Sometime back between the Cubs’ most recent forays into being good, my family went into Chicago for a day game. I don’t remember the exact game, but it was something like the game on August 25th of 2012, so I’ll use that one for this story. A marquee at one of the Wrigleyville bars—I think it was Murphy’s Bleachers—had the pitching matchup listed: “Alex White vs. Brooks Raley. Raley’s for the Cubs.”
They had to specify.
Be prepared for a whole lot of that this year.
This isn’t set in stone. There’s still a good bit of offseason to go. But we’re a few weeks from pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training, and if you check Roster Resource, Tyson Miller is currently lined up to be the Cubs’ fifth starter.
If your reaction to that was, “Who?” or your reaction to that involved saying, “Wait, the Cubs signed Tyson Miller?” before realizing you were thinking of Tyson Ross, don’t be ashamed. Tyson Miller isn’t exactly a guy to know. The Cubs’ fourth-round pick in 2016, Miller was ranked the 30th-best prospect in the organization last summer by FanGraphs. He has five major league innings to his name, with one start in a bullpen game in August. He could be serviceable for a few starts, but he’s not going to be pitching every fifth or sixth day for the Cubs, or at least not for more than a month or so at a time.
Brett Taylor had a good piece on this the other day over at Bleacher Nation in which he analyzed it in terms of innings. Read the whole thing if you have a couple minutes, but the gist of it’s as follows:
- The average MLB team, over a full season, needs something like 880 innings out of starting pitchers.
- Pitchers are ramping back up from a smaller workload than normal.
Taylor then goes through and assigns innings to pitchers: 160 each to Kyle Hendricks and Zach Davies, 120 to Alec Mills, 100 to Adbert Alzolay, and then 50 each to a whole slew of guys: Tyson Miller, Shelby Miller (with whom the Cubs have reportedly signed a minor league contract, and who hasn’t thrown fifty innings since 2016), Cory Abbott (11th-ranked prospect), Keegan Thompson (23rd-ranked prospect), Justin Steele (non-ranked prospect, and the rankings go to 41). And then you’ve got 90 innings left.
In 2019, the Angels only got 680 innings out of technical starting pitchers, but their heavy use of openers deflates that total. If you sum up the total innings thrown by all their pitchers who operated, more often than not, as traditional starters, you get something closer to 825. Which, if the Cubs were to match it, would still leave 35 innings unaccounted for in the list above. And the list above, to be clear, is a terrifying list, in which if the average start lasts five innings, exactly one third of games are started by pitchers not named Hendricks/Davies/Mills/Alzolay (and Mills and Alzolay aren’t exactly proven, reliable starters).
What’s going to happen?
Don’t count on the Cubs to sign any proven, reliable starters. That would be surprising (though Mike Leake and Gio González are both available and could probably be signed for something like five million each, which isn’t the worst price for a slightly-above-replacement-level arm). Instead, expect a few more Shelby Millers to join the fold. The contract the Cubs signed with him is reportedly for $875,000 if he’s on the major league roster, with some bonuses attached, which means even if it works well and the Cubs pay him a little more than one million, they’re only paying him a little more than one million. For that price you could sign a handful of options—though again, don’t expect a full handful.
It’s also possible the Cubs could try to acquire a pitcher through trade, but the buzz has cooled down about Kris Bryant and Willson Contreras, and that pitcher would probably be in the Tyson Miller/Abbott/Thompson/Steele tier if he is peripherally major league-ready.
Whichever direction the Cubs go, a rotation like that of last summer does not appear to be in the cards. And options even for the committee are limited.
