Cubs’ Pitching Depth Tested as Kyle Schwarber Smashes Former Team
They say momentum is only as good as the next day’s starting pitching, which is why all the good mojo from the Cubs’ walk-off win on Sunday against the Pirates evaporated four pitches into the bottom of the 1st inning. Though a one-run deficit should not have felt overwhelming, the fact that it was authored by Kyle Schwarber against a man tasked with filling in for one of two injured starters skewed things. After holding the Rays scoreless with just one hit over nearly six innings in his first start, Javier Assad was punched in the mouth right away last night.
A J.T. Realmuto single in the 2nd doubled the Phillies’ lead, then Schwarber came up the next inning and deposited a sinker into the batter’s eye in center to double the margin yet again. The Cubs managed to halve the gap in the top of the 4th, but Assad was forced to wear it in a 5th inning that looked like this: walk, single, single, double, sac fly, single, single. The righty ended up with nine earned runs on 11 hits, striking three with two walks.
That he was left out there for 82 pitches is a testament to how thin Craig Counsell‘s staff has gotten, though perhaps not as much so as Charlie Barnes going three innings or Riley Martin being tabbed for Tuesday’s start. It was clear from the start of the 5th that Assad didn’t have it. He avoided Schwarber with what may as well have been an intentional walk, then gave up hard contact on the first pitch to three of the next four batters.
Even Paul Skenes has a bad outing every now and then, but Assad is essentially the Cubs’ seventh starter and he looked very much like that on Monday night. Martin will open for Colin Rea as Counsell hopes to stretch things out, but the seams are already starting to show just 16 games into the season. That tends to happen when you’ve got six contributors on the 15-day IL, not to mention Justin Steele on the 60-day.
Losing relievers Phil Maton and Hunter Harvey in quick succession taxed a bullpen that has seen some unlikely reinforcements, forcing Counsell to cobble things together on the fly. It’s pretty difficult to build a circle of trust when you have to run different pitchers out there all the time, and it doesn’t help that the offense hasn’t provided much early run support.
Then you’ve got the optics of seeing a former Cub hammering away at his old team, though any narratives about Schwarber getting revenge are overblown. His time in Chicago ended over five years ago now, and most of the guys he played with are long gone. He’s now played 92 more games and hit 72 more homers with the Phillies than he did with the Cubs, including the three highest single-season totals of his career.
Though Schwarber wasn’t quite dismissive of the question from Bleacher Report’s Tim Kelly about whether it’s still weird to face the Cubs, he made it clear that those days are in the past.
“It’s been long enough,” Schwarber said with a sardonic smile. “Obviously, I had a lot of great memories there. That’s where I started my career, won a World Series there, heck, 10 years now…It’s the 10-year reunion tour. You look at Rossy and Rizzo doing their podcast — got to go on that. That’s where it all started, and I always say that I was lucky enough to come up with a lot of great people in that organization who taught me how to be a big leaguer and taught me how to win and taught me how to care about winning and care about the right things.
“It’s kinda like the foundation aspect of it, so obviously a lot of great memories, great fanbase over there too. A lot of appreciation for them, but obviously now where I’m at, I love where I’m at and we’re looking to keep adding on here.”
Not that it’ll stop Cubs fans from re-litigating Jed Hoyer’s decision to non-tender Schwarber following a disastrous 2020 campaign. Even if the mistake of letting him go for nothing and replacing him with Joc Pederson — who was then traded for Bryce Ball, a hulking slugger who never made it past Double-A — looks bigger in retrospect, there’s no way the Cubs would have re-signed Schwarber to the same deal the Phils gave him in 2022.
Now, however, Hoyer is dealing with an entirely different can of worms. An organization that has long been built on low-90s velocity finally realized that you can’t succeed in today’s game with just finesse. The problem is that they may still be taking it a little too easy with some of their big arms, which could be the cause of all the injuries. Studies have shown that injury rates are highest in spring training and the early part of the season as pitchers’ workloads spike to levels that exceed their chronic capacity.
Think of it like going to the gym for a heavy leg day after having only performed a few brief workouts over the previous month. You’re going to have trouble just getting out of bed the next day, let alone navigating the stairs. Look, the folks running the organization’s pitching infrastructure are much smarter than me when it comes to this stuff, and there’s also a point at which you have to recognize that shit happens. When the same shit keeps happening over and over, though, you have to start wondering if there are commonalities.
All I know for sure is that the Cubs have dropped three of four and are currently the only sub-.500 team in the NL Central. They’re already having to tinker with the rotation to keep guys fresh, plus they’re leaning on reinforcements that most fans had never heard of three days ago. Maybe that’s not all bad, as it could give rise to a dude or two. Martin has looked the part through three scoreless outings, and he’s done so with a mid-90s heater from the left side. That’s not nothing.
Still, I can’t help but worry that even my most pragmatic analysis won’t provide me with the escape velocity needed to push through the gravity of Planet Meatball. The Cubs are making it far too easy to believe the folks who say the sky is falling, which is not a good feeling to have. That’s why it would be really great if they could just rattle off a few wins in a row here, because I’m not sure I’ll be able to handle a whole summer of them struggling just to rediscover mediocrity.
