While the Cubs were 22-15 and had three games ahead in the middle of the NL, the largest of all the teams in this article, the rotation that helped them sail to the bass has recently won hit percentages. Last month, 2023 All-Star Left Justin Steele underwent surgery to repair his ulnar ligament while Javier Assad suffered a setback while restoring oblique labor. Then on Monday, the Cubs placed the 2024 All-Star Left Shota Imanaga on the injury list due to a left hamstring strain. Although his injury is not significant, his losses could tighten the divisional game and test the depth of the already exhausted rotation.
After leaving the Pirates in April 29 due to two quadriceps cramps, Imanaga was allowed only three singles and four walks in four innings after he left the Pirates in the April 29 match against the Brewers on Sunday in Milwaukee. However, the 31-year-old's afternoon ended with a sour taste. As the game still didn't score in sixth place, he got a lead single from Jackson Chourio and then walked to William Contreras. He seemed to escape unscathed when he landed Christian Yelich on first baseman Michael Busch, who started a 3-6-1 doubles game. Imanaga ran first base, but not only did Dansby Swanson's shot come late, but the pitcher looked up and forced him out of the game.
Relief Julian Merryweather entered and threw a wild court to get Chourio to score from third place, and when he got the final, there were three more runs in a 4-0 loss with the Cubs. They suffered a more terrifying defeat on Tuesday when rescuer Reliever Ryan Pressly allowed eight consecutive Giants to reach base in 11th innings and 14-5 concedes of goals.
Imanaga's MRI on the injured leg showed mild stress and he was placed on the 15-day injury list. With Jed Hoyer, president of Cubs Baseball Operations, telling reporters: “The most important thing about this kind of injury is to get him back to the rest of the season, not only to get him back. You talk about going back to the game, but to go back to the most important thing about your previous form. It's a certain thing, it can take some time, it can take time.
By starting eight times, a total of 44 innings, Imanaga is usually effective as his 2.82 ERA is slightly lower than last year's 2.91 points. However, his 4.52 FIP and 4.58 Xera both show that he is walking the tightrope. Compared to his first game in the U.S. after six years in the NPB’s Yokohama Bay star last season, his strikeout rate dropped from 25.2% to 18.8%, while his walking rate rose from 4.0% to 7.7%. Meanwhile, his allowed average exit speed increased from 88.6 mph to 90.4, his barrel speed increased from 8.6% to 10.5%, and his air rate increased from 22.5% to 24.1%.
One factor in which Imanaga retreated in those areas is probably because he reduced his arm angle from 40 degrees last year to 37 degrees this year. Lower angles should create cheating and increase the arm side runs of his four-speed ball (and have nearly two inches). But when thrown in the upper third of the strike zone, the efficiency of the court has been reduced, where batsmen’s percentage loss increased from .448 to .586 and barrel rate from 13.2% to 22.2%, which is an unworthy trade-off (from 17% to 23.3%). Overall, the batsman this season beat 0.471 in the four-man match against him. His Statcast running value on the court dropped from 4 to -7.
The Cubs have not yet determined who will fill Imanaga's rotation slot, although on Monday manager Craig Counsell pointed out veteran Chris Flexen and Prospect Prospect Cade Horton as the best choices. The 30-year-old right-hand Flexen spent last season on the southern side of Chicago, and labor was the top spot for the bad White Sox. His performance isn't as bad as the 3-15 record, but his 4.95 ERA (122 ERA-) and 4.80 FIP (114 FIP-) are not enough. The Cubs signed a minor league deal, he won five starts for their Triple-A Iowa branch, posted 1.16 ERA and 2.88 FIP in 23 1/3 innings before being called on April 30. He gained three innings savings in his season debut Friday and hit two quarters in one hit and two hits.
Now that he has been on the 26- and 40-man roster, Flexen’s footsteps against Horton are 23-year-old Righty, the seventh pick at the University of Oklahoma’s 2022 draft. The 6-foot-1, 211-pound Righty is ranked 64th on the latest 100 prospects this spring, with a 50 rupees prospect. Here is a part about him written by Eric Longenhagen:
Horton's childbirth was quite violent and indeed looked tough on his shoulders. Other aspects of his fastball are unauthorized, so Holden is trying to make the court effective. His secondary ball pushed the reason why he was here for a medium projection. Holden's slider and change both produce overdue missed rates. His slider has a rare speed and two-plane tilt (a weapon for left-handed and right-handed batsmen), and his screwball switch brings him another way to get left-handed off. Unless his peak speed returns, Horton may be inefficient as a starter and have to push his minor items out a ton. He is still likely to be an influencer pitcher, but suddenly his career illness list keeps growing, forcing Holden toward the overall top 100.
So far, Holden has reached 1.24 ERA and 3.58 FIP in Triple-A, Iowa, with a strikeout rate of 30.6% in 29 innings. His average four-link speed rose from 94.1 mph last year to his Tennessee and Iowa Double-aa nine, then placed on his shoulder strain on his shoulder, which is a very promising development so far.
In isolation, the loss of Imanaga in a few weeks was not a serious problem for the bear, but the injuries were piled up. In mid-February, Assad tightened his tilt. The 27-year-old Righty started in Iowa when his second recovery began, and then suffered a setback from injury. The Cubs moved him to the 60-day injury list to accommodate Flexen on the roster. But the bigger blow so far is Steele's loss, which happened a month ago, but somehow never found our report on Fangraphs. After forming his first All-Star team and finishing fifth in the 2023 NL Cy Young competition, he is equally effective last year (3.07 ERA, 3.23 FIP, 3.0 WAR), but limited to 24 starts due to his left elbow left hamstring and tendinitis. The 29-year-old Southpaw was tuned to tunes of 6.89 ERA and 6.32 FIP in the first three games of the season, but rebounded in a joint closed game with the Rangers on April 4, throwing seven innings in the April 4 game, allowing only three hits and two walks while hitting eight innings at the same time.
Unfortunately, before his next round, Steele told the Cubs that he experienced a tight elbow during that game. The group placed him on the 15-day IL and was described as another round of tendonitis. Counsell said he hoped Steele would only miss the minimum, and pitchers reportedly conveyed similar expectations. Alas, a follow-up MRI revealed he suffered UCL injuries, and on April 18, Steele carried out what Cubs called Dr. Keith Meister's “revised fix” to the UCL. The term became increasingly blurred as variants of the UCL repair program reproduced, but that means it wasn't Steele's August 2017 total ligament reconstruction surgery, who pitched for the Cubs' senior branch in the fourth career season. “We're looking for a time frame for about a year,” Kussel said later.
So the rotation, which ranked No. 21 in our preseason position rankings are now the only two starters who are expected to generate more than 1.7 wars and the Cubs are looking to bring one of them back, but that's not a good place. The rest of the rotation has performed well so far, but it’s clear that the Bears need to find some innings elsewhere, as these starters have not had a lot of work in recent years except for 33-year-old Righty Jameson Taillon and 34-year-old Righty Colin Rea. Taillon was the recipient of two Tommy John surgeries, and so far, in 39 2/3 innings, Taillon has presented a solid but unobtrusive 3.86 ERA and 4.09 FIP. He has developed into a reliable mainstay by post-pandemic standards as he is one of 15 pitchers who have reached 140 innings in each of the past four seasons. He ranked 19th in the Grand Slam with 681 innings since early 2021 (including this season), despite his 8.8 War tied in the 52nd inning.
Matthew Boyd's two-year, $29 million deal made him the Cubs' most outstanding free agent, with him 2.75 ERA in 39 1/3 innings and 3.74 FIP games. Even so, the 34-year-old left-hander hasn't thrown more than 78 2/3 innings in a season since 2019, while the pandemic, flexor tendon surgery in September 2021 and Tommy John Surgery in June 2023 limit him to 263 innings since 2020-24 years. Ben Brown, a 25-year-old Ben Brown who made his debut last season but didn’t pitch after June 8 due to a pressure response from his neck, led all the Cubs starters with a strikeout of 23.8%, but his 9.5% walk rate is also the highest in the group. He relied almost exclusively on the four-chain/knuckle curve combination to create a 44.7% ground ball rate, but has earned 4.88 ERA in 31 1/3 innings (although only 3.72 FIP).
Rea is a Michael who set his career last year with a 167 innings and 0.9 war, doing admirable work by Steele after starting a 5 1/3 of the off-site in the bullpen. The Cubs were stretched out when Steele fell, so he had only 24 2/3 innings in total in five games. At that time, he had an ERA of 2.96 and 3.12 FIP, and overall he had a 2.43 ERA and 2.98 FIP with a strikeout efficiency of 20.3%. He used a different combination and approach from last year's winemaker last year, reducing his arm angle from 35 degrees to 30 degrees and highlighting his four-pin agent, which has increased from 93 mph to 93.9 compared to last year, and added a few inches of arm side running (6.5 to 8.5). His time was 52.7%, up from 19.5% last year, while heavy usage dropped from 30.9% to 5.6%. Like Imanaga, he was more frequent than last year, but had no greater success, although overall batsmen totaled on the court at just .361. In fact, Rea's outstanding performance so far is driven by the newly discovered ability to avoid close contact. He lowered the barrel rate from 8.7% to 6.6%, while his hard strike rate dropped from 42% to 38.4%; both represent improvements in percentiles from somewhere in the 1920s to somewhere in the 1960s.
It is speculated that if the Cubs continue to argue that they will enter the market for rotation upgrades by the July 31 trade deadline, although the ongoing buzz about Marlins Righty Sandy Alcantara, who may target Marlins, has been taken refuge by the tragic return former Cy Young Winner received from Tommy John Surgery; he was ignited in the 8.42 era. Especially when Imanaga recovers, the bears will have to cross their fingers and hope that their spins are not otherwise problematic.
