Additional Thoughts on Edward Cabrera’s Blister Issues, Pitch Tweaks

An idea came to me as I was lying in bed this morning, and, unlike most such fleeting thoughts, it stuck around long enough for me to look into it a little further. I wondered whether my initial analysis of Edward Cabrera‘s blister issues and new breaking ball had been missing a key concept. What if the Cubs weren’t really planning on getting him to throw a “new” pitch, but were rather going to change the grip on either the slider or the curve?

This was rooted in the idea that Cabrera’s motor preferences may have shifted slightly over the years, causing changes in his horizontal movement. I had noted previously that he appears to be a pronator, and a quick look at his H-break over the last four years indicates that he may be favoring that preference even more. His four-seam, sinker, and change have trended toward more arm-side run, while his curve and slider have gotten less glove-side movement.

In terms of the view from the mound, everything has shifted pretty significantly to the right. It’s not uniform by any stretch, but that’s not the point. Now, it’s possible that some of this, particularly with the two breaking balls, comes as a result of Cabrera trying to avoid those recurrent blisters on his right middle finger by not ripping through the seams as hard as he needs to for those pitches to be effective.

I don’t think it’s necessarily one or the other, and it could be that both are at fault. We’ve all experienced changes in preference over time, whether it was an evolution from hating onions to simply tolerating or even loving them, or a change in the way you cross your legs when you sit. That could just be how your internal wiring got re-routed with age, and it could be a function of injury.

After breaking my fifth metatarsal bone several years ago, I found that my left pinky toe’s orientation had changed ever so slightly. The result is that I need to be very diligent with my nail care to avoid ending up with a painful corn on the adjacent digit. It strikes me that Cabrera might be in a similar boat, though he’s about 20 years younger and is being paid millions to throw a baseball rather than paying $75 to limp around in beer-league softball.

I was hoping to find that Cabrera had been employing a more traditional curveball grip and that the Cubs were planning to move him to a knuckle or spike grip. Since the idea with the latter pitch is, in the words of Ben Brown, to “throw the crap out of it,” the topspin is generated by the ball rolling off the middle finger rather than violently ripping down through the seam on the horseshoe. That theory was bolstered by an AI search result that Cabrera had changed from a spike to a stacked finger grip this past offseason.

Except that said result actually came from one of my own articles and had conflated Cabrera’s changes with those employed by Jordan Wicks. I think I may have inadvertently fixed the search algorithm by clicking on the link, so, like, you’re welcome. So while that is a good thing, it created a dead end for my hypothesis.

I do still wonder whether the Cubs’ pitching infrastructure, spearheaded by pitching coach Tommy Hottovy and VP of pitching Tyler Zombro, will merely tweak the curve and/or slider. One of my introductions to Zombro came in the form of a video he did for Tread Athletics about the ideal repertoires for different pitchers based on arm slot and pronation/supination bias.

In addition to the changes in his horizontal movement, or perhaps as their genesis, Cabrera’s arm slot has dropped by 11 degrees since 2023 with the Marlins. If he’s throwing his breaking pitches the same way as he did four years ago, it stands to reason that the amount and location of the friction between seams and finger have changed. My guess is that the Cubs have tried to identify those potentially minute alterations in an effort to reposition the baseball in such a way that Cabrera can be more effective while also remaining healthy.

And hey, maybe it really is a matter of incorporating a sweeper that sees him work against his innate preferences (or such is my decidedly amateur assessment) to create more separation from a group of pitches that have drifted more toward the arm-side. It may be quite a long time before we learn more for sure, as this kind of stuff usually comes to light during spring training. That means we’d be waiting four months under ideal conditions, but a lockout could leave us grasping at theories for much longer.

Or maybe we won’t be grasping at all, because is anyone going to give a tin shit about Cabrera’s new breaking ball if March rolls around and MLB is still in a labor dispute? I question whether this site will even exist in that case, though I can’t imagine going back to this topic even if the lights are still on here. Anyway, this is what happens when your brain won’t shut off.