Cubs prospect Ben Brown could be back ‘really soon’ — never mind camp cuts

MESA, Ariz. – Cubs pitching prospect Ben Brown was hoping the pain in his side late last season would disappear on its own. But on his flight to Chicago to get it checked out, a sneeze made him realize it was more than a minor pull.

“Not the flight to Chicago I was hoping for that year,” Brown said in a conversation with the Sun-Times.

Brown, 24, was on the cusp of a call-up before that oblique injury, which landed him on the injured list in early August. He was among the 12 players cut from the Cubs spring training roster Friday, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s expected to impact the major-league team this season.

“Generally when we get excited about young pitching prospects, it’s stuff,” manager Craig Counsell said Friday. “Certainly Ben sits in that category. Then the next hurdle for really all players is, just go get people out, go perform. Do that, and he’ll knock the door down for sure. And we’ll be asking about him soon. Really soon.”

As much as Brown caught the team’s attention last year, he should be even better equipped for the jump to the big-leagues now.

“Everyone can see my season last year was a tale of two seasons,” he said.

After just four starts in Double-A, the Cubs promoted Brown to Triple-A, where his success continued. But he’d have a high-scoring start sprinkled in now and again. On June 25, he gave up six runs to Memphis in the first inning and was pulled after only two outs, a low point in his season.

The next week he limited Omaha to two runs in five innings, a nice bounce-back. Then it happened again: six runs in 1 ⅓ innings against St. Paul.

“We saw there was a huge mechanical discrepancy as the season went on,” Brown said. “I was really throwing across my body. I was working towards third base.”

He was often athletic enough to compensate for it.

“But my whole season, I was swaying off from what I do best,” he said. “And that’s working through the zone and working to the zone.”

Still, Brown was in conversations between the front office and then-manager David Ross about potential bullpen call-ups down the stretch.

The day before his last start in July, Brown felt some irritation in what he initially thought was his lat muscle. On his start day, he pitched five innings of one-run baseball.

“That’s just the guy I am,” he said. “I want to pitch. I’ll grind through it. And I was hoping it would just go away the next day.”

It did not.

Brown was diagnosed with a strained left oblique. It was initially unclear whether he’d be back before the end of the season. But he returned to the mound for Triple-A Iowa on Sept. 3 as a reliever. Four of his seven appearances out of the bullpen were scoreless, but the other three bumped up his September ERA to 9.39.

“Every single article you read about a Grade 2 oblique strain is two, three months [of recovery,]” Brown said, praising the training staff at the Cubs’ Arizona complex. “The fact that I was able to come back and compete in a month was really cool. So, I can hold my head up high knowing that I did everything I could do to come back and hopefully have the chance to make a difference.”

This winter, which Brown spent in Arizona throwing at the Cubs’ facility, he cleaned up his back leg mechanics. And he honed in on his three best pitches – his fastball and curveball, which have always been his bread-and-butter, and his changeup, which he added last year.

He also reflected on his mentality through the injury process.

“It was frustrating,” he said. “And I think that’s why when I came back, it was so hard on me, because I put this pressure on myself to make a debut before I turned 24, or all these things that I’d dreamed of since I was a kid. And I just saw them fold right in front of my face. So when I came back and still had an opportunity, I was just a mental mess.”

That side of the game became a focus for him this offseason.

“It’s going to make for one really cool story one day,” he said.