Was Edward Cabrera’s Last Start Canary in Coalmine or Rock Bottom?
Edward Cabrera‘s performance had been somewhat troubling for a while, with underlying data indicating his stretch of five straight games with three earned runs allowed in each was actually much better than it should have been. A few days prior to his Saturday start against the Rangers, Nate Roper expressed concern about the dip in fastball velocity and the worsening shapes of his breaking balls. The curveball, which makes up 20% of Cabrera’s repertoire, had looked particularly bad.
I had noted in the lineup analysis for that loss in Arlington that, while his strikeout rate had improved in the two previous starts, Cabrera was still giving up an alarming number of hits. That was again the case on Saturday night, as he struck out six with a 28.6% K rate that was right in line with his recent results. For reference, he’d been around 16-18% from starts 2-5. Good in a vacuum, but not when you also give up seven hits.
Two of those hits left the yard, which has now been the case for Cabrera in three of his last four starts. That’s what happens when your stuff isn’t as sharp. The curveball has lost just over four inches of horizontal movement and nearly four of vertical drop from last season, despite being thrown with the same spin axis and direction. That’s not just because it’s down 182 RPMs, but also because its spin efficiency has dropped from 77% last year to 63% to this point.
In his X thread on the topic, Roper cited a possible grip change as a culprit, but he also noted that it could be nothing more than a matter of angles from the screenshots in question.
He may have adjusted his grip slightly, this year spiking his index finger more, sitting more on the seam (darker image is 2026).
It’s such a small change that it could just be individual variance in the images, not an actual change. pic.twitter.com/atlLBgGmWI
— Nate Roper (@NateRoper_) May 6, 2026
What we know for certain is that Cabrera has dropped his arm slot to 33 degrees this season after being at 36 last year and 42 in 2024. Those angles had each been the lowest of his career, so it may just be a matter of adjusting. There’s been a trend toward lower arm slots across baseball, with many believing it is beneficial to arm health.
As with any adjustment, however, there can be tradeoffs in other areas. For Cabrera, the lower arm slot seems to correlate directly to reduced extension. He was at 6.7 feet in 2024, then 6.5 feet last season, and now he’s at 6.4 feet. While a few inches might not seem like much, releasing the ball farther from the plate means a fastball and sinker that are already down in velocity will play down even more. It also means less deception on breaking balls that aren’t as sharp as in the past.
Former CI staffer and current CHGO Cubs talking head Brendan Miller got very granular on those topics in an X thread of his own, detailing Cabrera’s changes in a series of graphs. His conclusions are more or less the same as Roper’s, though Miller avoids insinuating that some sort of health issue could be at the heart of the decline in production.
My hypothesis is that, rather than some sort of minimal injury leading to Cabrera’s inefficiencies, this may be a matter of unintended negative consequences from changes meant to improve his ability to stay healthy. There’s a reason pitchers are willing to put the structural integrity of their arms at risk in search of more velo and nastier stuff, and it’s that those things are what earn you the big bucks. But pitching coaches know that the greatest ability is availability.
Those concepts are often in conflict with one another, as it’s increasingly difficult to unlock better performance without creating greater injury risk. We know the Cubs are trying to do both, and we also know that they convinced oft-injured reliever Hunter Harvey to sign with them based on their pitch that they’d be able to help him stay healthy. That obviously hasn’t worked for Harvey, who was just shut down for four more weeks due to a stress reaction near his triceps, but he may offer a clue as to what’s happening with Cabrera.
‘‘I was mesmerized by it,’’ Harvey said of their recruitment. ‘‘They were able to keep players healthy, and it really grabbed my attention because that’s kind of one thing I’ve been battling.’’
There’s a big difference between a 28-year-old starter with three years of club control and a 31-year-old reliever on a one-year deal. I won’t go so far as to say the Cubs don’t actually care about Harvey’s health, but he is much more of a replaceable commodity. I can’t help but wonder if the pitching gurus were so intent on making little tweaks aimed at keeping Cabrera healthy that they ended up making him worse in the process.
As cool as that whole availability thing is, you don’t exactly want to send a guy out there every five days if he’s going to give up more hits than innings pitched. And if one or two of those hits clear the fence, it’s much harder to work around the traffic. Even if we’re just talking about a gang of singles, that means higher-stress outings and earlier calls to the bullpen.
Bear in mind that this is all totally hypothetical, as I don’t have any direct evidence of the Cubs proactively adjusting Cabrera’s slot. It would be exceedingly odd for them to do that if they knew the extent to which it would limit his extension and stifle his spin efficiency, but the results aren’t always readily apparent. To be fair, this could be a matter of Cabrera making his own adjustments, or he might actually be dealing with what he believes to be a superficial injury.
All we can say for certain is that he’s not pitching like the kind of guy you would trade your top prospect to acquire. Now, that could change in a hurry. So to answer the titular question, at least for me, is that Saturday’s loss could be both the canary and an indication that Cabrera just bottomed out ahead of an inevitable rise. Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better, and the series of mediocre games that preceded this last one simply didn’t provide enough impetus for change.
Now we just hope his last start was a bit of a wake-up call to show Cabrera and/or the team’s pitching infrastructure that what he’s been doing isn’t going to work.
