Sunday, September 27

Welcome back to the Cubs Beat newsletter. MLB.com's Mike Petriello wrote this edition. All stats are updated through Tuesday's games.

It’s not exactly a secret that for the last decade or so, fastball usage across the Majors has trended down. “Throw it harder, but use it less” is a pretty succinct way to sum up pitching right now, and that’s pretty easily seen when fastballs (four-seams and sinkers here) are thrown, on average, at 94.4 mph while also being seen just 46.8% of the time. Those are both extreme marks in the pitch-tracking era, dating to 2008, which makes it highly likely they’re the most extreme marks of all time, too. 

We start with that because simply saying “the Cubs are seeing a lot more breaking balls right now” isn’t good enough without context, since pretty much every batter is as well. They’re seeing a lot more breaking balls. A lot. 

Last April, Chicago batters saw breaking balls on 28% of pitches. This April, it was 32%. Now, in May, it’s 37%. That it’s the highest breaking-ball rate the Cubs have seen in a month in the pitch-tracking era (and, again, likely ever) goes without saying. It’s now one of the highest breaking-ball rates any team has seen in any month -- the second most of more than 3,100 team months on record. 

It’s everyone, and everywhere. Alex Bregman saw 31% breaking balls over the last five years; he’s up to 43% this month, easily a career high. It’s not hard to see why, either. So far this season, Bregman has hit .306 with a .413 slugging percentage against fastballs, .334 with a .500 slugging against offspeed pitches and … just .155 with a .211 slugging against breaking balls.

His lone home run off a breaking ball came when he took advantage of a Blake Treinen sweeper that swept right into the barrel of his bat, coming in a Dodger Stadium that has now (yes, really!) become the most favorable home run field in the Majors for righty hitters. 

We originally looked into this with Bregman in mind, for exactly the reasons stated above. But as it turns out, were you to look at the more than 350 players who have seen at least 100 pitches this month, while Bregman has indeed seen an exceptionally high rate of spin (7th most), he’s not first on his team. Or second. Or even third. He’s fourth just on his own Cubs -- and barely even that. 

Highest breaking-ball % in May, min. 100 pitches seen 

• 47.9% // Seiya Suzuki, CUBS 

• 47.8% // Dansby Swanson, CUBS 

• 46.9% // Lenyn Sosa, Blue Jays 

• 45.5% // Coby Mayo, O’s 

• 43.4% // Miguel Amaya, CUBS 

• 43.0% // Matt Wallner, Twins 

• 42.9% // Bregman, CUBS 

• 42.0% // Sal Stewart, Reds 

• 41.8% // Salvador Perez, Royals 

• 41.6% // Matt Shaw, CUBS 

That’s five Cubs among the top 10 spin-seers here, and outside of Ian Happ and Michael Conforto, the entire lineup is seeing breaking balls at an average or better clip. Suzuki, in particular, stands out here: among every batter who has ever seen 300 pitches in any month dating back to 2008, he’s cracked the top 10, with that 47% rate being a massive increase from the 33% he saw in April.

On a completely related note, the Cubs had a top-five offense in March/April (.780 OPS) and have a bottom-five unit in May (.633). 

That, to some extent, are the normal ups and downs you’ll see over the course of a season. The April Cubs were probably never as good as they looked, in part due to Carson Kelly’s second consecutive monster start. (He’s the third-best hitter in baseball over the last two Aprils.) The May Cubs aren’t as bad as they’ve looked, either; you certainly wouldn’t expect Swanson, Suzuki and Nico Hoerner to be three of the 30 weakest hitters in the game for very long. 

But there’s a reason why you see fewer fastballs and more breaking balls, and that’s because fastballs are where damage is found. Just take a spin over to the Statcast Pitch Arsenal Stats leaderboard, which shows which batters have been the most valuable against which pitch types, and it’s hard not to notice how overwhelming the placement of fastballs is on the get-crushed list. Twenty of the 22 best combinations for batters are against a fastball type (and yes, we see you, Dillon Dingler and Cody Bellinger, and your slider mastery). Breakers work because they work. 

(A quick aside: This is also why all the focus on trouble with runners in scoring position sort of misses the point. It’s not that the Cubs' offense isn’t performing in the biggest spots. It’s that they’re not performing in any spots, right now -- they’re 29th in OPS with the bases empty.) 

So what’s the cause for hope here? It might be found in the why behind all the May breaking balls. You’d expect to have seen some signs in April that this was going to be a weakness for the lineup, one which scouting reports eventually caught up to. 

But that’s not exactly what happened. The April Cubs were actually quite good against breaking balls, rating fifth in Run Value (+9) against them. The thing is, they were elite against fastballs, posting a .294/.391/.497 line. That was best in April in Run Value (+30), and was in fact one of the best fastball marks in any month by any team over the last three years. 

Of course, then, the league would adjust. Fewer fastballs. More breaking balls. It’s on the Cubs hitters to adjust back. The good news is that they’ve done it before, as recently as last month. The bad news is, nothing at all is going to change until they make it change. 

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