Justin Steele is the only Cub who might get into the All-Star Game tonight, and even he might not pitch. I haven’t seen any pitching plan, I don’t think such things get released before the game, there are a lot of pitchers on these teams. Still, it’s been a joy to watch Steele enjoy the All-Star festivities, partially because it’s a joy to watch Steele do much of anything. The other part, though, is that Justin Steele was so unlikely to even stick around on the Major League roster. Now, he’s one of the best pitchers in the world.
I don’t know Justin Steele personally, and I’m wary of heaping too much praise on him as a person. Indications are that he’s a happy, friendly, funny guy who happens to throw what Yan Gomes famously called Country Boy Fastballs, but we don’t have a good way to confirm the first half of that sentence, nor do we really care to. We know celebrities better than we ever have, but it’s ok to let baseball players be baseball players sometimes. The Country Boy Fastballs are allowed to be enough.
Steele is, as is being heavily noted these days, from a town of a few hundred in the southeast corner of Mississippi. He went to high school in Lucedale, a town of about three thousand located 40 miles from Mobile, Alabama. It’s not the most rural place in the world, but the man is, true to reputation, a country boy.
That’s not what makes Steele’s ascent so special.
When Justin Steele debuted in April of 2021, coming out of the bullpen after Adbert Alzolay and Andrew Chafin handed back the lead to the Brewers following a fourth-inning Kris Bryant home run, he was just another relief pitcher popping up from the Chicago farm. Like many minor leaguers, he’d just spent an entire season at a training facility, waiting out Covid in South Bend with the rest of the Cubs’ inactive roster. In a season in which the Cubs would put 36 players on the mound in relief, from Joe Biagini to Craig Kimbrel, Steele was supposed to be just another name. His upside was to be an effective multi-inning relief arm, something which often calls Josh Hader to mind but more often tops out around Ryan Tepera, and that’s aiming pretty high. His two-pitch mix boded poorly for his ability to get through the order a second time, and he wasn’t throwing 100 miles per hour. He appeared on some prospect lists towards the end of his minor league career, but he was 25, rapidly approaching his best years, and it wasn’t clear that his minor league career would be coming to an end.
Over a little more than a month, Steele appeared in relief eleven different times, allowing runs in only two of the outings and allowing earned runs only once. His FIP was a middling 4.00, but he was good enough to keep getting opportunities. Then, the Cubs had him sacrifice bunt in the midst of what was supposed to be a multi-inning outing against the Nationals, a decision which led to Steele missing a full month with a hamstring issue. When he returned to action, it was in the minor leagues, and before long, the Cubs were headed towards a sell-off, Steele pivoted towards extending his pitch counts back towards starting pitcher territory. When he returned to the Majors in August, he started games, and results were bad. Over his first eight MLB starts, he failed to get an out in any sixth inning, allowed ten home runs, posted a 5.89 ERA, and walked a batter more than every other inning. His FIP of 6.82 was even worse. For a minute, he was getting better, but the wheels started to come off in September, with six home runs across three outings resigning us to the idea that Steele would indeed be, at best, a member of the bullpen in what would hopefully be a better 2022 for the Cubs.
2022 wasn’t better for the Cubs.
But Steele sure was.
Beginning with his final start in 2021, an out–of–nowhere seven-inning, one-walk, four-hit scoreless performance, Steele posted an even 3.00 ERA across 126 innings of work before a lower back strain shut him down for 2022. As bad as the team was, he was its fourth-most valuable player, and the sample was large enough to believe that perhaps the Cubs might have something. Even in April, he’d seemed like a far-fetched bet to stick in the rotation, but he did more than stick around: He became the closest thing the Cubs had to an ace.
From there, the story’s recent memory. Steele’s tenth in the majors in pitcher fWAR. He’s seventh among qualified starters in FIP. He’s not striking all that many guys out—he does only throw the two pitches still—but he induces weak contact and he reliably competes, managing that contact effectively. He’s old for a breakout, and even optimistic projections don’t have him competing for a Cy Young this year, but the guy who turns 28 today (while his son turns one) has made it. Not just to a lasting role in the major leagues, something that appeared to be his absolute ceiling, but to an MLB All-Star Game.
Sports will find plenty of ways to surprise you.
That’s part of the charm.
How Bad Will Northwestern Get?
Northwestern is a very bad job for a college football coach, which is why Northwestern seemed so lucky for so long to have Pat Fitzgerald, a thorough anomaly who was not only capable of winning games but was emotionally loyal to this particular school in a way they could expect no one else to be. The program was on the upswing when Fitzgerald took over, stepping in after Randy Walker’s tragic heart attack, but it had still only played in a bowl game in five of the preceding eleven seasons, as well as five out of the preceding 57. The magical 1995 season came against a schedule which lacked Ohio State, and it ended with a two-score loss to the 17th-ranked team in the country. That is what constitutes the best season in Northwestern history.
There’s an argument that’s being made that this is a good job, that it’s a Big Ten job and so resources are flowing and if resources are flowing the job must be good. Treat this claim with skepticism. Television is a huge part of revenue, yes, and Northwestern is getting plenty of television revenue through the Big Ten’s media deals. But ticket sales do matter, and so does merchandise, and so do endorsements and all other sorts of things.
It’s hard to confirm current numbers, especially because Northwestern is private, but Department of Education survey data from 2019 has Northwestern’s total football revenue in the relevant year (I’m guessing this was the 2019 season, but it might have been 2018) at $59.5M, well below what was then the Big Ten’s average of $71.7M and even below the Big 12’s $62.2M average. Even if the gap is widening, Northwestern’s not a normal Big Ten school, which is a lot of what we pointed out yesterday.
There’s a counterargument being made to our counterargument which says that since Northwestern is building new football facilities, that both 1) makes the job more attractive in and of itself and 2) signifies that there’s an appetite among the school’s boosters to invest in football. This second piece might be correct. It is theoretically true that hiring one great coach should only require one enthusiastic booster to foot the bill. But again, we’re skeptical, because plenty of schools have sparkling new facilities and Northwestern’s prior facilities were bad, as is the current, pre-renovation stadium. Bad facilities don’t just happen. They arise from years and years of a school failing to raise the money to update them. Big-dollar donors do not, by my impression, pledge to make the same giant donations again and again. Fatigue could well be fresh, and it’s hard to imagine enthusiasm being higher than it was a few years ago, when Northwestern was winning ten games with some regularity and made the Big Ten Championship twice.
Considering timing, too, Northwestern is in a bind. They fired Pat Fitzgerald because of a leadership and culture problem within the program, making it difficult to justify promoting an interim who was on last season’s staff. It’s currently July, making it difficult to find a capable coach elsewhere. One solution would be to try to pull a respected-enough coach out of retirement for one season to serve as an interim, someone like David Cutliffe, and to then conduct a coaching search at the front end of the carousel this offseason, but it’s hard to know how they’ll approach this. At the moment, it sounds like defensive coordinator David Braun, who was still at North Dakota State last season, will be the guy. Matt Campbell’s name has been mentioned, because Matt Campbell’s name is always mentioned, but why would someone like Matt Campbell want to walk into a rebuilding project this massive with no time to prepare for the first season? It would be lunacy. If Northwestern is going to find someone right now, it’s either going to be an irrational actor or a coach bad enough to believe he might never get another shot at a Big Ten or SEC job. And yes, this is a massive rebuilding project. Because for those who didn’t catch the SIU and Miami–Ohio and Wisconsin and Illinois games oh and Duke and ok let’s just say the entire 2022 season, this team is *bad.*
Northwestern finished last season with a 1–11 record. Movelor ranked the team 102nd in Division I, trailing ten FCS programs. In 2021, they went 3–9, beating only Ohio, Indiana State, and Rutgers. They’ve had one recruiting class ranked better than 50th by 247 since 2014. The talent is not there, and the performance hasn’t outshone that talent for two whole years now.
Pat Fitzgerald was special because Pat Fitzgerald took an unusual approach at an unusual school. He had smart kids. He had tough kids. His teams played brands of football designed to slay goliaths, and they had to, because his teams were davids at least three or four times a year. His success was rather inexplicable, most credibly attributed to development and motivation and scheme, three things that are very difficult to replicate. If everyone could get top-20 results out of top-60 talent, they would all do that, and then we’d be back to square one again. In a sport where talent matters like few others, Pat Fitzgerald routinely outperformed his talent.
The result of this was that Pat Fitzgerald could leave no blueprint. There is no obvious design for Northwestern to now follow. The blueprint was to have Pat Fitzgerald be your coach, and to have him do it at Northwestern, a school which could only access exactly the player Fitzgerald knew how to develop and motivate and guide—a player often like himself. Even then, even with the perfect Northwestern football coach, Northwestern went 4–20 these last two years. The ship may have already been sinking when Fitzgerald walked the plank. Realistically, even Nick Saban probably couldn’t win ten games at Northwestern before 2025, if that. There is a long, long rebuild ahead, and odds are that it will fail, and that Northwestern will be one of the worst two or three programs in the Big Ten every single year for the foreseeable future.
It’s possible to have success at Northwestern. It’s definitely possible. Fitzgerald showed that it is possible to win football games as the home team in Evanston, Illinois. But it’s different to succeed at even Wake Forest (Dave Clawson’s name has also been mentioned for the job) than it is at Northwestern. For one thing, admissions standards for athletes are tougher, they’re tougher at Northwestern than probably anywhere else in the Power Five besides maybe Stanford. For another, though, the Big Ten schedule does not offer as many open shots as the ACC’s. In conference play this year, Northwestern will play eight teams who finished last year in the Movelor top 50. Wake Forest will play three such teams. Northwestern will play one team ranked 111th, and that is the only game in which they’re likely to be less than a double-digit underdog. Adding UCLA and USC and getting rid of the Big Ten West isn’t going to dilute the competition level for the Wildcats.
So no, I don’t think Northwestern is a good job. I think they can pay a decent amount of money, comparable to the middle of the Big 12, but it is a very difficult job in which to have anything resembling success, and I’m not sure the money will really be there, given all those factors we discussed yesterday which likely led the Fitzgerald firing decision to be as swift as it ultimately was. If I were setting odds, I’d call Braun the favorite to be the head coach in 2024, but I wouldn’t say he’s favored over the combined field. Someone will take the job, but it’s hard to imagine it being anyone who generates a whole lot of excitement. The better question might be when the next time is that Northwestern will win five games. Cue “Rocketman.”
Vlad Jr. Is So Young
Yet another great Home Run Derby last night, highlighted by Julio Rodríguez’s first round but accented with a reminder that Vlad Jr. is so darn fun.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is having a bad year. Even by bWAR, the more sympathetic of the two formulas, he’s been only the seventh-most valuable Blue Jay position player. His power numbers are down, his already bad defense is grading out even worse than usual. He’s been making much better contact than last year, suggesting positive regression could be on its way, but still: It’s not good when a player still early in his arbitration years isn’t playing up to his salary.
Hopefully, Vladdy Jr. turns things around, because Vladdy Jr. is a sight to behold when he’s raking. All sorts of players are fun when things are going well for them, but few are more fun than Guerrero at his peak. That’s not really the point of all of this, though: The point is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is only 24.
Major League Baseball enjoys a lot of young players at the moment. Ronald Acuña Jr. is 25. Juan Soto, like Guerrero, is 24. Even Shohei Ohtani, who’s been stateside for more than five years now, is only 29, with still a year to go in his traditional prime. Common though it may be, though, I’m still not used to it. Maybe you aren’t either. Vlad Guerrero Jr. is 24? How can this be, when he broke into the league a full year before Covid hit?
The thinking for a significant amount of time, even in baseball’s educated era, was that players didn’t peak until 27. That’s changed lately, developing evidence suggesting they peak shortly after entering the league. Still, they aren’t supposed to decline until 30. This is the average, it’s not presented as a universal rule, but it’s the general suggestion of a player’s trajectory. Theoretically, if a player is a 48-home run guy as a rookie, he should be exactly that valuable for years to come.
A problem with this, for Guerrero, is that he wasn’t a 48-homer guy as a rookie. He did that in his third season in the league. Over his first 757 plate appearances (slightly more than the fullest full season these days), he hit 24 dingers, and his fWAR over his 2019 rookie campaign and his 2020 Covid campaign was a round 0.0. Average that with what he did in 2021 and he’s a 32-homer guy expected to put up about 3.2 WAR, which is nearly exactly what he did in 2022. (He was only worth 2.8 wins, but he did hit exactly 32 home runs.) This is also—again, very baseline expectation here not at all tailored to Vladimir Guerrero Jr.—what he’s expected to do next year, and the following year, and so on and so forth until 2030, when age finally takes root in his big ol’ bones. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t good enough for a down year to not be dangerously close to replacement level.
Because so much of his negative value is defensive, and because American media pays so little attention to the Blue Jays, and because he just won the Home Run Derby, Vladdy Jr.’s struggles fly under the radar. He still posts a sightly batting average (.274 last year, .274 this year so far). He still hits the ball out of the park a fair amount (on pace for 23 long balls this year). He’s still so darn fun when things are going well, because he’s Vladimir Guerrero’s son and because he’s a big guy and because he can hit the ball a mile (he’s not that slow, either—28th percentile is all). He will be just fine in terms of his perception so long as he can avoid a Cody Bellinger-level downturn in his mid-20’s (Bellinger bottomed out with a .165 batting average and –1.0 fWAR at age 25 before bouncing back these last two years). But Vlad Jr. is young, and that’s a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that we get a lot more years of him. The curse is that he’s likely to continue to play below his 2021-driven reputation, and that if he does underperform, it could get ugly fast.
