A conventional approach won't fix this bullpen

The Cubs have at least one big piece to use, but what are they waiting for?

A conventional approach won't fix this bullpen

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The Cubs are a weird team. I don’t mean historically, although the 1990s alone would blow your mind if you weren’t around to suffer through them. The current interation is a different kind of weird. As we discussed1 yesterday, the return over the next week to 10 days of four key players should really help (we’re not sure about Kyle Hendricks, but we have hope), and so it’s tempting to look at their current 21-15 record and feel like they weathered a storm and things should be pretty good from here on out.

That might be true, if the storm were completely beyond their control. If they were 21-15 despite injuries to Seiya Suzuki (their best player), Justin Steele (their best pitcher), Cody Bellinger (their second best player) and Hendricks, that would be one thing.

But if the storm was triggered by a cold front caused by a plague of injuries, it was because it ran into a high pressure system fueled by the inflated ERAs coming out of their bullpen.

David Ross lost his job last year largely because of the failings of his bullpen, especially late in the season. Much of that was due to operator error. The only way the Cubs could get good old Rossy to hit the right buttons at the end of games was to coat the ones they wanted him to press with peanut butter and hope that he licked it off at just the right time.

But not all of the bullpen woes were because of the manager. He certainly wore out his few key relievers by pitching Mark Leiter 1.1 (he’s not good enough to be 2.0), Jerry Merryweather, Michael Fulmer and Adbert Alzolay in every game most of the season with no regards to the score. But he also didn’t have enough quality arms in that bullpen, and when the only late season reinforcement was Jose Cuas, you knew it wasn’t gonna be enough. And it wasn’t.

Cubs President of Baseball Bare Minimums Jed Hoyer clearly convinced himself that Ross was basically all of bullpen issue last year and when he shockingly put on his big boy pants and fired Ross to hire a massive upgrade in Craig Counsell, we all assumed it was the start of a flurry of improvements.

Well, what followed was a flurry that if a Dairy Queen employee turned upside down for you at the drive thru window it would end up all over your driver’s side front door.

The Cubs signed Hector Neris away from the Astros and got Yency Almonte thrown into the Michael Busch trade (you can imagine Andrew Friedman covering the phone and making everyone else in the room laugh with, “he wants Almonte!”

And so, the only surprise six weeks into the season is that the Cubs bullpen’s sky high ERA isn’tthe worst in the league. After giving up six runs last night (all in one inning—how efficient of them) the Cubs bullpen’s ERA is 4.81 and that ranks sixth in baseball.

Sixth worst. In the National League only Rockies and Giants have higher ERAs from their relief corps. I’m amazed any team is worse.

A lot of it has to do with when the Cubs are giving up runs, and not just how many. The Cubs starting pitching, despite injuries, has been excellent. Shōta Imanaga is one of the best pitchers in baseball through his first six career starts, Javier Assad is nearly as good this year and he was very good once he finally was made a starter late last season. Jameson Taillon has been very good since he stumbled off the injured list a couple of weeks ago.

The only starters who have struggled have been Jordan Wicks, who hasn’t been terrible, but couldn’t fight his way out of the fifth inning in any start until his sixth one and that’s when he got hurt, and Hendricks, who has in fact been terrible.

The Cubs have gotten quality work from Hayden Wesneski in two starts and Ben Brown in four. They are the best kind of Cubs’ pitching prospects, the ones drafted by some other team that taught them how to pitch.

Do the returns of Steele, Hendricks and eventually (we think) Wicks create opportunities for the Cubs to fix their bullpen from within?

Well, the answer is yes, but let’s not say that loud enough for Jed to hear, because they can’t completely fix it without help from outside. So he’s got a lot of work to do.

Steele’s return made Brown’s obvious move to the bullpen official. Hendricks’ return should move Wesneski there. If there’s a temptation to send him back to Iowa so he can stay stretched out as a starter, fight that urge. He’s needed elsewhere.

And then Wicks’ return could move Assad to the bullpen since he had a 3.02 ERA there last year in 22 relief appearances, right?

Fuck no.

That might have been the plan earlier in the season, but Assad has been too good as a starter for too long to mess with it now.

When Wicks returns you’d have six starters, but that also assumes nobody gets hurt between now and then and that Hendricks is actually good again.

It’s easy to just forget how terrible Kyle has been so far this year. Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) says he’s been unlucky, though. While his ERA is 12.00 (yes, it’s twelve!) it should only be 7.73. So…I guess that’s good?

No, it’s still bad.

Putting Brown and Wesneski into the bullpen will help, whether or not the return of Drew Smyly (whenever that might be) helps is up for debate. But that still leaves a very real issue about who pitches at the end.

Last year, Adbert Alzolay didn’t take over the closer role until the end of May, and everyone with the Cubs just decided that his work in the 38 games between that date and when he strained his pitching forearm in September was indicative of who he’d be forever.

Well, it turns out that he isn’t that, at least not right now. And it’s cool that the Cubs weren’t alarmed at a young pitcher having a strained forearm considering that Tommy John himself gets a text alert every time any pitcher has that diagnosis.

Neris is getting the closing opportunities and he’s survived them so far but it’s been rocky. One of his strengths in his long, oh so long, big league career has been his ability to throw strikes, but he hasn’t done that really well so far as a Cub.

So what do the Cubs do? Can you just make Ben Brown the closer? He’s got the stuff for it. He strikes out a batter per inning and is hard to hit. But he’s walked 11 in 27 innings. That’s not terrible, but walks have been an issue in his climb to the big leagues.

Do you trade for one? We have no idea if they are really talking to the Marlins, but their closer Tanner Scott was pretty good the last two years. This year he’s got more walks (14) than strikeouts (12) in 13 innings. How fun.

Oh, and he might have lost his closer job. Rookie Anthony Maldonado closed on Sunday with Scott pitching the eighth. I’m sure it’s fine.

Everyone thinks that Emmanuel Clase is the obvious choice for any team in need of a closer, but the Guardians are tied for the most wins in the American League. They probably want to hang on to Clase for a while.

Do the Cubs even need a closer? Isn’t the point of having Counsell that he just figures this stuff out?

Well, that would assume you have somebody he can actually “figure out” to use as a closer. It’s not like he can just make a closer all by himself.

But what if Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith come over and help him build a…never mind.

In the meantime, I have an idea.

On Friday, the Cubs are expected to face Pissburgh’s top prospect and last summer’s number one overall draft pick Paul Skenes in his big league debut. The Pirates have done weird things with Skenes so far this spring, limiting him to a bunch of purposely short starts to try to save some extra innings for him to use in the big leagues. On it’s face it kind of makes sense.

But, it’s ignoring the fact that Skenes carried a heavy workload at LSU. That was part of the appeal of him. He was really fucking good and used to being a horse. A more aggressive organization would have put him in the rotation on opening day and rolled with it. Are you really helping a guy who is used to throwing 110 pitches a start by limiting him to 60-70 for five weeks and then promoting him?

All that brings me to my big idea for the Cubs.

Their version of Paul Skenes is their number one pick from two years ago Cade Horton. Unlike Skenes he’s not used to a heavy workload. When the Cubs drafted him in 2022 he had only thrown 53 innings for Oklahoma, and honestly, was only good for like two weeks.

The Cubs already have him on a pitch limit. He dominated at double-A but only pitched 16 innings in four starts. He was only allowed to pitch four innings in his debut at triple-A. He pitched 88 innings last year and at the current rate it looks like the Cubs are trying to get about 120 out of him this year.

Will he eventually come up and make some starts for the Cubs? Probably. Will he still be limited to short outings? You would think so.

So just call him up and put him in the bullpen.

This idea that he has to slowly ramp up innings as a starter is dumb. The Cubs best starter, Justin Steele started his Cubs career as a reliever. Carlos Zambrano started his Cubs career as a reliever. Chris Sale had a run of seven straight seasons where he finished in the top five of Cy Young voting for different colored Sox and he didn’t make his first big league start until the first of those seasons, his third, after 79 relief appearances. Fergie Jenkins made 48 relief appearances in his first year as a Cub (and 12 starts) and it so harmed him he only pitched 17 more years after that.

I’m not saying you need to make Horton your closer, but you have a gaping hole in your pitching staff every time your starter’s leave games. Shouldn’t the most talented pitcher in your organization be at least part of that solution?

He’s pitched 20.1 innings already this year. Could you use 80 more innings from him out of your bullpen? Yeah, you sure could.

What is the point of your vaunted pitching infrastructure and the supposedly innovative pitch lab if you can’t use any of it to figure out an atypical way to break in your best prospect?

Free Cade Horton!

You need to do something.

And I’m sick of watching these other dopes.


  1. I typed, you read, is that a discussion?