MESA, Ariz. – Cubs right-hander Jameson Taillon never stopped throwing after the 2024 season ended.
He wasn’t pitching off a mound in October or anything to that extreme. But he kept up catch play – trying something new this offseason, even after shortening his time off the year before to one month.
“I’ve just found the older I get, the more time I take off, the worse I feel,” he said Tuesday. “So it’s good to just keep it moving.”
The adjustment flowed smoothly into the program the Cubs designed for him. With the team playing in the Tokyo Series March 18-19, the Cubs moved up their pitchers’ offseason work. They needed to make sure they’d have enough arms ready to compete in that two-game series against the Dodgers, which count toward the regular season.
At the same time, the rise in pitcher injuries has been an MLB-wide concern. Accelerating pitchers’ offseason programs for Tokyo wouldn’t make sense if it exacerbated injury risk.
“We did a lot of research internally,” Cubs pitching coach Tommy Hottovy said. “Not just me, people waste way smarter than me, doing some really cool digging on how much time it takes for tissue to adapt in the offseason, to repair; how we can do that creatively without just completely shutting down and losing workload.”
The team gave pitchers at heads up on the unique timing of the offseason in exit interviews last year. Then they had them do things like throwing around the football in the fall.
“Tried to stay active, so that when we hit that ramp back up, we were at a full zero,” Hottovy said. “We were hovering slightly above that. That was going to allow us to shrink that timeline just a hair.”
With the extra work done on the front end, the Cubs plan to run the next four weeks of camp as usual – albeit with earlier report dates.
There’s a nine-day difference between the first game of the Tokyo Series and MLB’s domestic opening day, but Cubs starters don’t necessarily have to be fully stretched out.
Last year when the Dodgers and Padres played in Seoul around the same time, the most any pitcher threw was 77 pitches, from Tyler Glasnow. That same game, Yu Darvish threw 72. But in Game 2, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, making his MLB debut, only threw 43 pitches.
The Cubs will have plenty of off days on either side of the Tokyo Series to line up their pitching plan.
“We have the ability to adjust based off of how guys are feeling, how they’re recovering,” Hottovy said. “So I think there’s a lot of ways we can go. I also think there’s opportunities to have multiple starters in the game if we want to piggyback guys. “Because it’s such a unique situation, the sky’s the limit with how we want to put that together.”
It’ll be a unique experience as well.
“I want to go over there and play good ball,” Taillon said. “And whether it’s an exhibition or in a game, I really want to pitch in the Tokyo Dome. I think it’d be pretty cool to say you’ve done that.”
Taillon, a coffee connoisseur and Pokemon card collector, said he’s already started scouting his spots for both. Shota Imanaga, who is set to start one of the two Tokyo Series games, and Seiya Suzuki plan to throw a team get-together.
“It’s going to be an incredible trip,” manager Craig Counsell said. “It’s going to be an incredible cultural trip for us. It’s an incredible team-building trip for us. And it’s an incredible baseball experience for our guys. So in all measures, we are fortunate that we get to do this trip.”