Cubs outfielders can’t catch balls 10 rows up the bleachers

The likes of Ian Happ, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Seiya Suzuki, and Michael Conforto have to wonder how many times they can watch a ball sail 20-30 feet over the wall. With Edward Cabrera‘s disastrous start on Friday, Cubs starters have now surrendered 62 home runs, and it’s not even Father’s Day yet.

That’s a 1.73 HR/9 as a starting staff heading into Saturday. One expects that from the Colorado Rockies, who pitch in the thin Rocky Mountain air. To no surprise, the starting staff’s flyball rate is among the top third in baseball. They are also among the worst in hard-hit rate, a bad combination of flyballs being hit hard (duh).

The Cubs starting rotation is in a terrible place right now

This is beyond not ideal; this is terrible. A team cannot win like this. These home run problems are going to be hard to resolve with warm weather and wind blowing out. Especially when guys like Jameson Taillon (20 HR against) and Shota Imanaga (17 HR against) are heavy flyball pitchers who are no strangers to giving up homers. That’s part of their games.

With Cade Horton done and Justin Steele still out for a while, they have what they have unless they make a deal. Hope that the Cubs staff finds something to help unlock Cabrera (who keeps getting worse), and Matthew Boyd can be a decent anchor when he returns. Hard to be optimistic right now.

For a team with the philosophy built on run prevention and defense, it’s not possible for a defense to prevent runs when they need jetpacks to catch the ball. For years, fans wondered why they didn’t have more swing-and-miss arms and groundball getters; now it’s catching up to them. Injuries don’t help, obviously, but this is a staff-wide issue.

Comparing to last year

Last season, the Cubs starters gave up the eighth-most homers in the Majors (127). To no surprise, both Taillon (24) and Imanaga (31) struggled with that. Colin Rea gave up 20 (as a starter), and Boyd surrendered 19. They sported the second-highest flyball rate (43.7%) as well.

At least Taillon and Rea limited the damage on those home runs. Plus, having Horton in the rotation helped too. Taillon may have given up a handful of homers, but compare 24 given up in 129.2 innings to already having given up 20 in half those innings. That’s just insane.

There is a lot of pressure right now for Cabrera to get it together, for Rea to be decent enough, and Ben Brown to keep ascending. If Taillon and Imanaga are going to struggle with homers this bad…hope more are solo shots. Taillon had done a good job at limiting damage in previous years.

Either way, this is a really awful trend, and even with the injuries Hoyer has to answer for.

The post Cubs outfielders can’t catch balls 10 rows up the bleachers appeared first on ChiCitySports.