Matthew Trueblood

Because of the odd circumstances of his first season and the lousy injury luck that opened his second, it took us far too long to see the real Seiya Suzuki on any kind of consistent basis. At last, it's happening, and we can start to discern the size and shape of his value in an MLB outfield. Against one of the best pitchers on the planet Tuesday night, Seiya Suzuki collected two hits in his first two at-bats. The batted balls both had an exit velocity north of 111 miles per hour, and the second of them (at 113.2 miles per hour) was the hardest-hit ball of his career. It helped that Shane McClanahan is left-handed; Suzuki has crushed lefties of late. Still, the game was just one more marker on what has been an unstoppable climb for the Cubs right fielder this year. Suzuki has hit over 50 percent of his batted balls this season 95 miles per hour or harder. Contrary to popular opinion, he's not creating an inordinate share of that hard contact on the ground, either. He's elevating the ball often enough, and he's pulling it considerably more (around 39 percent, up from 28 percent in 2022), allowing him to reap something closer to the full benefit of that ability to make hard contact. He's taken a clear step forward, and games like Tuesday night remind us that he could still take another one. In some ways, Mookie Betts is a reasonable comparison for Suzuki. Their batted-ball data is quite similar. Suzuki whiffs more often, but has an equally discerning eye at the plate. An MVP award probably isn't in his future. After all, when Betts won his, he was 25. At that age, Suzuki was playing in NPB. Still, that's the level of sustained excellence of which Suzuki is capable. Because of the lockout-shortened spring training of 2022, some nagging injuries throughout last season, and the tragically-timed oblique injury he suffered this spring, we had to wait until now to see him hit his stride, but it was worth the wait. With a .310/.414/.552 batting line for the month of May, Suzuki is demonstrating the ability to live up to the cleanup role to which he's been assigned on this team. He might hit more doubles and fewer home runs than the average slugger of this era, because his hardest-hit balls seem to cluster in a slightly lower launch angle band than do those of most similar hitters, but his power, plate discipline, and pure hit tool all appear to be above-average right now. Nowhere is the comparison to Betts or the enforced circuity of his development more clear, though, than in right field itself. Suzuki struggled mightily with the adjustment to playing defense in MLB, where there are fewer domes, more day games, and different visual backgrounds to navigate. He lost an untenable number of routine fly balls in the sun, the sky, or the lights last year, and that problem even followed him into 2023. As he's been able to get healthy and take more reps, though, he's shown tremendous progress. That, too, was on display Tuesday night. Notably, Baseball Prospectus's new state-of-the-art defensive metric (Defensive Runs Prevented, or DRP) had him as 5.4 runs to the good even last season, when other metrics and (often) the eye test maligned him. This season, the other metrics are beginning to agree, and he looks much more comfortable reading the ball off the bat, leading to plays like the one above. He's already shown off an excellent arm, too. In a season marked by high highs and low lows, nothing has yet excited me quite as much as seeing Suzuki do what he's doing. He's the star the team hoped they were getting, at the discounted price made possible by the acknowledged risks of bringing a player to a new continent while paying a handsome posting fee. He's not only the key to the team staying in contention in 2023, but a cornerstone around whom they can build for the next few years. View full article

Just when things seemed almost hopeless, Marcus Stroman might have saved the Cubs’ season. Their record is lousy, but Stroman is one argument for persisting in optimism. Let’s talk about what a contract extension might look like for him. Already this season, we’ve seen multiple reports that Marcus Stroman would prefer to sign an extension with the Cubs, rather than either being dealt at the trade deadline or hitting free agency this fall. That probably shouldn’t shock us. For one thing, Stroman is already 32 years old. It makes sense for him to seek long-term security–and the big payday that comes with it–as soon as possible, rather than risk having a downturn in the second half and being less valuable than he might have hoped when the time comes to decide between his $24-million salary for 2024 or free agency. Because he’s been given a qualifying offer in the past, Stroman also doesn’t have anything to gain from being traded. The Cubs can’t make him that offer this fall and limit his free-agent value artificially, even if they retain him all year. Thus, Stroman has no reason to want to go elsewhere, likely moving to a smaller market and losing the fan capital he’s amassed in Chicago already. Even with the convenient alignment of his incentives, though, it seems like Stroman feels an authentic connection to the Cubs and to Cubs fans. To watch him pitch throughout the last year, especially during home games, has been a joy. He comes up with big outs, and his outbursts of exuberance and exultation have been welcome reminders of what is missing too much of the time at Wrigley Field lately. Stroman cares deeply about winning. He relishes the passion of the fans when the game is close and the outcome matters. That’s enjoyable and admirable. If the team can keep him around for a reasonable price, they ought to do it. What’s a reasonable price, though? That’s the key question. Since July of last year, when Stroman returned from the injury that sidelined him for a month, he’s pitched 164 ⅓ innings. His ERA is 2.57, and while his underlying numbers don’t fully support that figure, it feels a bit more sustainable than those peripherals would predict. He’s back to getting ground balls at a truly elite rate, for the first time since 2018. He’s missing more bats than he did back in 2018, too. Finding comparable players for Stroman is vital to estimating what it would cost to extend him, but it’s not easy to do. Most pitchers who are right around his skill level are much less durable than he is. Most who are as durable as he is are either considerably worse, back-end starters, or true aces, a class to which he also still doesn’t seem to belong. Worse, pitchers who do roughly approximate both his ability and his durability still feel like bad fits, because he’s a unique athlete for the position. When the White Sox signed Lance Lynn to a two-year extension in July 2021, Lynn was pitching similarly to Stroman. He was around the same age. He didn’t strike hitters out at an elite rate, but he was still well above average overall. Lynn got $38 million in new guarantees, and the equivalent to that deal now would likely be adding two years and around $40 million to Stroman’s guarantee for 2024, thus making it a three-year extension. Hyun-Jin Ryu was even more akin to Stroman, when he hit free agency after his stellar 2019. He got $80 million over four years from the Blue Jays. That seems like a more likely deal to strike, especially given the leverage Stroman has. Even Yu Darvish’s lucrative new extension with the Padres is a relevant guidepost, though Darvish is older, has a different style, and signed under different circumstances than Stroman. The problem with either comp is that neither Ryu nor Lynn remotely resembles the lithe, explosive Stroman. He’s a dramatically different athlete than those guys are. That’s the fact that shines through in almost any analysis of this situation one might attempt. It’s important to keep in mind, always, that Stroman is a unique pitcher and person. If he and the Cubs are going to find common ground and extend their relationship beyond 2023 or 2024, it will happen because the Cubs understand that. View full article

One year ago Wednesday, Ken Rosenthal wrote a column saying that firing Joe Girardi wouldn't solve the disappointing Phillies' problems. A few days later, the Phillies fired Girardi, and it immediately solved their problems. Firing David Ross won't solve the Cubs' problems, but, you know? Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports It feels, for all the world, like the 2023 Cubs are doomed to another season of untenable irrelevance. In fact, there's a real and lethal sense of existential dread settling over Cubdom, and it's not unearned. It's heavy, and it's impenetrable, and it's not just in the heads or the itchy Twitter fingers of fans. Hopelessness hangs over this team, and is perilously close to defining it. Sometimes, the written word just can't do what images and video can. I encourage you, then, to ponder this moment from NBC's The Good Place. That's not the way I prefer to see people behave, in times of trial and adversity. It's not the primary reason why, from June 3 onward, the Cubs went 65-44, including 20-9 from that day through early July. Crucially, too, Ross isn't Piniella. A similar display of fireworks from him wouldn't feel as authentic, wouldn't have the same catalytic effect, and wouldn't wake this team up the same way, because of who he is, and because of the very different composition of this team, compared to that one. Still, Piniella had something in his back pocket. He had an ace in the hole. It doesn't feel, at all, as though Ross has that left in him. In his book about the 2016 Cubs, Tom Verducci relayed a poignant anecdote about Ross. In the thundering quietude of the clubhouse after the Cubs lost Game 4 of the World Series and fell behind 3-1, someone fired their glove into the back of their locker. Ross rebuked the doubters, and told the team he would be in the lineup the next night, and that he would ensure they won. That works from a beloved veteran mentor. It doesn't work the same way for a manager. If Ross could replicate that recipe, surely, he'd have done so by now--not only this year, but when the should-be contenders of 2020 flagged at the end of the shortened season, or when the 2021 squad collapsed so thoroughly and embarrassingly in the month running up to that year's trade deadline. The 2023 Cubs probably aren't the 2022 Phillies. They're probably not the 2007 Cubs, either. However, they're dramatically more talented and complete than their record reflects. Their run differential, alone, tells us that much, but even it doesn't tell the full story. Even more importantly, with the Brewers just 28-25, the gap the team would need to close to get right back into the mix is smaller than those faced by either of the aforementioned teams. Since their 11-6 start, this club is 11-24. That can't continue, and while it feels like firing Ross won't put an end to it, they have to try something. It doesn't have to be Peeps, but this chili needs some new ingredients. View full article

Though it's suddenly far from being their only flaw, the Cubs' bullpen has been a persistent problem this year. Three relievers currently pitching for the Triple-A Iowa Cubs could change that, and it's nearly time to give them their chance. It's no secret that the Cubs' relief corps is a mess. They not only lack effective pitchers, but don't seem to have any idea how to deploy the guys they do have. David Ross looks lost. Cornered by a long outing Friday that made Javier Assad unavailable Saturday night, Ross turned to Jeremiah Estrada, Brandon Hughes, and Mark Leiter, Jr. to finish out a game in which the Cubs trailed by multiple runs by the middle innings. This farrago of penmen has been so uneven and inscrutable this year that it's impossible to pin down the ones Ross is supposed to trust and utilize for high-leverage situations, but by any reasonable reckoning, all three of those guys are on the list. That Ross used them to chase a victory the team simply didn't have in it, after letting Michael Fulmer enter in a medium-leverage situation on the back of yet another ineffective Jameson Taillon start, illustrates his bewilderment about who can help him and how to get the most out of any of them. If this team is going to turn things around (a prospect that looks increasingly far-fetched, but one on which no one should yet be willing to entirely give up), they need to radically remake the bullpen. Luckily, they have the arms to do just that, working for the Iowa Cubs. This week needs to see the front office perform one more shakeup, in the hopes of waking up their somnambulant roster. The easiest call-up will be Codi Heuer, who pitched a clean inning for the I-Cubs Saturday, striking out two and issuing no walks. Heuer is eligible to come off the 60-day injured list on Tuesday, and although his numbers during his rehab stint have evinced some of the erraticism endemic to returnees from Tommy John surgery, he's honed in on the strike zone better as the time has passed. He's frequently reaching 98 miles per hour with his fastball. His changeup and slider are right in line with their previous forms. He should be with the big-league team as soon as he's allowed to be, and could quickly earn back the closer's role he briefly held near the end of 2021. Whereas Heuer was always likely to be a key cog in this team's bullpen, few would have guessed in July 2021 that fellow former White Sox farmhand Bailey Horn would be in a similar position. He is. Horn has a 1.96 ERA in time split between Tennessee and Iowa this year. In just over 18 innings of work, he's fanned 29, while allowing only nine walks and eight hits. He's throwing 95 miles per hour from the left side, with near-elite carry. He has two distinct flavors of breaking ball: a big, slow curveball that changes eye level and speed against righties; and a slider that is firmer and hades away from the neat vertical line of movement implied by his delivery and shown by his fastball and curve, against lefties. The curve might not play as nicely in MLB as it has in the minors, but he has enough funk in his fast-paced delivery and enough command of that rising fastball to have a good chance at being a solid complement to Hughes. Heuer was part of the Craig Kimbrel deal. Horn was the return for Ryan Tepera. To fully bring the trio of relievers the Cubs traded in 2021 back in their new skins to help the 2023 club, then, we need only account for Andrew Chafin. Hello, Daniel Palencia. After a brief detour to the development list (while the team wisely aborted any effort to make it work for him as a starter), he's gotten the bump from Tennessee to Iowa, and he's been converted to relief. I said it on this week's edition of the unofficial podcast of North Side Baseball, This is Not a Rebuild: I still think Palencia could lead the Chicago Cubs in saves--not down the road, but in 2023. Certainly, it helps that no Cub currently has more than two of those (they only have six as a team, thanks to being so lousy and losing nearly all their close games), but I would be willing to be that bold even if Fulmer or Leiter had four or five of them right now. Palencia reminds me (not physically, but in terms of stuff and career arc) of Edwin Diaz and Jhoan Duran. Díaz was a starter in the Mariners system until May 6, 2016. One month after his move to the bullpen, he debuted in the majors on June 6. By the start of August, he was the team's closer. Durán, with his fastball often touching and even exceeding 100 miles per hour but unable to stay healthy as a starter in 2021, made the move to the bullpen in the middle of spring training in 2022. He made the Opening Day roster for the Twins and has been their relief ace basically since Day One. He might not be quite as ready as Heuer or Horn, but Palencia showed even in his first taste of Triple-A competition that he has the stuff to move smoothly into an MLB bullpen. Like Durán has continued to do, he still throws four pitches in relief, but unlike Durán or Díaz, he might not have a truly devastating secondary offering right away. Even so, his fastball and the ability to utilize multiple offerings should make him immediately effective. By the by, he made his last start in Double A on May 6, too. If we assume that Leiter, Hughes, and Adbert Alzolay are more or less locked into the bullpen mix for now, there will need to be some bloodletting whenever the team calls up Heuer, Horn, and Palencia. Fulmer should be the first to go, but Julian Merryweather can be right behind him. Though both were solid offseason pick-ups, it's pretty clear that neither is going to even have significant value at the trade deadline--let alone help the Cubs avoid needing to think that way. There will be some challenging juggling ahead. Thanks to the front office's failure to formulate or stick to a clear plan for the usage of Assad, they're running out of times they can option him during the season. That will force Estrada to stay on the Chicago-Des Moines shuttle a bit longer, even if the team doesn't elect to rapidly activate these three young hurlers. Michael Rucker still has options, so he figures to start riding some buses soon, but merely keeping fresh arms out there isn't going to solve the Cubs' problem. They need to get a couple of dominant pitchers with bat-missing stuff slotted in for late-inning use, so Ross can stop guessing and put his relievers in a better position to succeed. Heuer, Horn, and Palencia give them the best chance to achieve that turnaround in the minuscule amount of time they have left to do so. View full article

Yeah, man. Maddon was fired after 2019. Ross took over in 2020, and yes, they won the division in that first year, but they ran out of steam before the end even then, and that was a 60-game season. I’d call this a fourth straight year of not meeting what should be a realistic standard of competition and credibility, even if actual winning was a bit of a reach in two of those.

Most Cubs fans agree that the early stages of this season have been disappointing. Increasingly, there have been calls for changes in baseball leadership for the team. Those aren't out of line, but we need to clarify a couple of things. Image courtesy of © Lucas Peltier-USA TODAY Sports A couple of weeks ago, after another close and winnable game slipped away for the Cubs against the Cardinals at Wrigley Field, I wrote a column saying that David Ross will not be able to get the team back over the hump and into contention. Many people responded to that piece by saying that the fault for the team's poor start really lies with Jed Hoyer, and that he should be the one on the hot seat, instead. In fact, that's been a theme on Cubs Twitter: that the talent deficit with which he's worked makes it too hard to evaluate Ross, and that the front office should be held accountable instead. Before we go any further, let me reiterate one thing I said in the original piece about Ross: I'm not calling for him to be fired immediately. A small but growing number of fans is saying that, but not me. Timing a decision like that, in my opinion, requires more information than any of us who do not have close and regular contact with the organization can credibly claim to have. What I do want to make clear, though, is that the idea of Hoyer (or, extra laughably, Carter Hawkins) being fired before Ross is a fantasy, and not even an especially well-plotted one. The Cubs hired David Ross as the successor to Joe Maddon, after the 2019 season. Jed Hoyer didn't step up to the top baseball executive job until Theo Epstein departed, after the 2020 campaign. While he was certainly in the room and a valued minority partner to Epstein, Hoyer essentially inherited Ross. He had to navigate ownership limitations on spending that made short-term contention almost impossible, and he had to turn over several key roles in the front office, but he didn't enjoy the privilege of doing all that with a clean slate. For all of those reasons, and more, Hoyer and Hawkins will get to fire Ross and hire another manager, before the ownership group seriously considers firing them and shopping for a new front office. That's just the way it is, and Cubs fans should be glad of that. In the rare cases when that hasn't been true (most notably, with the Angels, dating all the way back to Mike Scioscia's time there), it's created a mess and a lack of direction for the franchises involved. The 2023 Cubs continue to tantalize us. They look good enough to contend for the largely unguarded crown of the NL Central, and the likely claimants to the Wild Card berths in the senior circuit haven't exactly run away with things. It might be that they need to make a change, so as not to waste and miss the opportunity before them, If they do so, though, or even if they make a change in leadership this coming fall, it will be Ross who gets the axe. There's little point in arguing about that. When the issue of Ross's job security comes up, changing the focus to Hoyer instead is a needless distraction. View full article

A couple of softly-hit balls fell in, and the defense behind him wasn't what it needs to be. That said, the Cubs' erstwhile ace made too many mistakes Thursday night to excuse his loss on those bases. It would have been wildly unfair to expect vintage Kyle Hendricks on Thursday night. In his first appearance on a big-league mound since last July, Hendricks was bound to be a bit less than dominant. He was, but he also showed flashes of the good version of himself. His velocity was fine, and the movement on his changeup (both versions) was encouraging. He looked just good enough, in fact, that there was a lot of talk about his bad luck. In the Mets' three-run second inning, Hendricks allowed four straight two-out hits, none of which were clean, blistered batted balls. His shaky control from the first inning was tightened up, though, and after that (before running into more trouble in the fifth) he would lock things down. Naturally, some fans even dismissed the damage he did allow, because some of the key hits seemed so fluky. I understand the impulse, but I don't think pretending that bad luck was the driver of his bad numbers is necessary, even for those determined to find optimism in this outing. Again, based on his sheer stuff, Hendricks looked good enough to have a chance to stabilize and be a workhorse for the back of this rotation the rest of the year. However, he was the catalyst for his own misfortune Thursday night. All four of those hits in the second inning came with two strikes. All four came on changeups, and the last three came on changeups in the strike zone. These were still not dreadful pitches. Last year, when things went especially sour, Hendricks was missing over the heart of the plate with those, and they were getting hit out of the park. These, at least, stayed on the edges, which is why they induced seemingly innocuous contact, rather than thunderous homers. Still, it's neither the fault of his fielders nor a product of bad luck that Hendricks gave up those hits. In those counts, with that pitch, based on the way they had them each set up, Hendricks needed to throw those hitters strike-to-ball cambios. The pitch needed to dip below the zone, even if not by much. When people talk about Hendricks having a thin margin for error, this is what they mean. It's not that he can't afford to attack the heart of the plate; plenty of pitchers only find danger there. It's that Hendricks has to be able to execute that kind of pitch, and so at a high rate. When he misses just a little, he falls behind in counts, or he gives up seemingly weak and unearned hits. That's always been true. At his best, Hendricks not only hit those spots with good movement and deception, but repeated the trick with staggering consistency and accuracy. That feel--that special skill--deteriorated badly in 2021 and only intermittently resurfaced in 2022. That he didn't have that feel back in his first start in 10 months is no big deal. We just need to be clear about what was and what wasn't really going on there. Next time out, Hendricks does need to better locate those two-strike changeups. If he can't, he's not going to regain even an attenuated facsimile of his former glory. View full article

When the Cubs signed Marcus Stroman on the eve of the lockout in late 2021, they envisioned helping him reclaim the top of the strike zone with his four-seam fastball. In 2022, it didn't work. This year, though, that's changing. Image courtesy of © Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports There's no full-scale reinvention happening here. Marcus Stroman will (probably) always be a sinker-first pitcher, and the Cubs prefer to have their pitchers sink or cut their fastballs, anyway. When pitching coach Tommy Hottovy and the rest of the team's pitching infrastructure got ahold of Stroman, though, they did have some idea of finding greater utility for his four-seamer. Stroman has always had above-average spin on his stuff, especially his fastballs. His short stature ensures a low release point. Those things, in combination, should ensure the ability to attack the top of the zone and get whiffs with a riding four-seamer. That's the theory, and it's why Stroman was open to trying it out. It did not work. Last year, Stroman used his four-seamer about 12 percent of the time throughout the first two-plus months of his campaign. During that time, he had an ERA of 5.32. After he returned from the injury that sidelined him from early June through mid-July, his ERA dropped by more than half--and so did his use of the four-seamer. The correlation there does not imply causation, in either direction. Stroman's cutter took a beating early last year, too. He struggled with location and sequencing. His problems went beyond the fastball, in whatever form. Still, it's clear that the 2022 version of Stroman was not able to make effective use of that pitch, in the broader context of his arsenal. Stroman is no quitter, though. Height doesn't measure the willingness to make thoughtful adjustments, and to try again if something doesn't work, any better than it measures heart. He's come back in 2023 with a better plan for weaponizing the fastball. He's almost exclusively using his sinker and slider (or sweeper, or slurve, or maybe it's really some of all three; he befuddles each of the major pitch-classification systems) against right-handed hitters. Against lefties, though, he's a kitchen-sink guy, and one of the many looks he's giving those hitters is the true, rising fastball. His velocity is down by a mile per hour, but Stroman is getting just as much spin on it as he achieved last year. His spin efficiency is, technically, diminished, yet he's getting more movement--more rise, and a bit more run. Partially as a result of that (but also because he's locating and plotting it better), he's getting those whiffs he and the Cubs imagined when they first started tinkering with this last year. In fact, of the 361 pitchers who have thrown at least 50 four-seamers this year, Stroman has induced whiffs on the 14th-highest share of opponents' swings. He gets a lot of help from the fact that he's using the pitch only tactically and selectively, but even so, his results are staggeringly dominant. Here, in a nutshell, is why. Here's a pitch Stroman made in a 1-2 count against the Twins' Byron Buxton, in what was otherwise his only truly bad outing of this young season. 8c298c18-7c07-4d83-a40a-72019090f414.mp4 And here's one to which he went on 2-2 against Kyle Schwarber, in his last start against the Phillies. 075b24c7-2cfc-430b-aaee-e523d6c282d4.mp4 These are both fastballs up and away. What's striking, though, is how perfectly Stroman located each, given that Buxton is right-handed and Schwarber is a lefty. Using the threat of the rest of his repertoire to his advantage, Stroman is throwing that four-seamer to a spot where hitters think it's a very hittable sinker, and getting relatively feeble swings when it turns out to be a pitch with such different movement. The problem Stroman had with his four-seamer last year was that he couldn't keep it out of the meaty part of the strike zone. It still didn't get hammered, but it was often fouled off and rarely missed altogether. This year, only 11 pitchers have had a lower Called Strike Probability on their four-seamers than Stroman, according to Baseball Prospectus. Hitting the edges and using the top of the zone better has naturally led to more whiffs. This is part of a broader strategy with which Stroman seems very comfortable this year. He's not nibbling, exactly, but he's not giving in to anyone. His walk rate is up, not because he's lost any capacity for throwing strikes, but because he seems determined to work at the edges of the zone and try to force weak contact. Before the season began, he talked about the trust he had in the team's reinforced defense, and that seems to have been a very earnest sentiment. Stroman is chasing some strikeouts, but only indirectly. What he's primarily doing is trying to keep the ball in the park, and trusting that even if he issues an extra walk or two, he can then get some quick, low-danger contact, and that his fielders will come through for him when that happens. He's done that with a bifurcated pitch mix based on handedness, and with some loving tweaks to his mélange of pitches--and with a newly badass old-fashioned fastball. View full article

The Cubs' offense has yet to be shut out in 2023. They have seven above-average hitters on the active roster, even with Cody Bellinger on the injured list. To get the most out of that group, though, they need to jettison one of their persistently below-average ones. Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-USA TODAY Sports Nick Madrigal started the season a little bit hot. He had a .345/.387/.414 batting line through his first 31 plate appearances, and had struck out only once. Since then, though, he's batted only .203/.239/.250. In 67 plate appearances, he has eight strikeouts. That would be a fine strikeout rate for an average hitter, but Madrigal's profile relies on extraordinarily high contact rates. His dearth of power (and the resulting inability to draw walks, as pitchers hammer away at the strike zone) make every punchout a problem. Even as he's cooled off, though, Madrigal has played too often. During Nico Hoerner's stint on the injured list, David Ross even batted him leadoff. It's clear that Ross, perhaps due to the influence of the front office, is overly attached to Madrigal, who was the centerpiece of the trade that sent Craig Kimbrel to the White Sox in 2021. He won't stop using Madrigal. Jed Hoyer needs to take away the option. If Madrigal's playing time comes at the expense of that of Christopher Morel, Patrick Wisdom, or even Trey Mancini, it's not a well-spent resource. Speaking of options, sending Madrigal to Triple-A Iowa is technically on the table, because he has not yet exhausted his minor-league options. The problem there is that the Cubs need 40-man roster space. They'll soon need to restore Codi Heuer to the 40-man, as he comes off the 60-day injured list. The team has too many players on the 40-man who need to be in the minors already. An organizational depth chart without Madrigal on it has much more room for players who have shown greater promise. Nelson Velazquez doesn't look like a replacement for Madrigal at first blush, but with Morel and Miles Mastrobuoni around to serve as utility infield options, Velazquez can take that roster spot and add better offense without hurting the defense. Alternatively, since it seems unlikely that the team will carry 24 hitters for long, they can just give Madrigal's playing time to those aforementioned hitters--including and especially Morel, whose hot streak since being called up really makes clear how redundant Madrigal is. As impressive as Madrigal's progress as a third baseman was, he's ultimately no better there than Wisdom. He's not as good a second baseman as either Hoerner or Morel. With Cody Bellinger sidelined for a bit with his bruised knee, a plausible argument might have been made that Madrigal provided valuable infield depth, such that Mreol could patrol center field every day. With Mike Tauchman in the mix, though, that's far less important. Against most righties, in the short term, Tauchman should play center, leaving Morel to play third or be the designated hitter and keeping Mastrobuoni available off the bench. Eric Hosmer is gone. Luis Torrens lasted less than a month. Wesneski and Keegan Thompson have been returned to Iowa to polish off their rough edges. It's clear that the front office at least wants to win this year, and to send the message that they're serious about performance and accountability. Letting go of Madrigal is a necessary step in that process. View full article

There was something gnawing at me. It was tough to put my finger on it, but just as Christopher Morel's eighth home run in his first 11 games of 2023 sailed over the fence, the penny dropped. This is what the 1990s were like. Last Tuesday, Danny Rockett (on Twitter at @SonRanto, one of the deans of the metaphorical delegation from the real-life Wrigleyville to its digital counterpart) ran a Twitter poll asking fans of whom Christopher Morel most forcefully reminds them. He gave three options, and invited other suggestions. The responses were quite evenly mixed, including many people who took advantage of that offer to identify their own comps. With all due respect to Danny, these weren't especially compelling comparators, in my opinion. Morel doesn't have anything approximating Aramis Ramirez's hit tool. He doesn't have the plate discipline or the defensive skills that allowed Ben Zobrist to first find a foothold, then blossom into a true superstar. Yet, his power is a louder tool than Zobrist ever had, and he's better able to make real use of his athleticism on the diamond than Junior Lake ever was. Morel probably isn't a long-term, everyday infielder, but he's also unlikely to be a well-rounded utilityman with value in all facets and on both sides of the runs ledger. What Morel looks most like, as he comes up on 500 career plate appearances, is a rough-edged, toolsy outfielder with top-shelf power. What he looks like is Sammy Sosa, and while I'm not projecting that he'll hit 600 big-league home runs, that's an awfully exciting comparison. Here's the cruel twist, though: For much of his career, Sosa was a dazzling, enlivening star on soporific Cubs teams. His flaws made him ill-equipped to be the best or second-best player on any serious contender for the first half of his Chicago tenure, and the obnoxious egalitarianism of baseball rendered him unable to singlehandedly lift them very far for much of the second half. Watching Sammy Sosa was always fun, but it was empty calories. That's not a commentary on the substance or the style of Sosa, but on the fact that too often, the Cubs were so relentlessly and (sometimes) inexplicably bad that one could have exactly as much fun by checking the highlights on SportsCenter to see Sosa homer as by watching the whole game. That's the vibe of the 2023 Cubs right now. Morel is not a force on par with peak Sosa, of course, but he's been a burst of sizzle and spark in his first fortnight with the parent club. Alas, he's just the latest guy taking a turn. Nico Hoerner has had a similar stretch during which he put on a really fun show. Patrick Wisdom's power binge was every bit as thunderous as Morel's. Cody Bellinger showed us a glimpse of his considerable former glory, early on. Roughly twice every time through the rotation, a starter has a wonderful start that makes most of an entire game fun and watchable. It's not adding up to anything. The maddening reality is that a lot of things have gone right for the Cubs this year, but they're 20-26, and they're watching a lot of the teams over whom they grabbed what felt like a potentially critical early edge get right and sail right past them--often at their direct expense. Somehow, for the fifth straight season, this team is less impressive and less consistent than it ought to be. The familiarity of the players, the makeup of the front office, the man on the top step of the dugout, and many things about how the organization tries to win have changed in that time frame, and they've had very different levels of expectation going into each of those seasons, but the results seem obdurate. That's why it feels like it did 20 or 30 years ago, right now. Even the team's successes feel a bit like hiccups. Just when they begin to feel almost trustworthy, the page turns, and Cinderella turns back into a franchise forever selling hope. The farm system is on the upswing, but fans old enough to remember $4 bleacher seats know that when the big-league product is on the downswing, the farm system is always on the upswing. Jed Hoyer and Carter Hawkins are superficially smarter than Ed Lynch, and even than Andy MacPhail, but they seem no closer to resolving the perpetual extra gravity that drags the Cubs downward than those men got. Ownership was bad then, and ownership is bad now, but ownership changes far less quickly and easily than front-office or on-field personnel. If it's bad owners holding the Cubs back, there's no way to tell when a light might emerge at the end of the tunnel for the Cubs and their fans. If the Ricketts family is the kind of ownership group that can at least be overcome by better front-office work, Hoyer and Hawkins need to start doing it. There is too much talent and too much money on the field every day for the Cubs to be excused for their recent play. Fans can do little to improve the situation, but the standard the franchise is setting is too low. Coming into this season, the baseball world had relatively low, muted expectations for the team. To see them demonstrate that they have the talent to prove those people wrong, yet consistently fail to actually do so, makes it feel like the bad old days are here again. Given that the charm and the affordability of Wrigley Field have been irreparably damaged by the Ricketts's myopic cash grabs throughout the last decade, fans can't even fall back on something ineffable and separate from winning as solace during times like these. Just at this moment, it feels like the Cubs' owners successfully got rid of everything that made the Cubs unique, except for the mysterious, constant losing. View full article

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