The Chicago Cubs don’t need another reminder that their pitching is lagging behind the modern game. They got one in October, and it came fast.
By the time the NL Wild Card Series in San Diego was underway, the problem was already hard to ignore. Cubs pitchers gave up 12 runs in the series, including five homers, while the offense managed only one run. That kind of collapse doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and Jed Hoyer made clear after the season that the club sees the issue the same way everyone else does.
“Right now, I feel like we’re a bit imbalanced,” Cubs President of Baseball Operations Jed Hoyer said in his end-of-season press conference on Oct. 2. “We’re leaning on our defense too heavily, and the overall quality of our pitching has to improve.”
The biggest issue is the kind of pitching the Cubs are built around. Their 2026 staff averaged 93.6 mph on four-seam fastballs, which ranked fourth-slowest in MLB. None of the three teams below them - the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Kansas City Royals or the Washington Nationals - made the playoffs.
That’s a sharp contrast to where the league has gone. The MLB-average four-seam fastball sat at 93.4 mph in 2016.
This year, it climbed to 94.8, setting a sixth straight annual high. Over the last 10 seasons, the Cubs’ average four-seam velocity has been dead last in baseball at 93.1 mph.
The Cubs have lived with that gap for a while, but this season it became impossible to paper over. Shota Imanaga led the team in innings and averaged 91.6 mph with his fastball, the second-slowest mark among qualified pitchers in MLB. The staff as a whole posted a 6.0 fWAR, third-worst in the league, and its 20.8% strikeout rate ranked eighth-lowest.
That’s not the profile of a staff built to survive October, and the Cubs found that out quickly.
“When I think about the offseason, when I think about seasons to come, that has to be our goal - to get our pitching infrastructure and our pitching quality to the level of our position players,” Hoyer said.
The numbers point in the same direction as the results. The Cubs hit the most home runs in the National League with 220, but they also allowed the most with 231. For all the strength elsewhere on the roster, the pitching landed on the wrong side of the balance.
It’s a different world than the one that carried the Cubs to the 2016 World Series title. That team was led on the mound by Kyle Hendricks, a soft-tossing starter whose 2.13 ERA topped MLB and made him the first Cub since 1938 to lead the majors in that category. He started Game 6 of the NLCS and Game 7 of the World Series in Cleveland, and he did it with an average four-seam fastball of 88.9 mph.
Back then, the Cubs’ staff wasn’t among the hardest-throwing groups in the game. Its average fastball velocity of 93.3 mph ranked 17th in MLB, yet the unit still produced the fourth-most fWAR at 18.8.
A decade later, that formula doesn’t travel nearly as well. The league has only gotten faster, and the Cubs have stayed stuck at the bottom. Hoyer said the organization will dig into what led to the lack of swing-and-miss and the home run damage against its pitchers this season.
“Right now, the gap has widened a bit,” Hoyer said of the Cubs’ pitching development compared to some of the league’s best. “We need to address it.”
That leaves the offseason priority in plain view: the Cubs have to remake the rotation with velocity. The organization has had only a few real success stories in that department, with Cade Horton standing out before his UCL injury in April, and Justin Steele on a similar path before UCL surgery and setbacks kept him out for nearly two full seasons. Horton’s 2025 fastball averaged 95.5 mph, and his talent made that season look like more than a flash.
But the broader record is harder to spin. The Cubs have spent years trying to develop pitching and haven’t done enough of it. If they want to get past the same roadblock that has stood in the way for the last ten seasons, they need more arms that can miss bats, more velocity in the rotation, and a staff that looks like the rest of baseball has already moved on to.
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