NEWSLETTER
How awesome has Rowan Wick looked lately? We were starting to see flashes before this Pirates series, and then he was just dominant this weekend. Given that he’s one of the few in-house relievers who could absolutely lock up a role by the end of this season (as opposed to remaining in the very large and very compelling group of definitely-could-be-a-guy types), his end-of-season run is one that I’m watching particularly closely.
And it’s going so well lately, man.
Consider that, even in his “blown save” on Thursday, the guy was looking as sharp as he’s looked since returning from the long, long oblique recovery. A bleeder with eyes, a bouncer off the plate, and a catcher’s interference set up that blown save, and I’m telling you, he LOOKED good. He responded the next day by doing this:
Rowan mowin’.
🔥🔥🔥 @RowanWick pic.twitter.com/LMgldvGPYn
— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) September 3, 2021
Then, two days later, all he did was pitch TWO dominant innings to get the multi-inning save yesterday. It’s the Pirates, so you don’t want to take too much away from the results, but you have to love what your eyes are showing you. The guy looks really good right now. And that’s exactly what we needed to see from Wick as the year winds down.
Consider this, via The Athletic (written a WEEK ago, and then pitching coach Tommy Hottovy concurred – again, all before this weekend):
“It’s so hard when you miss as much time as he did,” bullpen coach Chris Young said. “It’s taken him a while to get his feet back underneath him. I think sometimes we mistake ‘healthy and able to pitch’ with ‘high-leverage, major-league pitcher ready to go.’ He has all the tools he needs to be a high-leverage reliever. It seems like he gets a little crisper each time out.”
This is rather typical for Wick. It happened last year too, in that he starts off a little slowly, but as the season goes along and he gets more work in, he starts to look significantly better. The Cubs want to see both his strikeout and walk rates move in different directions from where they currently are and they believe as he continues to get work in, that’s what will happen.
The velocity is there with his fastball, but the curve doesn’t seem to be up to par just yet. He’s starting to get more swing-and-miss as the season progresses, but so far his 6.8 percent swinging-strike rate is just not close to good enough for what he can do when at his best.
“He’s gonna do the work,” Young said. “He wasn’t happy with his first couple outings and he was back in the bullpen the next day trying to touch the mound and get better. Through that process, he’s found out that when he does a little extra work, it escalates quickly. It starts as a really good reliever and then he gets to a point where he’s really happy with where he’s at.”
We have definitely seen this kind of ramping up from Wick before, even in the limited time we’ve actually been exposed to him. He looked shaky his first four or five outings this year, even as he was getting results. The velocity was not quite holding as you’d like, he wasn’t getting any whiffs, and he didn’t have any moments where you would describe him as “nasty.” Not what you want to see from a guy you were hoping would show out as the presumptive closer to open the 2022 season. I was concerned. I’ll cop to it. I wrote about it.
Thankfully, it was just the ramp up stuff. Because the guy we’re seeing right now is every bit as dominant as you’d hope Wick could look this year. He’ll still need health to get to Opening Day as the presumptive closer, and that’s not something you can just assume in his case, but at least it’s looking like he will finish out this year looking like the guy he flashed in 2019 and just before his injury in 2020.
On the season, Wick has thrown 11.2 innings through 11 appearances, and despite the early unevenness, the results have been great overall: 3.09 ERA, 2.40 FIP, 30.0% K rate, 12.0% BB rate, 3.6% barrel rate, 25.9% soft contact rate, 22.2% hard contact rate. Those last ones stand out to me even more than the strikeouts, because when Wick was at his best in 2019, it wasn’t just that he’d get some strikeouts, it was that nobody could square him up. You wouldn’t call him a “contact manager,” but the best relievers – even the ones who DO get a lot of strikeouts – are also just impossibly difficult to barrel up consistently. So I love seeing that still showing from Wick this year.
Long story short: it was really important for Wick to flip a switch and start pitching very well, and he’s done that. Now I’m watching to make sure he can finish out like this and stay healthy. Do that, and he’s going to head into the offseason the favorite to be closing games for the Cubs next April.
