far beyond Taillon on Tuesday night. It was just one of those games, where nothing seems to go quite right. Dansby Swanson hit two balls very well, if a bit less well than Marsh did, and both died well short of doing any damage. Nico Hoerner, who ultimately drove home the Cubs' only run in the eighth inning, just missed poking an RBI single through the right side earlier in the game. A mishit blooper just barely got over Hoerner and fell into right-center field for one of Philadelphia's runs. Junior Valentine allowed a fairly large strike zone, and that happened to suit Ranger Suarez much better than it suited Taillon. You can chalk almost all of that up to bad luck, but all of it (and especially the fact that Marsh easily cleared the fence twice, while Swanson showed only warning-track power) also points toward the Phillies' superior overall talent. It was the kind of game that is both closer than the final score makes it look, and clearer than a recitation of its action makes it sound. The Cubs just had that wonderful homestand, and then a highly productive road trip that started with four straight wins. To end that trip with an unfortunate loss to the Cardinals was no big deal, but to let it become a two-game losing streak in the first game back home, despite the days off and the fact that the Phillies are no juggernaut this year, was a bummer. There's time to turn things right back around in the 12 games left before the All-Star break, but that loss put a whiff of danger back into the air, mingled with the smoky haze. Wednesday night needs to be the start of a bounce back. View full article

The Cubs are a better team than their record shows. In the National League, they rank fourth in runs allowed per game and sixth in runs scored per game. Tom Ricketts has said he expects the team to be buyers at the trade deadline. If that's true, their focus should be on adding a bat to their lineup. Image courtesy of © Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports It's probably surprising to some to hear that the team is above-average in run scoring, at least on the senior circuit. They went through a long fallow period at the plate, and their weaknesses (being on the wrong side of average both in strikeout rate and in power) can make them disproportionately frustrating at times. Nor is their current standing a wholly accurate picture of how their season has unfolded. We're taking this measurement of their relative production during a fairly long hot streak, which juices everything. Let's talk, then, about lengthening the lineup. The team needs to hit for more power, without striking out more, and they need help at first base, designated hitter, and/or third base. Here are three players who could be fits. Andrew McCutchen, Pirates DH/OF It's been a welcome surprise to see McCutchen hit so well in his return to his original team. Although long ago relegated to outfield corners and despite a couple of severe leg injuries over the years, McCutchen has remained a sneakily great athlete. He's not hitting for exceptional power this year, but his overall line--.271/.394/.431--would be an upgrade for almost anyone, and certainly a big one for the Cubs. McCutchen also has nine steals in 12 tries this year, and he's only struck out 55 times in 277 plate appearances. He'd slot in as the regular designated hitter, limiting Trey Mancini's playing time unless and until he shows he can hit and handle first base adequately. Lane Thomas, Nationals OF He's only 27, and still has two years of team control beyond 2023. It's unlikely that the Nationals will desperately try to move Thomas. However, this season has made clear that that team is far from contention, and he could be their best trade chip this summer. That's thanks to 36 extra-base hits (including 14 homers) in 328 trips to the plate this season, good for a .515 slugging average. Thomas has big tools. He strikes out often, so he won't solve that problem for the club, but he would be an excellent complement to the outfield mix of Ian Happ, Cody Bellinger, Mike Tauchman, and Seiya Suzuki. Adding Thomas would allow David Ross to keep all of those guys fresher, by rotating them through the DH spot and playing matchups better. Jeimer Candelario, Nationals 3B Since he's a free agent at the end of this year, Candelario would be much cheaper to acquire than Thomas would be. He's also much tougher to strike out than Thomas is. That comes at some cost in power, but if the Cubs feel that the rest of their lineup has found some productive stability, they can afford to add a player who keeps the line moving, as Candelario does. His batting line for the year is .260/.335/.466, which is (adjusting for the era and run environment) darn close to a perfect match for the production a believer might have expected from him when he was a Cubs prospect, several years ago. The above only scratch the surface. If the Cubs do go shopping next month, they'll have even more options than these. As a starting point, though, these three hitters are fine examples of how the team can shore up a lineup that isn't yet deep enough to support a championship run. View full article

Though they couldn't complete a sweep of the Cardinals in the London Series, the Cubs remain pretty hot. With an off day Monday ahead of a crucial 13-game stretch before the All-Star break, now is a good time to assess the team's chances for the postseason. Image courtesy of © Peter van den Berg-USA TODAY Sports Two models of Playoff Odds projections dominate the national conversation: those on FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus. On each, the Brewers dominate the Cubs in terms of likelihood to win the NL Central, and neither gives Chicago much chance to claim a Wild Card berth. As the team has heated back up recently, though, their odds have steadily risen--especially according to FanGraphs. Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA projection system has been more pessimistic about the Cubs since before Opening Day, and that pattern persists, though the gap is small. BP gives them a 19.2-percent chance to reach the postseason, including a 16.5-percent shot at taking the division title. That model does have the Cubs as a clear second-best in the division, though, whereas FanGraphs sees the Reds as a legitimate, essentially equal contender. Obviously, since the Reds are currently leading the division, there does seem to be a kernel of truth to that. At bedrock, though, the two models say the same thing. The Cubs are not the favorites in the division, thanks especially to their dreadful stretch of play from mid-April through the beginning of June, but they're viable, thanks to a solid foundation of talent and the weakness of their division. These projections are rooted not only in their record, but in their roster and the talent those systems see in it. There is one other robust Playoff Odds engine out there, though. At Baseball Reference, they don't look at projections and roster composition. Rather, they use a rolling sample of a team's last 100 games played (even if it spans seasons) and adjustments for strength of schedule to project future performance. The system accounts both for opponent strength over that 100-game sample and for the strength of schedule for the balance of the season, and simulates the remaining schedule 1,000 times each day to come up with Playoff Odds. In that system, the Cubs aren't fighting with the Reds for second place, or trying to get above 25 percent in terms of total chances to reach the postseason. In the Baseball Reference system, the Cubs are the division favorites. By this system, the team is just on the right side of a coin flip to win the division, and will still have some chance of winning a Wild Card if they miss out on that. It's certainly a system that favors the Cubs in ways that could feel meaningless. Of their 100-game sample, nearly a quarter is the final stretch of last season, when they went 16-8, in a weird and low-pressure environment. That boosts them significantly, and so does the fact that the system is based solely on recent performance, rather than on projections at an individual level. Every projection system is somewhat skeptical that Marcus Stroman and Justin Steele are this good, but this system is just looking at their results. Ditto for Christopher Morel. There are some reasons to doubt the utility of this kind of system, but there are also some reasons to think the Cubs are given short shrift by some modern projection systems. On balance, it feels like the true chances they have of reaching the playoffs lie somewhere between the numbers given by the two types of system, but that could just be cognitive biases at work. At the very least, getting hot for the last two-plus weeks has positioned the Cubs to view themselves as buyers ahead of trade season. Whether it's an outside chance or a very good one, they clearly have a shot at winning this tepid divisional contest. The next fortnight will really illuminate things, though, and should clarify a lot of things. By the time that stretch is over and the All-Star break comes, the Cubs will no longer be leaning much on last season's strong finish in the Baseball Reference model. They'll also have played four more games against the Brewers, so we should have a better idea of which team is better. The Wild Card odds are especially interesting, though, and the first series after their English holiday will shine a spotlight there. According to PECOTA, the Cubs' Playoff Odds actually rose yesterday, even as they lost. Their own loss and wins by the Brewers, Phillies, Marlins, and Diamondbacks were outweighed by losses by the Mets, Reds, Pirates, Dodgers, Padres, and Giants. In the more balanced schedule environment and with so many teams making the playoffs, the Wild Card races really open up, and they do it early. The Phillies come to Wrigley Field Tuesday night. That series, between a 40-37 team and a 37-39 one, will be an important test of the Cubs' mettle. By the weekend, we'll have another valuable set of data points to inform estimates of the team's Playoff Odds, even though there will still be much uncertainty, and even disagreement between models. View full article

One of the undercurrents of the 2023 season for the Chicago Cubs is a building interest in (and anxiety about) Marcus Stroman's contract situation. As of now, Stroman can opt out of his three-year deal before the final season of it. Many fans, like Stroman himself, want to see the Cubs lock him up on a long-term deal. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports Tom Ricketts, with exactly the same mealiness of mouth to which we've all become accustomed, keeps telling interested fans (including those who chanted passionately for a Stroman extension at a public event in London this weekend) that that decision rests with Jed Hoyer and the front office. That's a feckless copout, but it's also the right thing for an owner to say at the moment, in this particular case. As I've written about in two recent articles here, the Cubs have an acute and important problem in their starting rotation: a dearth of whiffs on pitches within the strike zone. The starting corps for this team is good, but their greatest weakness is a lowish strikeout rate, and even when they find whiffs, they have to do so by inducing opponents to expand their strike zone. Stroman, with his heavy sinker but sinker-heavy arsenal and focus on getting weak contact, is as guilty of this as anyone. That fact looms over whatever negotiations the Cubs might enter into with Stroman. It can't help but do so. If the rest of the rotation were missing bats like the 2003 Cubs, they could afford to commit to a front-of-the-rotation guy with limited strikeout skills. When they already lag the league in that regard, though, it's hard to justify what would surely be an investment of over $20 million per year in a pitcher who would ensure that the problem persists for years to come. Strikeouts aren't the end-all, be-all, of course. Stroman does so many other things well, and watching him pitch in 2023 has been a joy. If he sustains this level of dominance (even without an elite strikeout rate or the arsenal typical of the modern ace) all season, then the decision to extend him gets easier. It might well be that Hoyer isn't interested in a midseason negotiation for that very reason--because he knows the rotation needs a greater diversity of skills (and a greater proficiency in this one vital one), and isn't yet sure whether Stroman can fit into his grand plan for the unit. There's a simpler, more likely reason, too, though. Right now, Stroman's $21-million option for 2024 hangs over every conversation the Cubs could have about him--with his agent, or with other teams. Assuming Stroman stays healthy, he's on pace to easily clear 160 innings this year, which would boost the option to $23 million. It's still a no-brainer for Stroman to decline that, if he reaches the end of the year and still has both his health and sparkling numbers, but that's the figure with which the Cubs have to deal. As we learned with Carlos Rodon at last year's trading deadline, teams don't like trading for players on expiring deals that could, after all, not actually expire. Rodon had a longer and more worrisome injury history than Stroman's, but the same fear--that a player might come over in trade, get hurt, and squat on the team's payroll for a huge sum the following season--creeps into the picture. Even if teams don't authentically feel a concern about that, they'll try hard to convince the Cubs that they do. Thus, Stroman's trade value will be mitigated. Obviously, the hope (especially during this hot streak for the team) is that it will also be irrelevant, because the Cubs won't want to trade him, anyway. In that case, though, we still have to grapple with how the option affects leverage in an extension discussion. Through the deadline, it's a huge roadblock to those talks, because it creates such a leverage imbalance between the two sides. Even later in the campaign, it's likely to do so, especially as it becomes more clear that Stroman will earn his incentive bonus for innings pitched. Even if Hoyer badly wants to keep Stroman, it's very unlikely that the Cubs and their star right-hander will find the common ground needed to get a deal moving (let alone finished) before the end of the year. Once the team forces Stroman to actually exercise his opt-out, they can get aggressive about keeping him, without either side having a cudgel to wield. There's tremendous risk in that approach, because another team could just as easily get aggressive with Stroman at that point. He's been tagged with a qualifying offer before. The Cubs can't tie him to draft-pick compensation, and they won't get anywhere during a minuscule exclusive negotiating period. This, though, is where we circle back to what Stroman does (and doesn't do) well, and how it fits into the Cubs' philosophy of pitching. It's not really a coincidence that the team landed him in the first place, just as it's not a coincidence that they were able to re-sign Drew Smyly or that they acquired Jameson Taillon this past winter. Those guys all have the same flaw. None miss bats with regularity in the zone. On the free-agent market, almost every team dings them for that flaw more than the Cubs do, because almost no team believes as much in the ability to have success without that skill as the Cubs do. In a bit of a reversal of the Stroman situation, the Cubs have a club option on Kyle Hendricks for 2024. If he continues to pitch well, they could (just through inertia) retain Hendricks, Smyly, Taillon, and Justin Steele as the nucleus of their rotation next year. Hendricks hasn't yet qualified for this list, but of the 300 pitchers who have gotten at least 150 swings on pitches in the zone this year, Taillon ranks 167th; Smyly is 220th; and Steele is 244th. Stroman is all the way down at 268th. However good these guys are at skills like keeping the ball on the ground, getting weak contact, and earning called strikes (and each is pretty good), that's a problem. Hayden Wesneski (215th on the list of 300) is not a solution to this problem, at least in the short term. Ben Brown could be, as he seems to be earning plenty of whiffs in Iowa, but inserting him means moving on from at least one (and likely two) of the incumbent starters. The only ones not firmly under contract or team-friendly cost control for 2024 are Hendricks and Stroman. This is why, in the very near term, the team really could look to trade a starter at the deadline, even if they're acting primarily as buyers during that window. It's also why Hoyer hasn't yet engaged Stroman on extension talks. To be worth keeping at all, he needs to be an ace, and while that's what he's been throughout the first half, it's a hard thing to be without the ability to miss bats in the strike zone. If Stroman demonstrates a lasting ability to thread that needle, he could sign a deal worth over $25 million per year, for as many as five or six seasons. The Cubs could be the team to give that to him. First, though, he has to get to the finish line of this season with the egg on his spoon intact, and then the Cubs would have to make some tough decisions about what to do with other members of the current and prospective rotation. For that matter, committing that much to another starter (with, presumably, Taillon locked in for big money over three more seasons) would force some dilemmas on the positional side of the roster, too. In all, it's easy to see why the team has elected to wait on working out a long-term deal with their short king. It might come back to bite them, but their existing roster, his skill set, the parameters of his current deal, and the questions that remain about so much of their future make it impossible to act immediately. View full article

During press availability ahead of this weekend's London Series, a few members of the Cubs were asked about baseball history. Justin Steele was quick to pipe up with what he knows about the historic ties between the sports of baseball and cricket. He probably didn't realize it, but he's an especially interesting person to mention that connection. Image courtesy of © Eric Hartline-USA TODAY Sports Earlier this season, I wrote about the fact that Justin Steele's four-seam fastball really wasn't one, anymore. Now, even the foremost classifier of pitches and pitch data, Pitch Info, agrees. According to Brooks Baseball (fueled by Pitch Info and Baseball Prospectus), Steele's primary pitch is not a four-seamer, but a cutter. As I wrote in the first place, though, that's not bad news. It just underscores the uniqueness of Steele's approach. He's throwing hard, and the firmness of a cutter with that much movement is a problem unto itself. It's just silly to call the pitch a four-seamer, because it doesn't compare helpfully to any other four-seamer in the league. By contrast, comparing it to other pitchers' cutters can be illuminating. When Steele, Dansby Swanson, and Ian Happ were asked about the history of baseball Friday, Steele was most confident in his reply. It's interesting that Steele would be the one to say that, though, because his evolving style evokes one of the subtleties of cricket. In that game, there are several distinct and semi-distinct styles of bowling (the cricket equivalent of pitching). Some of the difference is more label than reality, but it's possible to move from one style and emphasis to another, adjacent one, in a way that is meaningful. If we believe and embrace that Steele's fastball was once dominant because of its cut-ride action, with rising movement at the top of the zone, then he was what cricketers would call a pace bowler. However, the rise on that pitch continues to deteriorate, or at least disappear. (We'll try to parse whether it's intentional, whether it's advantageous, and whether it's worrisome shortly.) At this point (look at the way the vertical movement on the pitch has changed even in this month, let alone over the last year!), Steele is much more akin to a swing bowler in cricket. Yes, he throws hard, in a certain way, but his effectiveness relies on movement and deception, not on pure power. Indeed, that ability to overmatch hitters with balls thrown right over their bats for swinging strikes seems to be virtually gone. Going back to the first graphic above, you can see that Steele is increasingly reliant on two pitches: his cutter and his slider. In fact, on Baseball Prospectus's Pitch Info-driven PITCHf/x Leaderboards, Steele's slider isn't compared with other typical sliders, but rather, with sweepers. Because he (unlike most pitchers in baseball this year) is not typically talked about as being part of the trendy emergence of the sweeper, that's a bit jarring. I probably wouldn't go along with that categorization, because the way Steele's slider plays off his cutter is quite different than the way many pitchers want their sweepers to play off their primary fastballs--usually four-seamers or sinkers. The differential in lateral movement between the two is just not as dramatic as a pitcher usually wants it to be when thinking sweeper. Steele's slider has more depth than the average sweeper, too, making it more like a true slider. Either way, though, he's now depending on two pitches that exist on the same easily blurred spectrum. He's really seeing his margin for error shrink, although his command and execution of that simple pair of offerings are currently so good that he more than gets away with it. It would help if, even if only from time to time, he were able to generate more of that rising action and a little less of the cutter's dip and swerve, but he hasn't shown that ability at all since last summer. Because he only seems to be committing with increasing intensity to an approach he'd already established, I'm inclined to think he's doing this on purpose. That's the optimistic view. Even if it's somewhere shy of fully optimal, plunging into a mode of operation that's working so well is good business. He can always tweak things if (and when) the efficacy of that attack begins to diminish. Another possibility, alas, is that he's quietly compensating for some physical limitations here, and that his evolution is really an attempt to outrun a boulder bouncing downhill for as long as possible. He has a long injury history already. He lost the end of last season and a fortnight of this one, and the latest injury was of a kind that is often a forewarning of major elbow trouble. If Steele has transitioned from a cut-ride four-seamer to a true cutter because he's hurt, red isn't an alarming enough color for the flags. Those worries can wait for now, though. On Saturday, Steele gets to show the whole baseball world what he can do, by taking the ball and working his swing-style magic on Cardinals batters. Cricket fans in the crowd and the TV audience will note many differences from what their favorite bowlers do, but Steele has just enough understanding and connection to the roots of his preferred game to evoke the nuances of an older one when he's at his best. View full article

Over the next two days, the Chicago Cubs take an international stage, and they become (however imperfectly) one of two foci in the ever-shifting elliptical baseball universe. The London Series against the St. Louis Cardinals is just two games, in a season of 162. Yet, it's undeniably special and different. Does that mean it's also especially important? Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports This question, of course, has no one answer, and the answer that holds true for one individual might be useless to another. It's easy to acknowledge that fact and shrink from the challenge of even considering the question. After all, why parse something on a general or collective level when the specific and the individual are all that matters? Still, I think it's a conversation worth a few minutes of our thought. At its heart, this question is one that makes baseball a thing worth caring about. It's a question of how much weight to assign to any given moment in our lives--of how much to allow a sense of special occasion and raised stakes to increase our responsiveness to a particular set of outcomes. It's a question, too, of whether the outsized impact of moments like those is just the self-fulfillment of a prophecy. Rivalry games always give us cause to pause and ponder this question, but there are too many of them, and the question starts to feel squishy. It's easy, when we ask whether Cardinals games in Chicago or St. Louis have greater importance than games against any other opponent, to see all the complicating factors that render the question unanswerable: the standings, the vagaries of the starting rotation, the unpredictable but usually long and low-intensity undulations of a season. A series like this, though--with its special location, heightened pageantry, and even temporal disruptions--sets itself firmly apart from the series on either side of it. What the Cubs just did in Pittsburgh and what the Cardinals just did in Washington will not bleed over into this series. What the teams do against one another in London will not affect how they each play when they return home. If a baseball season is like a prestige TV series, this series is a bottle episode. You know the ones. A subset of the cast (usually via some highly unusual enforced isolation) face a set of problems, dangers, or questions that don't bear much on the bigger arc of the season to which the episode belongs. It might tie in, and a good one usually involves some character development, but it's not really moving the big story forward. In Hollywood, bottle episodes are necessary evils. They're byproducts of the inevitable crunches on the budget and the calendar that come from the heavy lift of putting together the best possible show every week. Until the last few years, MLB hasn't had an equivalent to that experience--at least since the days when teams would squeeze exhibitions against interleague opponents or their Triple-A affiliate into empty days on the schedule. As they try to globalize their product, though, the league has created the same feeling. Viewing this series through that lens brings some clarity to things, too. Keeping each game in perspective--caring enough about it not to let games slide by and slip away, but not so much that it makes giving proportional attention to the games before and after it--is the eternal challenge of being either a fan or a part of a baseball team. To do that with these games, don't stress overmuch about their final scores. Just look for character development, and for the other redeeming quality of any good bottle episode: reminders of what makes you like the show the rest of the time. View full article

The Cubs finished a series sweep in Pittsburgh Wednesday, and have a chance to permanently KO the Cardinals during their two-game series in London this weekend. With a reshuffling of his starting rotation, David Ross showed how seriously he takes that opportunity, but he's also setting the stage for the following fortnight. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports Availing themselves of two days of rest before the two-game London Series and another day to travel home afterward, the Cubs will send co-aces Justin Steele and Marcus Stroman to the mound against the Cards. That certainly maximizes their chances of winning those contests, but it's also about the games that follow immediately afterward. Having won enough games to crawl out of the hole they dug themselves in May and early June, the Cubs now have to complete their return to contention by finishing the first half of the season strong. After London, Jameson Taillon and Drew Smyly will start on eight days' rest. Kyle Hendricks will pitch the third game of the team's return Stateside on seven days' rest. That's to kick off a stretch in which, after three days off in a span of five, the Cubs play 13 straight without a day off before the All-Star break. It's exactly the kind of break the team was surely looking for a chance to give to those three starters, anyway. Taillon has been better over his last few starts, but as he tries to balance the things that made him successful over the last few seasons and the new ideas the Cubs attempted to implement this spring, an extra bullpen session and a few days to reset could be just what the doctor ordered. If he's still dealing with any residual health stuff (remember, he's spent time on the injured list already this year), then the extra time can only help with that, too. For Smyly, a half a skipped start couldn't come at a better time. He's been bitten badly by the regression bug over his last several outings, and part of that has been bad luck, but it's looked as though fatigue was also a factor. Smyly is in his mid-30s, and has a lengthy injury history. Any chance to get a full season of consistent work out of him will require extra rest now and then. Obviously, Hendricks has looked considerably better than either of the other two. His last three starts have been spectacular. Still, this is a guy who had a significant shoulder issue end his 2022, and extra rest has always been friendly for Hendricks. This is probably the perfect moment for him to get a few days more than normal. The timing of this unique schedule disruption is kismet for the Cubs. In the near-fortnight of games without off days that come after the series, the team could stretch the rotation out even further. If they keep Ben Brown on the same (six-day) schedule they've had him on in Iowa, he'd be in position to start a game the Saturday before the break, in New York. That's a rough potential introduction to the big leagues, but it's an option. Some of what the team does could depend on whether Stroman, Steele, or both are selected for the All-Star Game, but lengthening the rotation one more time before the break would set up the starters (the strength of this club) to stay as fresh as they need them to in the second half. None of the above will matter if the team doesn't win at least eight of these 15 games, so whether they're open to adding another codon to the sequence could also depend on how well they stay hot over the next week. No matter what, though, this first shakeup of the rotation makes sense. They're both putting their best foot forward on an international stage and positioning themselves to keep getting good work from their starters in the medium term. View full article

The Cubs' co-ace goes again tonight. As the team heats up and closes what was once a daunting gap in the NL Central, Marcus Stroman's stellar season is becoming a bigger story. It's all (well, ok, it's partly) thanks to a sinker heavier than any other in baseball. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports According to Baseball Savant, no sinker thrown at least 200 times this year has had as big a differential between its expected, spin-based movement and its actual movement as has Marcus Stroman's. That's notable on its own, but it's only part of the story. The site has spin direction data back to 2020, and in none of those seasons has any pitcher matched the differential on Stroman's heavy sinker. We're not talking about pure movement, here. There are pitchers (although most of them are side-arm or submarine guys) who generate more drop on their sinker than does Stroman. The wrinkle with him, in addition to the fact that (unlike most sinkers) he has a very high spin rate on his heat, is that much of his movement derives from seam-shifted wake (SSW). In other words, even if a batter with Ted Williams-caliber eyesight picked up the sinker right out of Stroman's hand, they might be fooled by it, because the pitch moves more in a direction not predicted by its spin than that of any other hurler in the game. Hitters can often look for the sinker against Stroman. It's the pitch he throws most often against both lefties and righties. They might look foolish if they misidentify his slurve or cutter as the sinker, but often, they'll be right about what it is. In that case, they'll rarely whiff on it, but they're very likely to mishit it, because they'll spot the spin and anticipate one magnitude and shape of movement. Instead, thanks to the orientation of the seams and the way Stroman releases the ball, it'll really move in a different way and to a different extent. The problem with that approach, of course, is that whiffs are relatively bulletproof, but managing contact is tricky. It requires excellent command, and that can be hard to sustain. This year, Stroman has done it to an extent rarely seen from any pitcher in recent memory. Hitting that spot with such consistency, especially when he can command his other offerings just as finely, makes Stroman almost immune to the pitfalls of a contact-oriented pitching approach. Because he throws his sweeping breaking ball so consistently to the other side of the plate, right-handed hitters can't effectively cover that inside sinker. Lefties have the same problem if they're considering diving out to reach the sinker away, because he bullies them with pinpoint cutters on the inner edge. Hitters have to take a certain attack angle to square up a sinker with as much seam-shifted wake as Stroman's. They can't do it when they're caught in between that pitch and a ball with movement in the opposite direction, to the other side of home plate. As nuanced and variable as Stroman's approach can be, that much is fairly reliable and simple, and he's executed it with extraordinary deftness in 2023. The fragility of that path to success still lurks, threatening to cause him problems at some stage, but in the meantime, he's been as fun to watch as he has been effective. The Cubs need that to continue, as they plot a charge to the front of the NL Central that will depend mostly on their starters. View full article

One of the worst things about being late to a party is that, if you try to jump in with some jokes right away, they'll fall flat. You didn't quite read the room well enough. You're a little out of sync. The Cubs were late to the party when it comes to triple-digit relief pitching monsters. They're just now starting to get the tone right. Image courtesy of © Darren Yamashita-USA TODAY Sports In mid-January, the Cubs claimed Julian Merryweather on waivers. He'd spent the previous four-plus years in the Blue Jays organization, after just about an equal amount of time with Cleveland after they drafted him in 2014. He was intriguing, because he throws hard, but it was easy to view him as the next in a line of reliever dice-rolls who would probably come up with the wrong number and be shunted off elsewhere within six months. Now, it looks a whole lot more like Merryweather could have a stay of four-plus years in a third consecutive place. It's not just that he's put up respectable numbers (a 32.6-percent strikeout rate and .640 opponent OPS making up for too many walks and a couple of missteps in high-leverage opportunities). It's that Merryweather represents the full-fledged return of the effective fireballer to the Cubs bullpen. He's just one piece of that puzzle, and the team has to hope that he's far from the most notable by this time next year, but even as a figurehead, he's noteworthy. Merryweather threw 100.7 miles per hour on one fastball this weekend against Baltimore. It was not only the fastest pitch thrown by a Cub this year, but the fastest by any Cub since 2016, when the team had Aroldis Chapman for a couple of months and he threw roughly the 250 fastest fastballs in franchise history. Together with Nick Burdi and a couple of others, Merryweather will help ensure that the Cubs don't show up on another chuckle-inducing fun fact leaderboard at the end of this season, as they have over the last few. Technically speaking, it's not true that the Cubs were late in realizing that velocity is non-negotiable in a modern bullpen. They not only helped fuel the evolution of the fireballer beginning with the emergence of Kyle Farnsworth and Juan Cruz in the early 2000s, but had a fistful of truly terrifying hard throwers over the years just after PITCHf/x turned its electronic eyes on things. Remember the reliever versions of Jeff Samardzija and Andrew Cashner? Remember Chris "No, the Other Chris Carpenter" Carpenter? How about Henry "No, the Other Henry Rodriguez" Rodriguez? Briefly, Hector Rondon and Pedro Strop even scraped 100 miles per hour, in addition to their other virtues as relievers. Ever since the Brandon Morrow signing went bust, however, the team has shrunk from the risk associated with prioritizing pitch speed. Over the last year or so, when they've tried to walk back that walkback, it's looked clumsy, and it's often ended badly. Finally, with Merryweather, they're demonstrating a real grasp of the subject. It's important to find and cultivate velocity, but velocity for its own sake is inutile. You have to get a pitcher to do something else well. They should throw strikes with their heat. They should change eye levels by mixing their pitches. They should have some movement or spin characteristics that accentuate the difficulty of hitting their fastball, rather than canceling it out. Ironically, those are the very things that were missing for Merryweather for so long, and those shortcomings were why he was available at all. He didn't miss bats, because his fastball too often flattened out, and none of his secondary offerings created enough deception to get swings to expand the strike zone. He gave up too much high-value contact, because he too often left both his fastball and his changeup in the fat parts of the zone. The Cubs' first important step, then, was to realign Merryweather so that he wasn't just throwing hittable pitches, one after another. They managed it by sliding him slightly further toward third base on the rubber. With better angles of attack, Merryweather's changeup (which still moves essentially the same amount, and in the same direction) now often runs off the plate away from a lefty, where they can't do much damage, and often can't even make contact. His slider, with a naturally vertical shape, hasn't suffered at all from the shift, and he's throwing it more often. As a result, hitters now have to cover the entire zone, and they see fewer meatballs. His delivery is almost unchanged. Any tweaks there have been subtle, but they're sufficient. He's matching the release points on his fastball and slider better, and the combination of that improved efficiency and the adjusted angle has increased the rate at which hitters chase his changeup outside the zone. In an effort to streamline things, the Cubs and Merryweather have eliminated his curveball. He's all fastball, slider, and changeup now, and against righties, he's become extreme, willing to throw the slider over 60 percent of the time--including some sweepers that take advantage of a lateral movement that wouldn't have been productive before he slid over on the rubber. With a violent delivery and without elite ride on his fastball, Merryweather probably won't ever matriculate to the status of relief ace, for this team or any other. Merely to bring him this far, though, shows that the Cubs now have a better idea of how to tame and augment the talents of guys like him. As little as a year ago, it wasn't clear that they could do so, and that made it hard to have faith even in their burgeoning collection of pitching prospects. Right now, Merryweather is a weather vane, telling us that the winds of change are blowing in the right direction for the Cubs' pitching infrastructure. Since we're expecting a new shipment of high-end arms within the next two years, that's very good news. 74e72b5b-e453-4f02-9c7b-df319bdb874e.mp4 a401d441-aac2-4a44-b337-4e95d004d308.mp4 View full article

Every season is its own entity. We shouldn't spend all our time comparing the present to the past, or situating each moment in the context of other ones. Yet, the lifeblood of the game is its history, and we understand baseball better when we let ourselves appreciate the connections between one season, one series, one generation and another. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports After the sweep of the Pirates that fully restored the Cubs to contention in the underwhelming NL Central. Wrigley Field filled up for the weekend series against the Orioles. The holiday helped, and so did the fact that Baltimore fans travel well in both numbers and enthusiasm, but the environment had much to do with the fact that the Cubs are still relevant. It was reminiscent, to fans of a certain age, of another interleague series in June, 20 years ago. The 2003 Cubs started hotter than the 2023 edition has, but their division was a bit more competitive, too. When the schedule brought the mighty Yankees to town on the second weekend in June, the team was leading the Central, but far from being the heavy favorites. Excitement abounded, but it was a nervous excitement. There was the specter of Sammy Sosa's corked bat to worry about, but there was also a certain level of worry that the Bronx Bombers would come in and make clear that the would-be contending Cubs weren't really up to that standard. New York did win the opener on Friday in that series, but that would be the high point of the weekend for them. On Saturday, with Roger Clemens going for his 300th career win, the Cubs spoiled the party. The Yanks led 1-0 at the seventh-inning stretch, but after a Sammy Sosa single and a Moises Alou walk, Joe Torre lifted Clemens in favor of Juan Acevedo. On Acevedo's first pitch, Eric Karros cracked a three-run home run, giving the Cubs a lead they would not relinquish. The following half-inning, with the bases loaded and two outs, Mike Remlinger struck out Jason Giambi for the first of two times in the series, helping Chicago lock down the win for Kerry Wood, who struck out 11. The next night, on ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball, the Cubs won again, snuffing out a ninth-inning visitor rally when Joe Borowski picked off pinch-runner Charles Gipson, who represented the tying run with two outs. It was the first landmark of a near-magical season. It was surprising confirmation that the Cubs were legitimate, even if they also had obvious flaws. As it turned out, this weekend's series against Baltimore was a similar statement. The Orioles came in as one of the best and most celebrated teams in baseball, and there was every reason to fear that they would thump the Cubs. Instead, the Cubs showed that they can play even with great teams, just as they did against the Rays last month. Parallels run even deeper. The return of Cody Bellinger brought clarity to the team's first-base situation, after two-plus months of uncertainty. In 2003, a collision between Wood and Hee-Seop Choi delivered a similar (although sad and scary) resolution. Choi was concussed, and would never be the same hitter he'd been to that point in the season. Karros, therefore, became the everyday first baseman. Furthermore, just as Remlinger and Borowski began to cement their credentials as sufficient backend relievers in that series, the Cubs got affirming performances from Julian Merryweather, Mark Leiter, Jr., and Adbert Alzolay during this one. Although they won the last two 20 years ago and the first two this time, the outcome and the galvanic feeling is the same. None of that means that the 2023 Cubs are exactly like the 2003 team. There are plenty of salient differences. The similarities have begun to accumulate, though, from the strength of the starting rotation to the fact that the race is shaping up to be more than two teams fighting for just one playoff berth. It also looks like the team's offensive weak link will be the same as that one's: third base. In 2003, GM Jim Hendry addressed that weakness by trading for Aramis Ramirez. This season, if the Cubs are going to make a midseason lineup upgrade, it almost has to come at the same position. Maybe the Rockies, finally ready to reckon with the long road they face back to relevance, will be willing to trade Ryan McMahon. He'd be the long-term acquisition to truly match the Ramirez trade. Former Cubs prospect Jeimer Candelario is having a good bounceback season with the Nationals, and figures to be available as a short-term fix. Either way, though, and even if the team doesn't elect to be as aggressive in July as that one was, this weekend served notice that this team, like that one, marks an overdue return to serious playoff consideration for a franchise that had been adrift over the previous few campaigns. View full article

It's getting hot in Wrigleyville. The Cubs are still below .500, but they've reeled off a more substantial cluster of wins than it seemed they might all season. Of all the good things suddenly happening there, though, the best news is that Nico Hoerner is raking again. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports Quietly, one of the biggest problems with the problematic Cubs offense throughout May was the fact that Nico Hoerner fell off a cliff. His hamstring injury surely contributed, and coming back as quickly as possible from it might have come at some cost in effectiveness, but the results care nothing for the reasons. From May 1 through June 8 (the day the Cubs finished being swept by the Angels), Hoerner batted an execrable .222/.294/.315. In 119 trips to the plate, he had just six extra-base hits and 10 walks. Even during that atrocious stretch, Hoerner was a net positive at the plate, according to Win Probability Added. His skill set creates problems for teams when there are runners on base, and especially when the opponent can't afford to let those runners score. Still, he was essentially neutralized for that long period, and the Cubs got an OBP around .300 from a player who was routinely written into the lineup as the leadoff hitter. Dysfunction, like most forms of unhappiness, rolls downhill. Since the first game of the series by the Bay that might be a pivot point in the Cubs' season, though, Hoerner has been himself again--the dangerous, well-rounded, relentless presence he was over the first few weeks of April. After sitting to start that game, he came in and got the game-winning hit, and he hasn't looked back. In his last eight contests, he's batting .364/.400/.424. That doesn't mean we're out of the woods with him. Hoerner's strikeout rate is creeping up, as he tries to find his way to more patience and power. He hasn't actually realized those benefits in exchange for his losses, though, and for a long time, he seemed to be caught in a middle ground that (given his basic skill set) is much less fruitful than operating at extremes. Recently, Hoerner seems to have realized that. In early June, he steadily began giving up exit velocity, in order to get the ball off the ground and on a line more often. Here are two charts, showing rolling averages for 50-plate appearance stretches in both exit velocity and Sweet Spot percentage (the share of batted balls that were hit within the band of the most valuable launch angles, according to Statcast). In a vacuum, a falling average exit velocity is a bad sign, and it indicates that Hoerner's hot streak might be nothing more than a blip. Even in the most generous reading, it sets a fairly low ceiling on his production, because this version of Hoerner (a familiar one, to fans who have watched him closely throughout his career) has virtually no power. Again, though, he's a player who doesn't benefit much from plotting a conservative or conventional course. He has an extreme skill set, and should pursue an extreme approach. He'll probably never be Luis Arraez, but trading some power to give himself a significantly better chance of hitting a single each time up makes as much sense for Hoerner as it does for Arraez. Happily, he even has a dimension of value Arraez lacks, because once he reaches base, he can more often steal a base, or take an extra one on a batted ball. Every player is, to some extent, undergoing constant change. No offensive plan is static and invulnerable to adjustments by opponents. Hoerner (who is still so young and has had his career altered and tossed about by organizational emergencies, a global pandemic, and multiple injuries) has an especially protean approach, and that figures to continue for another year or two. That, after all, is why both he and the Cubs were most comfortable with a contract extension that neither paid him like a superstar nor locked the team into a long-term commitment. He might yet have major roisters and ruts even within this season. For the moment, though, he's been the catalyst of a crucial resurgence by the Cubs offense. It's been a delight, if nothing else, to see the unique talent he possesses on full display for the first time in six weeks. View full article