Matthew Trueblood

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

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