How big a question mark is the pitching? At least the starting pitching?
Taillon, Stroman and Smyly are all proven commodities. They put up seasons last year that were pretty close to their career expectations. They should come pretty close to repeating those performances. That gives you about 400 innings of sub-4.00 ERA starts.
In today’s baseball, you’re looking for about 800 innings from your starters. So the Cubs are looking for 400 more decent innings from some combination of Hendricks. Sampson, Steele, Thompson, Wesneski, and Assad. Those guys combined to throw 493.1 innings with a 3.50 ERA last year.
There’s enough redundancy here that if someone isn’t performing, they can be sent down or shipped out and replaced with someone else. Killian, Wicks, Brown and a couple others are all also not too far from contributing. It’s pretty clear that their strategies is to throw bodies at the starters’ slots and see who sticks.
It worked during the last half of last year, and I think it will work again. Really, the only point last year where the starting pitching was bad was in June when the top 6 starters in the organization were all hurt at the same time. That was a slice of bad luck pretty unlikely to repeat itself.
The bullpen is a much bigger question mark. They added Boxberger to returnees like Wick, Hughes, Rucker, Alzolay, and whichever starter above doesn’t make the rotation. There are some kids that will start getting chances the way Hughes and Effross did last year. He’s also added, by my last count, 6 veteran relievers signed to minor league contracts, a strategy that has worked pretty well for him the last couple years. I also think there will be at least one more MLB reliever signing.
