Pierce Johnson is, by all accounts, a pretty good pitcher. Last year, Baseball Prospectus ranked him as the 83rd best prospect in baseball. He was also the only pitcher the Cubs placed on that list (they had a total of seven players make the list in 2015). And while that certainly means something (and I’m […]
Tag: Pitching
Free Agency, Trade, or Both: Nobody Pitches for Free—Assessing the Cubs’ Pitching Situation
“Regarding our starting pitching, the topic sentence is: we would like to add more quality pitching.” —Theo Epstein (October 22, 2015) There are four guarantees in life: death, taxes, people overusing “death and taxes” to make their points, and the need for starting pitching depth. No matter the era, teams—especially contending teams—crave starting pitching. In the […]
Cerebral Kyle Hendricks Pitching With Carolina Confidence
“I’ll take care of you, man.” Those are the first words on my recording, and the first words any major-league player ever spoke to me with the knowledge that they might be published one day. “I’ll take care of you, man.” The guy on the recording was Kyle Hendricks, who I’d met a few days earlier—on my […]
Breaking News: Jake Arrieta Is Good on Breaking Stuff
When we think of Jake Arrieta, we think of a brilliant, under the radar (relative to where he should be), high-strikeout kind of guy, who’s second in the Cubs rotation but could be a number one starter in plenty of other organizations. We’re even starting to include him in the Cy Young discussion. And yet, this is the […]
Calm Kyle Hendricks No More Volatile Than You’d Expect
On Friday, August 14th, I found myself on Twitter. This happens a lot. It’s not localized to Fridays, honestly, or to Augusts, or to days which fall a fortnight into their respective months. It’s just something I do from time to time. And on this particular Friday, I spotted on my timeline the following tweet: I […]