SAN FRANCISCO – Another night, another Cubs starter who wasn’t part of the Opening Day rotation.
Obviously, teams start each season knowing they’re going to need to use a lot more than five starting pitchers to get through a six-month marathon. Obviously, the Cubs knew they’d be calling on more than the five guys who made up the rotation at the end of March.
But here in mid June, the Cubs maybe weren’t predicting this, that injuries would have decimated their starting staff and had them leaning on fill-ins to stay afloat during an early-summer freefall.
Right-hander Javier Assad earned the nod in the series-opener with the Giants on Friday night in California. Not a week earlier, he shut down this same lineup with 6 1/3 innings of relief work that manager Craig Counsell was still calling “heroic” days later.
And so Assad, who was dispatched to Triple-A in the middle of last month, suddenly looked like a promising option.
“Javy carries himself like a pro,” lefty Matthew Boyd said earlier this week, after his shoulder soreness forced Assad into Friday’s start. “He has a professional mindset. He’s mature beyond his years.
“We’ve said it all the time: It’s going to take all of us to take us where we want to go. It’s awesome to see him go do that. He’s a talented pitcher.”
Promising options have been somewhat hard to come by for the Cubs, who will need to continue to find patches moving forward with Cade Horton down for the season, Justin Steele’s status still unknown, Jameson Taillon on the injured list until after the All-Star break and Boyd’s IL return delayed.
The Cubs can be thankful that Ben Brown has broken out and turned in some of the best numbers in baseball; coming into Friday, his 1.74 ERA was the fourth lowest among hurlers with at least 50 innings on the campaign.
Other attempted solutions have been less successful. Colin Rea has an ERA north of 5.00, ranking second on the team in innings pitched despite starting the year in the bullpen. Jordan Wicks was quickly jettisoned back to Iowa after a couple of uninspiring outings.
And with healthy arms struggling, at times, too, it’s made for a bumpy ride.
“How we’ve handled it,” pitching coach Tommy Hottovy told the Sun-Times on Wednesday, “there’s times when you feel you’ve got things under control, and there’s times where you feel like you’re hanging on by the seat of your pants.”
That’s not unique to these Cubs or this season, of course. The grind of a baseball season has a way of draining even the most stacked pitching staffs. Just ask the Dodgers of recent vintage.
Though the mere mention of the postseason might have frustrated fans laughing during the Cubs’ 8-22 stretch, the team’s championship-level expectations demand that some of this depth deliver if it’s going to succeed – or even play – in October.
“Ultimately, the process of how we go about evaluating where guys are – tracking workloads, making sure we’re continuing to put guys in the best spots to be successful – that’s what’s most important,” Hottovy said. “We’ve done a decent job with that.
“But ultimately, it comes down to guys stepping up.”
So far, rotation-wide – including the healthy guys from the Opening Day group – that hasn’t happened to the degree it needs to. Coming into Friday, Cubs starters owned the second highest ERA in baseball, at 6.46, since May 9, the day after the team’s second 10-game winning streak concluded.
That includes poor showings by Taillon, Edward Cabrera and Shota Imanaga, who are far from depth pieces. They’re the guys who were supposed to carry the load and power a playoff team.
But it also includes Rea and Wicks – and even Brown, who’s done a good deal of work to keep that number from being even higher.
In other words, just like with the offense, the Cubs need to be better to get to where they want to be, even when injuries throw them a curveball.