Cubs Expected to Retain Pitching Coaches, Which Should Not Surprise Anyone

In news that should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows ball, Patrick Mooney and Sahadev Sharma reported that the Cubs are expected to retain pitching coach Tommy Hottovy and assistant pitching coach Casey Jacobson. The Cubs had one of the worst pitching staffs in baseball this past season as they dealt with myriad injuries, so I can understand why some of you wanted to see changes made. At the same time, you can’t blame your mechanic if you drive over a nail right after having new tires installed.

So unless you believe Hottovy was sneaking into players’ homes in the dead of night to place their arms at awkward angles, thus leading to issues when they threw the next day, it’s hard to blame him for the issues. More plausible grounds for concern would be that the Cubs’ methods contributed to their pitching staff’s poor health outcomes, but we’re talking about a role that carries a decidedly non-zero risk for injury. Nearly 40% of all MLB pitchers had undergone at least one elbow reconstruction as of January, and that number is rising all the time.

Injury prevention will forever and always be baseball’s El Dorado, so the unfortunate reality is that pitchers are never going to stop getting hurt. From feeling a UCL pop while throwing a pitch to tweaking your knee standing up from playing with your kids, things are just going to happen. Firing Hottovy and Jacobson because the Cubs faced an inordinate amount of bad luck would have been silly.

Now, performance is another matter entirely, and the Cubs’ pitchers did not perform well. They gave up more homers than their offense hit, which is really saying something, and their 6.0 fWAR was better than only the Royals (5.1) and Nationals (4.8). Kinda hard to pitch well when there’s a whole staff on the IL. For more on that, we turn to the sagacious Brent Barry.

“I don’t want to sound abrasive, but you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit,” the 1996 Slam Dunk Contest winner said in 1999 after being traded from the Bulls to the SuperSonics.

Jed Hoyer said during his end-of-season press conference that the pitching simply wasn’t good enough, a fact that was quite obvious even without his admission. He also vowed to fix it, presumably by throwing a lot of money at the problem this offseason. Nuking their previous spending strategy by signing Tarik Skubal would be a start. A more budget-conscious approach might include Michael King or Freddy Peralta.

If the front office invests in pitching and things still go sideways, yeah, maybe it’ll be time to scapegoat Hottovy. In the meantime, he’ll have a chance to help set things right.