Cade Horton is a who?

The Cubs did the expected and announced that their top prospect, right-handed "pitcher" Cade Horton will get the Shōta Imanaga starts, at least for the foreseeable future, while Mike Imanaga II is nursing a sore hammy and hanging out at Dunkin' while on the injured list.

Horton was the Cubs' top pick in 2022 and he's been very good in the minors. Well, when he's been healthy enough to actually pitch, at least.

Boog is going to be so impressed that Cade went to Oklahoma to try to win the starting quarterback job, as well as play on the baseball team. Boog seems to be shocked when a professional baseball player was actually good at other sports growing up.

Cade was a hotshot highly reruited quarterback at Norman High School in Oklahoma. He went to OU in 2020 with his sights on winning the job, only to get redshirted behind Spencer Rattler. Cade also was going to pitch on the Sooners baseball team in the spring of 2021, but he hurt his arm and had to redshirt there, too.

His dreams of becoming the Oklahoma QB ended for good when some kid named Caleb Williams showed up on campus pushing Cade to fourth on the depth chart and eventually Rattler to second.

So Cade focused on baseball and spent more time playing third base than pitching. In 25 games at third, four at short and 11 at DH he hit .234 with six homers, two triples, a homer, 17 RBI, 28 runs scored and was eight of nine in stolen base attempts. On the mound he was 5-2 with a 4.86 ERA (not great) but with 64 K's in 53.2 innings (not bad).

He was on nobody's draft list until the Big XII tournament when he won the championship game against Texas and kept on rolling through the playoffs and eventually the College World Series. In the postseason, Cade was 3-0 with a 2.61 ERA with 49 Ks (and only six walks) in 31 innings. He started and won the Super Regional final against Florida where he struck out eight in 6.1 innings and he struck out 11 in OU's win over Notre Dame in the College World Series.

He attributed his postseason success in 2021 to a slider he added late in the season. To this day it's his best pitch. Suddenly, he was on the map and the Cubs took him with the ninth overall pick. He was considered an overdraft and signed for "just" 4.5 million bucks, which allowed the Cubs to pay seconder Jackson Ferris a boatload of money to buy him out of a commitment to Ole Miss. The Cubs traded Ferris to the Dodgers last year in the Michael Busch trade.

Horton has dominated triple-A so far this year with a 1.24 ERA in six starts allowing just 12 hits in 29 innings with 33 strikeouts. He walked 13, which is concerning, but 10 of those 13 walks occurred in the first three starts of the season. In his last three he has walked just one batter in each start and he went six innings in each of his last two starts needing just 77 and 78 pitches.

His performance says he's ready.

His history says you'd better use him while you can. Success on the field has not been an issue for Cade. In three years in the minors he's struck out 11.3 batters per nine innings and posted an ERA of just 2.79.

The problem is that he's pitched in just 36 games for a total of 151.2 innings.

He's filling in for Shōta who will be out somewhere between four and six weeks with his hamstring injury. That means the Cubs need to cover somewhere between five and seven starts. If Horton were to make seven starts and average five innings per start, just those seven big league starts would account for more innings than he's pitched in the minors the last two years.

So?

So use him now, because if you wait until later in the season he might hit an innings wall that he's never experienced before.

And it makes sense for the Cubs do it this way. They already have a starting pitcher on their trade deadline shopping list. But they have to get there first. Maybe the best way to do that is to use Horton in May and June, instead of waiting for an August and September that he might not be available to pitch in?

Plus, it'll be fun to watch him pitch. He clearly is a real prospect, held back only by injury and inactivity.

In The Athletic on Wednesday, our pal Patrick Mooney wrote, "the Cubs view innings totals as an overly simplistic way to track pitchers."

Look, Carter Hawkins is their GM. Nothing is overly simplistic to that dumbass.

And I get the overall idea that just looking at a pitcher and thinking he can't ramp up from his innings total from one year to the other is a pretty basic way of looking at it.

But when the innings totals are 53.2, 88.1, 34.1 and 29, I don't think there's a more complicated way to look at it.

Cade's not going to be able to get to 150 innings this year without either throwing 74 MPH by the end of it or blowing his arm out again.

The Cubs should have similar concerns about Matt Boyd, who, while he's grown assed man hasn't thrown 100 innings in a season in six years, and hasn't topped 70 in the last two. The 39.1 innings he's at now are just one more out away from equaling his regular season total last year and yeah, he pitched well for the Guardians in the postseason but it was just 11.2 innings. By Memorial Day he'll be way past that number.

There was some doubt about whether the Cubs would go to Cade for Saturday's start. Their options were to start Chris Flexen instead (ugh) or to have a bullpen game. If Cade struggles, they're going to have a bullpen game anyway. But if he doesn't, well, they'll look like geniuses.

And there was talk that the Cubs would rather wait and have Cade get a home start for his debut. And that didn't make sense to me.

Granted, if they waited until next weekend he'd get to face the White Sox, which is actually like taking a step down from the AAA hitters he's been facing. But, the Cubs, at least in the Theo years (of which Jed Hoyer was a passenger) mostly preferred to have their hot shot prospects debut on the road.

In 2012, Anthony Rizzo debuted at home against the Mets, but he'd already played in the big leagues for the Padres.

In 2014, Javy Baez opened (and homered) in Colorado.

In 2015, Kris Bryant opened at home against the Padres (and struck out three times), but their plan had been for him to debut on the road in Pissburgh the next week. Mike Olt's broken thumb pushed Kris' debut up a few days. (But conveniently still after the allotted days needed to push his service time back a year.)

The rookie who did make his debut in that Pissburgh series was Addison Russell.

Kyle Schwarber did debut at home when he pinch hit on June 16 that year against Cleveland, but he was up because the next two games were in Cleveland and he served as the DH in those games plus the next three in Minnesota.

Willson Contreras debuted in 2016 at home against Pissburgh as a defensive replacement for Miguel Montero. The next day he pinch hit for Kyle Hendricks and homered on the first pitch he swung at in the big leagues. He made his first start the next day and started seven of the next eight, and then 14 of the next 15 after that. Joe Maddon got pretty used to having a catcher who didn't need to chug Metamucil between innings like the other two guys he had on his roster.

What about all of the hot shot Cubs pitching prospects?

Well, that's funny. There weren't any.

There really haven't been any for a long time.

Kyle Hendricks wasn't a hot shot when he debuted in Cincinnati in July of 2014. And, there was no pressure on those Cubs, so it didn't matter where he started.

Justin Steele pitched out of the bullpen in his first stint with the Cubs in early 2021 and came back as a starter in August after every good player had been traded away.

Who else even qualifies? Jordan Wicks? Yikes. Well, even if he does, he debuted in Pissburgh on August 26, 2023. He struck out nine in five innings. Through his first four starts he was 4-0 with a 1.99 ERA. He should have retired then.

Starting Cade on the road makes as much sense as anything else. He'll face a good Mets lineup, but would you rather have him facing them or attempt to get by with Gavin Hollowell, Daniel Palencia and Flexen trying to sneak into the sixth without letting the game get out of reach?

This makes much more sense.

And, given Horton's college numbers, they should probably get him a few starts at third in between his starts on the mound. Do we really think he'd produce less offensively than Nicky Lopez and Vidal Brujan?