Chicago Cubs Lineup (8/8/26): Holmes Sure Lock to Dominate in Cubs Debut
Raise your hand if you freaked out a little bit when Kevin Gausman, a workhorse by today’s standards who was brought in to solidify the rotation, took a comebacker off the lower leg last night. I don’t subscribe to the idea that injuries are somehow contagious, or that they’re a product of the baseball gods’ wrath, but the Cubs sure have been snakebit when it comes to keeping pitchers healthy. Gausman was able to continue, eventually going seven innings to get the win in his Cubs debut.
Now we get another debut from a trade-deadline pickup, with Clay Holmes making his first MLB start in nearly three months after recovering from a broken fibula. He suffered the injury on May 15 when he took a — you guessed it — comebacker off the leg. The Yankees’ Spencer Jones hit the ball 111.1 mph, not much harder than the 106.2 mph liner from Salvador Perez that clipped Gausman.
Between the long layoff and new laundry, Holmes will probably have a little more adrenaline than usual. We’ll find out whether and how that will impact his performance, but my initial guess is that he’ll have to take a little time to settle in. He was up to 5.1 innings in the last of three rehab starts and I’m sure the Cubs would like him to get around that much work tonight, which is more than possible if he’s working efficiently.
That means keeping the ball on the ground with his elite sinker, a pitch he’s gotten away from a little bit since converting to the rotation last year with the Mets. After being purely a sinker/slider guy as a lockdown reliever for the Yankees, Holmes incorporated a cutter and change last year. He also began throwing a curveball earlier in the season for the first time since 2021, and it was getting decent results.
With the cutter playing somewhat poorly, I wonder if the Cubs will encourage him to lean more heavily into his best stuff. While variety is the spice of life, not to mention a necessity for most pitchers, narrowing the repertoire might be a good way to ease the big righty back into action. Gausman threw more splitters last night than he had in any game this season, and I think we’ll see Holmes get into a heavier sinker/slider mix than he’d been using with the Mets.
As we’ve seen so many times this year, the starter really just needs to keep his offense with a swing or two.
They’re up against Seth Lugo, another former Met who began his career mainly as a reliever before moving to the rotation. He’s been a very consistent performer over the last several years, and I seem to recall him being a perennial trade target in the same mold as the aforementioned Cubs. As you’d expect from a guy who will turn 37 in November, Lugo’s velocity and strikeout rate have dropped steadily since 2020 or so.
In an effort to keep Father Time at bay, he’s expanded his repertoire from five to eight pitches. He’s also got some of the most equitable distribution of any pitcher I’ve seen, throwing seven of those offerings at least 9% of the time. There’s also very little difference in his usage based on handedness, which has kept his splits in the mild-to-neutral range.
There’s not much to break down here beyond that, as Lugo is one of those aging hurlers who just knows how to pitch. He’s not going to fool many hitters and has one of the worst-looking Baseball Savant sliders I’ve viewed in a long time, but he has dominated these Cubs hitters to the tune of a .487 OPS over 84 total at-bats.
Most of that came during his salad days, so I suspect we’ll see the Cubs inflate those numbers tonight. First pitch is at 6:10pm CT on Marquee and The Score.
