Matthew Trueblood

Amid another tough loss for the Cubs on Saturday, one bright spot was the performance of Jeremiah Estrada. The rookie reliever might be emerging as a new relief ace for the team--if he can find a way to get a little more use out of his breaking ball. Image courtesy of © John Geliebter-USA TODAY Sports In his major-league career, Jeremiah Estrada has now thrown 227 pitches. Of those, 173 have been fastballs. That's wild. It might not have been as radical even a decade ago, and it was certainly something relievers often did 20 years ago, but MLB is a league dominated by breaking balls right now. They're not the majority of pitches--that remains unthinkable--but they've become so much more prevalent than they used to be that seeing a pitcher throw their fastball 75 percent of the time is downright jarring. If any pitcher is going to get away with it, it will be Estrada. His heater sits at about 95 miles per hour, and he's touched 98. More importantly, the pitch screams on the way to the plate. Its spin rate and direction give it tremendous rising action, with deceptively little arm-side movement. It's the kind of heater that can miss bats at the top of the zone and earn called strikes lower in it, a very valuable combination. Still, it's a fastball. Eventually, hitters learn how to spot and attack everyone's fastball. That doesn't mean that the pitchers in question become helpless, but dominance based on sheer heat--be it velocity, movement, whatever--never lasts all that long. The per-pitch and per-swing numbers on Estrada's slider are really good. That's the good news. That pitch might be able to induce whiffs at an elite rate, and if hitters have to start looking for it, they'll be less able to handle the fastball, too. It was the development of better command on his slider that really let Aroldis Chapman transform from a novelty into a force of nature. Obviously, Estrada's fastball is special in a very different way, but that's the concept here. If his fastball can be a hair more of a surprise, hitters will have no chance against him. Obviously, since his ERA this year is 0.00, they already have some trouble. Let's pinpoint why he's not there yet. Estrada isn't throwing his slider much, mostly because he has a problem disguising it. Here's a pitch he threw to Martin Maldonado in Houston this week. Here's a pitch he threw to Jeremy Pena in the same game. Can you tell which is which? Sure you can. The one to Maldonado is a fastball. The one to Pena is a slider. That's easy for us to see, because of the difference in his grip. His hand is behind the ball in the first shot. In the second, it's coming around it. Hitters, of course, can't really see that--at least not many of them, and not with much accuracy. They can't pick out the moment the ball is released, freeze the image in their mind, and process the hand position of the pitcher. If they could, sliders wouldn't work. However, take a closer look. There are more cues there than just the grip. Estrada, right now, humps up more on his fastball than on any of his secondary offerings. He gets his shoulder cocked higher and releases the ball about three inches higher. He also gets deeper into his legs and farther down the mound on his secondary stuff. Finally, his slider and fastball don't enjoy the advantage of spin mirroring--one pitch spinning in exactly the opposite direction as another, making them very difficult for hitters to distinguish. Add those things up, and hitters can spot Estrada's slider. So far, it hasn't bitten him, and they whiff very often when they offer at the pitch. They don't offer that much, though, and that won't change unless or until he can make some adjustments. In the meantime, he'll remain dependent on throwing his fastball a ton, and that puts a little bit of a limit on his potential as a dominant reliever. View full article

On Friday, Jed Hoyer, Carter Hawkins, David Ross, and the rest of the Cubs brain trust enacted a bit of tough love. Five games (and really, a full month) into a tailspin that threatened to derail their season, the team's decision-makers (belatedly) made some big decisions. For one night, at least, it worked. Image courtesy of © Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports It's easy to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that signing Eric Hosmer this offseason was a mistake. That's probably unfair. At the time, based on the lack of other, more appealing options on the first-base market and given Hosmer's strong reputation as a veteran presence around a team, bringing him aboard was defensible. It just didn't work. To their credit, though, Cubs brass acted relatively quickly. Bringing up Matt Mervis just five weeks into the season and cutting bait on Hosmer two weeks after that might not represent the speedy decisiveness Cubs fans would prefer, but practically speaking, it was about as quick as these kinds of changes usually happen--especially when the rookie coming up to take the veteran incumbent's job is relatively without pedigree or national expectations. In any case, the last fortnight made it clear both that Mervis can offer things Hosmer can't, and that keeping Hosmer around as an occasional DH and a bench bat with clubhouse clout was a luxury this roster could ill afford. Hence Friday's moves, which not only saw Hosmer designated for assignment, but brought up two Iowa Cubs whose left-handed bats have much more jolt in them. Edwin Rios, who only hit .191/.393/.429 in 28 plate appearances during his Des Moines deployment, still doesn't have a clear path to regular playing time, but Trey Mancini's continued struggles and Patrick Wisdom's inconsistency create at least some opportunity for the left-handed slugger. Mike Tauchman, meanwhile, put up sparkling numbers against Triple-A pitching, just as he did (against about the same level of competition, all things considered) during spring training. He played center field almost exclusively last season, with the Korean Baseball Organization's Hanwha Eagles, and made the plurality of his Iowa appearances there. He's going to start in center against most right-handed pitchers until Cody Bellinger returns, after the Cubs placed Bellinger on the injured list Friday with a bruised knee. At least in the very short term, the Cubs are going to be a pitcher short of the 13-man limit on active hurlers. They optioned Keegan Thompson to Iowa, after his disastrous outing in Houston earlier this week, and didn't immediately replace him with another pitcher. That worked fine Friday night, as Marcus Stroman shut the Phillies down for six innings and the offense thrived. It's a highly unconventional gambit in the modern game, but it's laos probably very temporary. The Cubs were due to snap their five-game losing streak, anyway. They're too good a team to go on long jags like that one, even if they're not quite good enough to string together long winning streaks. Their 10-run outburst certainly had more to do with Nico Hoerner's return to the roster and the lineup than with a reshuffling at the edge of the roster. Still, this latest set of changes was welcome and necessary. In combination with the Mervis and Chrostopher Morel call-ups; the demotion of Hayden Wesneski to Iowa; and the addition of Nick Burdi to the bullpen in an earlier move to add velocity and upside, the shakeup proved that Hoyer and company genuinely see this team as a contender. If that's true, they still have more work to do, but at least we gained some clarity (and a slightly firmer foothold in optimism) Friday. The front office will not tolerate failure, at least not in an unbounded way, and that was a message the Cubs clubhouse needed to hear. View full article

As bleak as things feel in the moment, the 2023 Cubs are not out of it. On the contrary, the door remains open to them in the National League standings. They just need to turn things around, starting tonight in Philadelphia. Image courtesy of © Troy Taormina-USA TODAY Sports In other years, starting 19-24 might doom a team to irrelevance. It's not a hole out of which it's impossible to climb, but it's the kind of record that can leave team gasping for air if the top few teams in the league are using up most of the competitive oxygen. This year's NL looked like it would be that kind of environment, but so far, that hasn't materialized. The Mets, Phillies, Padres, and Cardinals are all below .500. Of the teams ahead of the Cubs either in the division race or in the Wild Card hunt, two (the Marlins and Pirates) are clearly inferior clubs about whom Chicago doesn't need to worry in the long run. No one is running away with playoff spots the Cubs want to claim. That really only increases the urgency here, though. Sure, you can survive 19-24. If the Cubs are another few games below .500 in another fortnight, things will look much more dire. In 2007, remember, the team started 22-31 before coming alive and being one of the league's best teams for the balance of the season. That was a more veteran team, though, and one in whom the front office and ownership were more ineluctably invested. They also finished 85-77. At the moment, it looks like that number of wins would get a team into the postseason in the senior circuit, but it's hard to feel confident about that. No, to avoid being left behind in the standings by the coastal giants and to stop Jed Hoyer from looking to sell at the deadline, this version of the Cubs needs to get right sooner. They're already nine games into a long stretch of games against tough opponents, and they have six more (against the Phillies and Mets) before they get a brief reprieve when the Reds visit Wrigley Field. After that, they have another tough two weeks, with the Rays to close out May and a 10-game West Coast trip to start June. That's all the time this team has left to prove itself: 22 games. If they come out of them 30-35, they can still push past .500 by the end of June and assert themselves as contenders. If they're 27-38 by then, it's over, and any hopes of genuinely escaping this miniature rebuild will have to wait until 2024. In a perfect world, then, the team would be able to get materially better right away. The bullpen is, obviously, a problem. It's too early to make significant trades, though. Until 1985, the trade deadline was June 15, because it was designed to be a final opportunity for teams to fix unexpected issues before all attention turned to the field. That was a better version of baseball, because it made the deadline an exchange of one team's surplus for another's. It was about trying to get better even if you were looking bad, and not just about dividing the league into buyers and sellers. There's no going back to that way of doing things, though. The draft doesn't even take place until mid-July now, which means that few teams can turn the full attention of their scouting departments to trade possibilities before then. Further, because every team must now essentially identify as a contender or a seller, teams delay their decisions as long as possible. That's not to say that trades won't be made during the rest of this month or in June, but the kind of upgrade the Cubs need--a trustworthy high-leverage reliever, especially--just isn't going to be dealt before the All-Star break. That leaves it up to this team to save itself. Nico Hoerner is eligible to return from the injured list tonight in Philadelphia. When he does, they will be fully healthy and fully armed, with Matt Mervis, Christopher Morel, and a fully operational Seiya Suzuki in the lineup for the first time. There are no more excuses, and there's no more distracting from what's actually happening by asking why some player hasn't yet been called up from Iowa. The offense needs to start scoring more often, and the defense needs to be the lockdown unit the front office envisioned when they built this roster. David Ross needs to use his bullpen better and have the team ready to play nine competitive innings every night. None of that lends itself all that well to analysis. So be it. The Cubs aren't going to hack the system or break the game with some special adjustment or innovation. They just need to play better. They have three more weeks to do it, and to prove that they can hang with the unimposing clubs in the NL playoff picture. If they can't, they deserve to be disassembled again in July. View full article

There is, alas, much to unpack in the wake of the worst loss of the Cubs' 2023 season, which came Wednesday night in Houston. One of the most urgent questions with which the game left us, though, is what is wrong with the man who was their best fireman in 2022. Image courtesy of © Troy Taormina-USA TODAY Sports It's almost unfair to start an article by confronting Keegan Thompson so directly. After all, until his lousy outing Wednesday night (three batters faced, two well-struck hits including a two-run homer, a walk, three earned runs), his ERA was 2.95, and his Win Probability Added (the best single statistic to measure the value provided by a reliever, though not to predict his future utility) was a solid 0.5. Yet, it seems pertinent, and because of one of the factors in his struggles, it also seems fitting. Thompson's surface-level numbers looked fine, before Wednesday, and his most granular numbers did, too. He left the concerningly low velocity from spring training behind. He has good movement and spin on his key offerings. He's generating roughly average swing rates and whiff rates. In between the bird's-eye view and the microscopic one, though, is an important middle ground, and it's there where red flags have been up all year for Thompson. Even before Wednesday, he was getting too few strikeouts for a high-leverage reliever; issuing too many walks for a high-leverage reliever; and failing even to manage contact as well as he did in the past. That suggests that there are some failures of sequencing and situational awareness at work. Here's one such issue: Thompson is attacking the strike zone too often with his hard stuff on the first pitch of plate appearances. Of the 91 batters he's faced this year, he's started 46 with either a four-seamer or a cutter in the strike zone. That rate, just over 50 percent, is the 20th-highest out of more than 200 pitchers who have faced at least 50 batters this year. In other words, Thompson is coming right after guys, but at times, it's a bit too direct an approach. Yainer Diaz led off the bottom of the ninth with a single Wednesday night. Prior to that, hitters had only been 2-for-11 when putting the first pitch in play against him, but there again, some luck and the small sample involved are obscuring the reality. When Jake Meyers hit a 1-0 cutter out of the park, that Diaz single became a big deal in a hurry. This isn't something unique to Thompson. Entering Wednesday, the Cubs had thrown some version of a fastball somewhere in the zone to start 38.9 percent of all plate appearances this year. That was the highest rate in baseball. Throwing strikes to begin an at-bat isn't a bad idea. Hitters tend to be more patient on that pitch than they are as the count progresses, and it's better to be ahead than behind. Still, throwing a fastball (or fastball-like pitch, be it a four-seamer, a sinker or a cutter) in the zone in a count in which the batter might be hunting such a pitch is risky. No team in baseball has allowed as many first-pitch hits as the Cubs. Thompson's issues run deeper. One thing we might be learning right now is that he's better-suited to true long relief, where the margin for error is a bit wider and the need to miss bats with intense stuff and lots of whiffs is a bit less acute. His command of the cutter is also lousy right now, and he needs that pitch in order to be at his best, against both righties and lefties. Still, one thing he and the team can do a bit more thoughtfully going forward is to begin each matchup with the mentality of already being fully engaged in battle with the hitter. They need to try to induce a few more chases with breaking stuff out of the zone, or steal a few more called strikes with offerings that mess with the opponent's timing. There's one more thing that might be in play here. Thompson is a bit less mechanically efficient and a bit differently aligned this year, and it could be contributing to his problems. Here's a clip of Thompson last summer, during one of his stints as a starter. d0380656-1024-4dab-b316-fe7c89e81e5f.mp4 And here he is this year, also with the bases empty, but now in his full-fledged reliever mode. 324bbd3b-4209-4199-bf21-a95446265c1d.mp4 In the name of whatever tweaks he's made to his stuff, he's setting up all the way at the extreme first-base edge of the rubber this year. He's not using the drop step miniature windup he used last season, which is giving his delivery a slower start, and he's never quite getting up to the level of extension he had last season. He's releasing the ball a bit less far down the mound, and before he does, his head is carrying him a bit farther off his driveline. All of these are small changes. Some of them even make some sense, if you think about the different ways Thompson probably intended to attack hitters this spring in his newly bullpen-exclusive role. They add up to some meaningful differences, though, and so far, those differences aren't for the better. Thompson needs to clean up his mechanics a bit, and he also needs to rethink his approach within at-bats. Not unlike the Cubs as a whole, he still has a chance to have a great 2023, but as is true of the team, the need for some major adjustments has grown urgent and daunting. View full article

For the first time since last summer, Justin Steele had a truly tough start Tuesday night. It was poorly timed, from a team perspective, but even within it, Steele showed his grit, and some obvious areas in which he needs to make adjustments stood out. Being a two-pitch starting pitcher is tough even on your best day. On a night like Tuesday night, as Justin Steele faced the challenge of giving the team some much-needed innings with some foreign substances floating around in his stomach and his respiratory system, it's nearly impossible. If you catch the defending champions on a night when you feel like that, you're probably going to be lucky to survive six innings, even while allowing five runs. All things considered, Steele pitched admirably. Even so, he allowed at least three runs for the third time in four outings, and it's starting to become clear what tweaks he needs to make in order to reclaim his dominant form. He's throwing too many fastballs, especially to right-handed batters, and it's making that unique heater too familiar to opponents. Here's how Steele's pitch mix has evolved from start to start this season, against righties. It's become popular, lately, to refer to Steele's fastball as a "unicorn," with its odd movement profile. Part of the fun and the magic of unicorns, though, is that they're so rare. Recently, and especially Tuesday night, Steele just hasn't fostered that magic, because he's not throwing enough sliders to keep righties from sitting on his fastball. Based on the way he's attacking left-handed hitters, the best guess here is that he's still confident in that slider, but not in executing it or locating it the way he needs to do to righties, in particular. He's throwing the slider more often than ever to lefties. Nearly every pitcher has different approaches based on the handedness of the batter. That Steele is very different in his pitch mix for lefties and righties is neither unusual nor a problem, per se. Because he's a southpaw starter (and one who works mostly to his glove side, without a changeup, to boot), he's going to see a ton of right-handed batters in just about every outing. He needs to be similarly effective against them as he is against lefties. When he's at his best, Steele can throw his slider to righties and have success. He can throw it at their back foot and get whiffs, or backdoor it for called strikes. When his feel is a bit less fine, though, he can miss over the plate with it, and naturally, right-handed hitters make him pay for those mistakes. That's led to a kind of security-blanket relationship between Steele and his fastball against righties. He's always confident in throwing that pitch, because he knows that even when he makes mistakes with it, he rarely gets hit hard. Alas, Tuesday night was a good example of how that can turn out not to be true when he leans too heavily on the heater. We can forgive that particular start, and Steele still isn't to be counted among the many problems facing this team. If he wants to remain the co-ace of the staff and continue his growth into one of the game's top starters, though, Steele has to figure out how he can consistently go to the mound with the command needed to use his slider more often against the hitters he sees more often. He might do well to consult with Drew Smyly, a fellow two-pitch lefty with unique pitch characteristics. While Smyly has the luxury of a breaking ball that fades deceptively away from right-handed hitters, he's had to navigate some of the same questions of balancing a thin pitch mix as has Steele, and like Steele, he generates whiffs and induces weak contact without premium velocity. Famously, a conversation with Jon Lester set Steele on the path to the mountainside he's scaled so impressively. Now, he can learn from another southpaw sherpa how to complete his trip to the summit. View full article

In the first monthly in-season update of our top prospect list, we have one graduate (alas: kind of), two newcomers, and a whole bunch of nuggets to discuss. Let's get into it. Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports The Cubs' farm system has yielded a huge number of interesting performances over the first six weeks of the young season. There's a sense of growing depth and greater potential impact than we anticipated even two months ago, although we've also seen a bit of the inevitable downside of relying on young players at the big-league level. Without further ado, though, let's discuss the particulars. The Graduate (Student): Hayden Wesneski Now over 70 innings pitched in the big leagues, Wesneski has graduated from our list, but he's back in Iowa to pursue the pitching equivalent of a Master's degree--or, depending on your perspective, to clean up what was a pretty sloppy capstone project. The pieces of a valuable mid-rotation starter all seem to be there for the right-hander, but as he's worked through multiple adjustments to better balance disguising his release points with commanding his fastballs, he's lost one of the vital skills of any modern starter: the ability to miss bats. Thus, weirdly, he exits the list as a likely success story, but is going to sojourn back in the minor leagues for (in all likelihood) the rest of May. Big Movers: Ben Brown and Miguel Amaya Announce Their Arrivals; Caleb Kilian Falls Flat Before the season began, we had Ben Brown ranked as the ninth-best prospect on the Cubs farm. Six weeks later, he's number two, and it's not a case of irrational or unjustifiable exuberance. He's posted a 0.59 ERA and struck out 47 of the 119 batters he's faced, adjusting smoothly even to an unusually early promotion to Triple A. His fastball is exploding on hitters, with great ride at the top of the zone from a very high release point, and he's developed two distinct breaking balls that play gorgeously off of them. At this point, it would take an injury or a deeply disappointing developmental hiccup for him not to debut with the parent club some time this summer. Amaya, of course, has already made his debut, and that was the major driver of his ascent from 19th on our preseason list to a new placement of eighth. As I wrote in the initial report, the biggest variable for him is health, and so far, he's healthy. He looks mechanically sound behind the plate, is drawing gushing reviews from pitchers and other teammates for his work at the intricacies of catching, and put a hurt on the ball even against big-league pitching during his short stint in MLB. There are still things to be ironed out, like his deleterious strikeout rate, and we can't yet assume his injury troubles are a thing of the past. At the moment, though, he looks like the catcher of the future. By contrast, Caleb Kilian's future might all be in the past. He continues to tease those who want to see something in him, with decent velocity and a deep arsenal, but neither his control nor his movement look good enough to get big-league hitters out. We can also say, without unfairly tagging him with makeup concerns, that he hasn't been able to meet the mental challenge of pitching in MLB in any of his first few trials, and the numbers even in Iowa don't inspire much confidence that that's about to change. We've seen pitchers with similar skill sets get lost for a similarly long time, then figure something out and take off. Mitch Keller, of the Pirates, is doing it right now. It's very rare, though, and Kilian doesn't have much more time to prove that he's capable of being that kind of special case. New Blood 17. Kohl Franklin - RHP It's been five years since Franklin was a high-school draftee. It's time for him to put up or shut up. That's why, despite the pandemic and a troubling shoulder injury robbing him of two full seasons of development, the Cubs gave him an early bump up to Double-A Tennessee. It wasn't exactly earned based on pure performance, because Franklin battled the same persistent walk trouble he has had throughout his pro career during his brief time at South Bend to open the season, but it was definitely necessary. It's time to see what his stuff, command, and durability will allow him to do against better competition. Of those three factors, the stuff is the one least in question. Franklin has a plus fastball-changeup combination and is getting more comfortable with a couple of breaking pitches. He's impressed a lot of prospect watchers with the flashes of command of each of those secondary pitches that he's shown this year. He's not nearly consistent enough with that yet, though, and even his fastball is sometimes sprayed around the zone too much. Whatever he's going to become, he has to do it quickly, and at this point, it's most likely that he'll end up trying it as a reliever in the near future. If he can tighten up his control and his pitch mix a bit, though, he still has a chance to stick in the rotation, where his shoulder will be easier to maintain and keep healthy. 20. Pablo Aliendo - C Like Kohl Franklin, Aliendo came into the organization in 2018. Like Franklin, he didn't make much immediate progress, and then was hurt by the loss of the minor-league season to the pandemic in 2020. Aliendo has finally found traction since the start of 2022, gaining a reputation as a plus defensive catcher, with both above-average athleticism and the requisite commitment to the position. Until this year, though, that defense-first profile was really all there was to Aliendo. He had basic bat-to-ball skills, but neither an apparent plan at the plate nor the strength to generate power. This spring, that seems to be changing. Facing Double-A pitching for the first time, he's slugging .576, with 10 extra-base hits in just 17 games. He's traded quite a bit of contact for that pop, but being able to access it at all is a major development for him. If Aliendo keeps this up, he could be an impactful catcher, even if it be in a Welington Castillo kind of way--average or better power, solid defense at the most important defensive position, all slightly capped in value by a limited hit tool. Overall Impressions Though he hasn't yet graduated, Matt Mervis emerged from the system already this spring. Jeremiah Estrada looks likely to fill an important role in the bullpen for the balance of the season, if only because the team needs more bullpen help than expected. Christopher Morel exhausted his prospect status last year, but the Cubs still deserve some credit for the way he's burst back onto the scene after some time in Iowa to hone his approach. Those three typify the general trend of the Cubs organization. They're on the rise. Here's hoping for another month of encouraging, even tantalizing performances in the weeks ahead. View full article

The Cubs are, suddenly, hanging by a thread. They're two games under .500, just one-third of the way through a tough road trip. It's time for a gut check, at every level of the organization. A baseball season is full of opportunities to indulge in unearned catastrophizing. There are 162 games, and they can't all constitute either a jubilee or a crisis. Each game is just one, and it's important to view them as mere cells within a living, changing organism of a season. That's easy to do after one bad series. It's harder to do after a truly dreadful one, like the one the Cubs lost to the Twins in Minnesota this weekend, as they allowed 27 runs in two brutal losses. Six weeks into a 27-week season, though, three bad weeks--which is what it's now been for the Cubs, who started 11-6 and are 8-15 since--don't represent a blip. Increasingly, the Cubs' identity is mediocrity. No longer, either, is the team's run differential painting the picture of a legitimate contender who's merely gotten unlucky. That narrative was always as faulty as overreliance on their actual record, but being thumped 27-4 over the last two days has brought the two indices close enough that it no longer needs to be debated much. So far, the Cubs just haven't dispelled any of the doubts shown by pundits and projection systems before the year began. They projected to be a slightly below-average team. They're a slightly below-average team, so far. The arc of their playoff odds reflects that reality. They began the season as distant longshots to reach the postseason in the National League, just north of 10 percent likely. At a few points between late April and the earliest part of this month, they nosed up to about 30 percent. Now, however, the sleepy division has awakened, and Chicago's window of opportunity seems to be slamming shut on their fingers. Their odds are still up, relative to Opening Day, but they're back to being afterthoughts. This doesn't amount to a death sentence. The Cubs are better today than they were when the season began. They've added Matt Mervis and Christopher Morel to the roster, and Seiya Suzuki (who had some great at-bats and hit the ball very hard at Target Field) is ensconced again in right field. Their pitching depth is proving to be better than it was in either of the last two seasons, even though the last two games were an abrupt and grating dose of regression for a unit that was overperforming until then. There could still be more help coming from the farm before the year is out. The team can't wait for any of that, though. Nor can they depend on their new blood to provide all the verve and resilience. This coaching staff and this roster were built on the premise that good leadership could pull a talented team through this kind of slump, allowing them to emerge stronger on the other side and climb right back into the race. That's far from being the only reason that the team extended Nico Hoerner, or why they signed Dansby Swanson, or even why they wanted Eric Hosmer and Tucker Barnhart, but it was a very real part of the appeal of each. If Jed Hoyer was right about the staff he hired and the players he acquired, they can right this ship and stay afloat as the heat of the summer gathers and the playoff picture takes shape. That's a high-stakes gamble, though, and it's not feeling as safe a bet as it did a few weeks ago, when the team was showing such spunk even when things went wrong. With series in Houston and Philadelphia this week, the team's work is cut out for them. They've won just one of their last five series, but to come back to Wrigley Field next week as a .500 team, they need to win two of them in a row. Heck, forget about .500. They need to win a couple of series in a row, anyway. It would be easier to feel confident about that, though, if they weren't about to face both combatants in last year's World Series. View full article

Barely a week ago, one could find plenty of Cubs fans discussing what it would take to extend Cody Bellinger. He was the heartbeat of the Cubs' offense. Right now, though, he's struggling, and the little problems that were below the surface before are coming to the fore. It was probably overly simplistic, all along, to debate whether this year's Cody Bellinger is the MVP version or the guy who scuffled so badly over the last two seasons. There existed, all along, a spectrum of possibilities much wider and more balanced than those two extremes, and it shouldn't shock us that Bellinger is falling into the middle of it at the moment. For the year, Bellinger still sports an impressive overall line. He's batting .270/.338/.497, and playing fine defense in center field. He's shown some power, and some speed. His skill set appears balanced and complete. Over the last two weeks, though, he's at just .226/.271/.359. His strikeout rate is nearly 25 percent during that span, and he's taken only four walks. His power is down. All of that is, fundamentally, fine. It falls within the bounds of normal fluctuation over a sample this small. It wouldn't be any cause for alarm, but for one thing: Bellinger's power, now so far down, was never up quite as much as it seemed, anyway. Pick whichever index of hard contact you prefer; Bellinger's is rough. In 2019, when he won that MVP award, he averaged 91.1 miles per hour of exit velocity on batted balls. Almost 46 percent of his contact was over 95 miles per hour off the bat. His maximum exit velocity was 110.6 miles per hour. Obviously, those numbers all dropped off in 2020, 2021, and 2022. In those campaigns, his average exit velocities fell to just north of 89 miles per hour. His hard-hit rate fell first to 41.5 percent, and then into the mid-30s. His hardest-hit balls (a good measurement of a player's raw power) were just over 107 miles per hour in each of the last two years. That last number is actually higher for Bellinger this season. He's hit a ball 108.1 miles per hour, part of him flashing a swing and a general physicality that much better matched his prime years than the last couple. He's looked healthy, and when healthy, he should have good power. Alas, on every other score, the quality of his contact is way down. His average exit velocity has tumbled to 87.2 miles per hour. That number is the roughest estimator of the ability to make solid contact, but it's just one datum. Only 31.9 percent of Bellinger's batted balls have been harder than 95 miles per hour. That's well below-average. Those are full-season figures. They don't only reflect his recent slump. They're also contributors to the rising strikeout and falling walk rates we've seen from him during that slump, though. Pitchers came after him a bit early in the season, and he hammered the ball enough to scare them out of the zone for a while. Recently, though, they've sensed the lack of danger in his swing, and they've invaded the zone on him again. This time, he's not fighting them off. The story of this season is far from complete. Bellinger could well turn this around. This is a troubling indicator, though. The Cubs go into these stretches, these funks, during which they can't seem to barrel up anything. Bellinger came to them from the Dodgers, who reinforce contact quality really well. The Cubs are much less consistent in that regard. Bellinger is an essential piece of their offense, but right now, neither he nor they are especially potent. You hear baseball people say, of weak or unimposing players, "he can be pitched to." At the moment, Bellinger and the Cubs can be pitched to, and that's a problem, in both the short and the longer term. View full article

I've never seen a bullpen like this. Baseball might never have seen a bullpen like this. In the twilight of the age of the two-pitch relief specialist, the Cubs are ushering in a new era of relievers who throw everything. Watching the Cubs pitching staff in 2023 would give a novice fan all the wrong ideas about how the typical team approaches the craft. Friday night was a perfect example. For six innings, Drew Smyly stood out there and mixed spike curveballs with riding two-seam fastballs. He threw a small handful of cutters, but he efficiently carved through the Twins lineup using almost nothing but his unique fastball and curve. When Smyly yielded to Adbert Alzolay, though, things turned inside-out. Alzolay, the hard-throwing reliever, used five different offerings in his 22-pitch, two-inning appearance. Mark Leiter, Jr. closed out the 6-2 Chicago win, and needed only eight pitches to do so, but he still threw four different pitch types. This is the bizarre experience of facing the Cubs, for opposing teams. Smyly and Justin Steele are, give or take, two-pitch starters. Almost everyone in the bullpen, though, has a repertoire that would be considered deep even if they were starters. Alzolay throws a four-seamer, a sinker, a cutter, a traditional slider, a sweeper, and (not seen Friday night) a changeup. Leiter throws his sinker and splitter most of the time, but mixes in a cutter, a four-seamer, and a big, slow curveball to keep hitters from sitting on either of those pitches. Keegan Thompson has virtually scrapped his changeup this year, which brings him down to a measly four-pitch mix: four-seamer, cutter, slider, curveball. Michael Rucker still uses his change, and has the same suite of other stuff as Thompson. Javier Assad goes cutter, four-seamer, sinker, slider, curve, and change. Michael Fulmer has the cutter, the four-seamer, the sinker, a new sweeper, and a changeup. Yes, there are a couple of traditional relievers out there. The Cubs didn't get ahold of Brad Boxberger and immediately demand that he throw two new pitches, and Julian Merryweather is that archetypal fastball-slider guy--although he also leans on a changeup against certain lefties, and he's added a sweeper this year in lieu of his old curveball. Brandon Hughes, gifted with such an incredible slider, really is just a two-pitch guy, plus the occasional sinker to run in on the hands of a lefty and keep them from diving out over the plate after that breaking ball. As the season goes on, the team might call upon some hurlers currently at Iowa who would be more familiar in their styles to fans who observed the 2010s closely. In reality, though, the age of that kind of reliever is slowly coming to its end. Hitters are getting too good. Only the few pitchers blessed with a truly devastating pitch or two will be able to get outs with sufficient consistency while using that limited an arsenal. Most guys, instead, will start to look more like the Cubs' relievers do. It will probably always be rare for a reliever to have five distinct pitches, as several of these arms do, but even in relief, you're often going to need three pitches you can throw to lefties, and three you can throw to righties. That's more true than ever because of the three-batter minimum rule, of course, but it would be true even without that constraint in place. If I'm right about the direction of the game's evolution, then the Cubs are ahead of the curve. Every reliever is a failed starter, in some sense, but not every one of them gets to that point the same way. The Cubs have a handful of guys who, via their various paths, arrived at a certain readiness to work in relief, but who felt (correctly, it seems) that they would be better even in that role if they held onto most of their repertoire, or even added a new wrinkle to it. This puts huge pressure on the team's catchers, and on Tommy Hottovy and the rest of the pitching support infrastructure. The knowledge of each reliever's repertoire that is necessary to get this particular unit humming and thrumming at full capacity is massive, and it speaks well of Yan Gomes and Tucker Barnhart (the latter of whom, for all we might malign his lack of any offensive value, seems to be a great fit for this particular challenge) that it's worked so well. If, as the season wears on, the Cubs call up Miguel Amaya for a longer stay and utilize three catchers in some kind of rotation (as they did in 2015 and 2016), we shouldn't be surprised. That might be the best way to use the final spot on their bench, in fact--making the parting of ways between the team and Eric Hosmer a little more likely. The front office has caught some flak for the fact that they were less aggressive in signing established big-league relievers this winter than in previous ones. That's a fair criticism, given that the Cubs have lost some close games in the early going and that David Ross has not always used this farrago of a bullpen to its greatest possible effect. Still, especially considering the broader context of the offseason (where they spent over $75 million for 2023 alone on Dansby Swanson, Cody Bellinger, Trey Mancini, Jameson Taillon, and Smyly, in addition to other, smaller moves), it's equally fair to give Jed Hoyer and Carter Hawkins some props. They, along with their coaching and player-development staff, have found a creative new avenue to building a good bullpen: forcing the other team to roll a die in order to guess right on a pitch, instead of just flipping a coin. View full article

The clearest bright spot for the 2023 Chicago Cubs, so far, is the starting rotation. That unit has been impressive both in its depth and its excellence, and the former is about to get even better. Now: what will they do about it? Rehabbing right-hander Kyle Hendricks is due to make another start for the Iowa Cubs on Sunday. After that, though, it's likely that he'll be ready to re-join the big-league rotation. Even in his last rehab outing, earlier this week, he worked five strong innings. With his return, the Cubs stand to gain even greater depth and consistency, but it also means that the squeeze is on. Obviously, the rotation spots of Marcus Stroman and Justin Steele are locked in and fully secure. So are those of Drew Smyly and Jameson Taillon, who (whatever performance concerns one might have about them from one start to the next, and despite the perpetual health concerns that hang over each) represent significant financial investments by the organization and are proven veterans. That leaves Hayden Wesneski as the odd man out, if the rotation remains a five-man unit. There's a case to be made for sending him down, too, because his start to this season has shown us several things on which he could work during a sojourn in Des Moines. Yet, the guy has gotten better with almost every start. He's not yet missing bats the way he and the team surely envision, but he's showing better command of his full arsenal; learning how to balance the need to disguise his offerings with the necessity of executing them well; finding ways to deceive and attack hitters from both sides of the plate; and working through adversity to finish his outings strong. In light of all that, it might be worth simply expanding the rotation to accommodate its familiar newcomer, rather than swapping him in for Wesneski. A six-man rotation is no longer an unthinkable proposition in the modern game. In fact, the Angels, Astros, Dodgers, and Padres used one for most of 2022, and the Brewers and Angels did so in 2021, as well. Some of those are special cases, because those rotations were designed to allow for optimal rest and usage for exceptional hurlers: post-Tommy John surgery Justin Verlander, for Houston, and Shohei Ohtani, for the Halos. Still, the six-man staff is beginning to find traction, and if you think about it, it makes sense. For one thing, the five-man rotation evolved under different rules and conditions than the league now has. Rosters were only 25 players deep. Expansion happened every decade or so. Teams carried fewer pitchers and prized their offensive bench options more. Bullpens were built around matchups, and it was permissible and reasonably common to see pitchers face just one or two batters per game. The 26th roster spot, alone, makes some part of the case for a six-man rotation. In the age of 13-man pitching staffs, it might be more efficient to use six starters, anyway. As the rate of injury continues to rise, and with the added complication and potential risk of the pitch timer, using six starters also makes sense as one path to keeping each starter healthy. Unlike going down to a four-man rotation, this wouldn't require an adjustment for which pitchers might not be ready. Every starter has a routine they utilize when they have a fifth day of rest, anyway, because that's fairly common even in a five-man formation. The only new challenge would be keeping guys on schedule when an extra off day or two creeps in. Obviously, there are implications for the bullpen, which would shorten to seven pitchers. The Cubs already love to use their relievers for multiple innings, though, and anyway, the utility of a sixth starter dramatically outweighs that of the eighth reliever. Further, part of the theory of the six-man rotation is that each starter can work (very slightly) deeper into each game than they might otherwise, which should decrease the team's dependence on the relief corps. Last year, the teams who led each league in innings pitched per start were the Astros and Padres, two members of the budding six-starter fraternity. It's not likely that the six starters would stay in rotation for the entire balance of the season. Someone will get hurt, and if (by some miracle) they don't, the team could shorten the rotation down the stretch, as the Dodgers and Padres each did for portions of August and September last year. Pushing back the decision to make Wesneski anything other than a big-league starter seems to make sense, but it needn't be permanently avoided if he starts to struggle again. The organization's improving depth beyond the six would-be starters themselves makes this easier to attempt, too. With Ben Brown and Jordan Wicks close to being ready for the big leagues as starters; with Jeremiah Estrada seemingly stuck on the Iowa-Chicago shuttle already; with Javier Assad stretched out for versatile usage; and with Bailey Horn and Codi Heuer lurking as reinforcement for the bullpen, the team has the sheer quantity of good arms to try something creative and accept the attendant risks. Hendricks and Smyly would definitely benefit significantly from the extra rest this approach would afford, given their ages and recent injury issues. The same is probably (though slightly less clearly) true of Stroman, Steele, and Taillon, because of the nature of their stuff. Most of all, though, it would give the Cubs time and information to make better evaluations of Wesneski, without hurting their chances of reaching the trade deadline in a competitive position. View full article

1. PCA 2. Kevin Alcantara 3. Ben Brown 4. Matt Mervis 5. Jordan Wicks 6. Cade Horton 7. Owen Caissie 8. Brennen Davis 9. Miguel Amaya 10. Cristian Hernandez 11. Porter Hodge 12. Alexander Canario 13. Daniel Palencia 14. Jackson Ferris 15. Moises Ballesteros 16. Kevin Made 17. Kohl Franklin 18. James Triantos 19. Luke Little 20. Jeremiah Estrada

Tuesday night was Jameson Taillon's biggest and best chance, to date, to assert himself as the mid-rotation workhorse the Cubs paid for when they gave him $68 million in free agency this winter. He's a pitcher in transition, and he's been slowed by an injury. Still, there's hope aplenty. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports Because everyone loves the sweeper, the fact that Jameson Taillon came to Cubs camp this spring eager to work one into his arsenal grabbed all the headlines. A handful of starts into his tenure, though, it's easy to see that there's more going on than the addition of a pitch. Obviously, the difficulties Taillon has had getting going for the Cubs have to be ascribed in part to the groin injury that sidelined him for a portion of the season. It's affected his command and control, which are even more important to his effectiveness than those things are to most pitchers. It could also be affecting his power and consistency of movement. However, there's also another dimension of change at work. Taillon hasn't merely added the sweeper this spring; he's also making radically different choices with the pitches already in his repertoire. That was against left-handed batters. Here's what he's done against right-handed ones. It shouldn't surprise us to see Taillon going to the cutter more often. Only the Brewers, Guardians, and Red Sox have thrown cutters more often than the Cubs so far this year. Craig Breslow, Tommy Hottovy, and their cohort don't just like cut-ride fastballs; they also like cutters themselves. (Don't forget, either, that Justin Steele's fastball is still counting as a fastball, even though it moves much more like a cutter these days.) Taillon is making other changes, too. He just came from the Yankees, who are a franchise focused heavily on the four-seamer. The Cubs, by contrast, love a sinker, especially one that is really defined more by its arm-side run than by its sink, and that can therefore be thrown up in the zone at times against same-handed batters, to induce weak pop-ups and to better set up pitches that change the eye level. Thus, against righties, Taillon is now backing up that sweeping slider mostly with sinkers, not four-seamers. The sweeper has effectively replaced his curveball against them, and the cutter has become his go-to pitch to attack the outside corner. Because of his injury, though, we haven't even come close to seeing Taillon truly figure out what his remixed repertoire is going to look like. I don't think we'd have seen him settle in yet even if he'd been fully healthy, but the stint on the shelf made sure of it. For one thing, there's a certain lack of conviction in the fastball mix against righties. He's not yet exploring the top of the zone with that sinker at all, so it's not setting up the sweeper the way it could. More importantly, it seems to me that Taillon could choose between the four-seamer and the cutter, rather than trying to utilize both. He might not be able to touch every part of the zone as easily with that adjustment, but pitching isn't a game of hitting every possible spot. That leads into another area Taillon and the Cubs could address: he's starting to stretch the limits of what any pitcher can be expected to harness. If he's throwing a four-seamer, a sinker, a cutter, a curveball, an occasional changeup, and two flavors of slider, he might be cannibalizing some of those offerings, and making it harder to sustain the feel required to use them each effectively. New-age pitching analysts and AI-fueled pitch modeling love when a pitcher adds a pitch, but consider Steele, the Cubs' two-pitch ace. Taillon might be better off if he focuses, at least in the short term, on a few pitches in which he has greater confidence or with which he has a longer history. He could always add things back in once he finds some rhythm and success. Some of this also traces back to the fact that, despite all their talk this winter about instant chemistry and an eagerness to get to work, none of the Cubs' catchers have previous experience working with Taillon. They've been learning how to use his arsenal even as he's been expanding and tweaking it. There were bound to be some hiccups, especially during tense moments within a game when one or more of those offerings isn't effective. Taillon's velocity, extension, movement, and spin are all intact. He's still a pitcher with big-time upside. He just needs to better blend and sequence his pitches, and that will take time, but it'll happen. View full article

Until this season, one could make an argument that David Ross hadn't been given enough talent or a sufficiently clear mandate to evaluate him as the Cubs' manager. That argument was flimsy, but it could be made. It's no longer valid, and Ross's managerial heat should be red-hot. Image courtesy of © Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports The latest (but far from first) example of Ross's ineptitude came Tuesday night. Many managers throughout baseball history have had the unfortunate tendency to place too much trust in a starter who appeared to be cruising, but Ross (like most of his counterparts in the last decade or so) has proved not to have that particular itch. Alas, he's replaced it with an equally lethal vice: he sticks far too long with relievers who seem to be cruising. In a tie game on Tuesday night, that took the form of Ross sending Javier Assad out to begin a sixth inning of work in the top of the ninth. That was inexcusable, inexplicable, and indefensible. Over five innings of sparkling relief, Assad had kept his pitch count low, and he'd looked great. That's irrelevant. It was the ninth inning of a tie game, at home. That has to be a spot in which you give the ball to a fresh, trusted high-leverage reliever, especially when the incumbent hurler is a reliever who had already pitched what would have been a fine start. If this were a rare occurrence, we could easily forgive it. On the contrary, Ross routinely tries to get an extra inning out of a reliever if they look good in a given frame. I wrote last month about multi-inning relievers as a staple of the Cubs' bullpen strategy, but this is something different. This is asking a pitcher who clearly had been intended to be used for a certain stretch being asked to go three more outs. Often, perhaps wanting to reinforce his gesture of faith, Ross won't even warm up a reliever behind the guy he's riding. That was the case Tuesday night, which is why even after Paul DeJong led off the inning with the go-ahead home run, Assad couldn't be yanked to keep the deficit to a minimum. He had to be left in for three more batters, while Michael Rucker hurriedly got warm, and in that time, the Cardinals shoved another run across the plate, rendering the Cubs' comeback hopes desperately remote. If, in turn, this were Ross's only quirk or foible, it would be forgivable, and perhaps it would be more worthwhile to talk about how the front office might correct the systematic errors. That, sadly, is not the case, either. Ross routinely burns out his club during hot streaks, making them vulnerable to long cold spells. He received ample praise during the last two months of each of the last two seasons for the spunk shown by teams with no hope of winning anything, but that praise was overcooked, and it overlooked the sluggish, sloppy, non-competitive baseball played for long stretches in the middle of each of those seasons, helping to ensure that the final two months were irrelevant. If he were the extraordinary clubhouse man with the magic touch that some imagine, his teams wouldn't go through such long and miserable slogs. They might still have lost a lot, but it didn't need to look as helpless and listless as it often did. He's too loyal to veterans (like Jason Heyward) and doesn't show savvy in his construction of lineups. He's made some utterly head-scratching decisions in recent weeks offensively, too, bunting ill-advisedly and missing pivotal pinch-hit opportunities. Because of his status as a beloved leader on the World Series champion team of 2016, and because he did a fine job of keeping the team together over the short and absurd COVID season of 2020, Ross has been given a long leash. That has to be over now. An immediate firing isn't necessarily in order, but any careful observer has to be down on him as a long-term managerial fit for a team that is now ready to seriously contend. He was probably never the right choice for the job, and he's had a fair chance to beat that rap. It hasn't happened, and the Cubs have lost too many winnable games already in 2023 because they have the wrong man on the top step of the dugout. View full article