NEWSLETTER
On September 9, 2019, a short-handed Cubs team in the thick of a playoff race called up a homegrown first-round pick to fill in a spot they had not anticipated would be necessary a month before. Nico Hoerner was summoned as the fill-in shortstop, he’d grab three hits and four RBIs in his debut, and he proved ready for the Major League assignment earlier than his development plan suggested he would be.
While that’s not the last time the Cubs called up one of their own first rounders for his debut — if you can name the last time, you have my respect — that’s certainly the last time anything felt like close to how this will feel: as Jordan Wicks is reportedly being called up to start as soon as tonight for a Cubs team that desperately needs someone.
It’s a fair question to ask whether Wicks is ready after seven solid-not-spectacular Triple-A starts but 1) the Cubs can’t afford perfect timing, and 2) his personality is going to help. I don’t expect Jordan to be overwhelmed by the moment; I expect him to believe completely that he belongs on that Pittsburgh mound. He’ll rightly be called a bulldog because he’s a strike-throwing lefty and it will sound generic, but in this case, the shoe fits.
You have to be that personality to throw his best pitch with the thoughts he does. The first time I spoke with Wicks — about 18 months ago for The Bain Campaign — he talked about his changeup and how his mental cue for it is to just throw the pitch down the middle every time. Find me more than five other professional baseball players that can have that sort of blind faith in a pitch that gets hammered by hitters if it actually ends up down the middle. While that says something about the movement on Wicks changeup, and we’ll get to that in a bit, I think it says a lot more about Jordan’s approach to hitters: here I am, come beat me.
That’s one of three ways that Wicks is going to remind first-time viewers of him today of Jon Lester, which I’ve been saying is inevitable since draft day. Another reason is how they look in a uniform (this was my one-tweet scouting report when I watched Wicks at Kansas State months before the Cubs drafted him), with Wicks just one inch shorter, and about the same weight that Lester was in Boston. Neither was ever confused with someone bringing all muscle to the scale, but both guys did the work necessary to get that fastball up to 94 mph.
The final reason is one aspect of their delivery that I think is/was important for both: hiding the ball behind their body during their arm swing. Lester would bring the ball pretty much straight back behind his butt, where Wicks will bring his outside of his body towards third base, but it creates a similar effect: a non-insignificant amount of deception that helps the raw stuff play up. Wicks adds to that deception with a little bit of cross-fire in his delivery. His front foot doesn’t go linear towards home plate but a bit towards the first base dugout, closing off his front shoulder to the hitter until he begins to fire, finishing with a pretty normal 7/8 release point. Good video here from Eric at FanGraphs:
(Obligatory comp reminder: no one here is projecting a Jon Lester career here onto Jordan Wicks! I’m highlighting those three similarities above very specifically.)
Okay, let’s get into the pitch mix here, because there are six offerings to talk about. It’s possible we don’t see them all today, as Jordan has been known to throw one or two out that don’t show well in the bullpen pre-game, but it’s noteworthy that he threw all six at least three times in his last outing with Iowa. Let’s go with the usage order that I’d project he’s most comfortable starting his big league career with.
- Four-seam fastball. While ultimately I think the four-seam will be best as his second- or third-most used offering, at this point in his development it’s still first. The pitch is a 92-94 mph offering, and the Cubs hope is that in time you’re more likely to see the occasional 95 than the occasional 91. The pitch gets about 15-18 inches of IVB, which is just-slightly above the 15.4″ average for MLB lefties in 2024. Jordan averages about 2-5 inches of relative cut with the pitch as well, meaning it doesn’t run arm side quite as much as hitters are used to seeing. We’ve seen how this can have an impact on contact quality, though Jordan’s is far closer to average than Justin Steele’s.
- Changeup. The bread-and-butter pitch, you can see Jordan discuss his history with his two-seam circle change grip in this video with Lance Brozdowski. Due to that grip, the pitch behaves like Wicks’ sinker, with an excellent 11-15″ of arm side run. Wicks had the pitch down to about 80-82 mph in his last outing, which was a little lower than the usual 82-84, giving him double digit velocity separation off his fastball. The pitch gets good late tumble and the results have pretty much always been dominant with it. (See Todd’s vid capture below.)
- Slider. New pitch with the Cubs, added to the mix before the 2022 season. Lance at Marquee has mentioned that the pitch will grade out better on the Stuff+ scale than the changeup, and while I don’t think it’s a better pitch, I do think it was a necessary one to get Wicks succeeding at the upper levels. This great article lists the 3 important data points necessary to get a slider to most effectively tunnel off a slider, and Wicks is as the top-end of each acceptable range: he’s about 13-14″ of horizontal break difference (he gets about 8-9″ of sweep generally), about 14″ of IVB separation and 11 mph of velocity separation.
- Two-seam fastball. Wicks’ sinker was his preferred fastball at Kansas State, but we even speculated on draft day that he’d likely flip-flop the fastball usage in the pros, and he has. The pitch’s best trait is how it perfectly mirrors his changeup with 14-17″ of arm side run, but whiff rates are so low that I think this pitch can really only be effective when he’s perfectly locating it to the arm side corner of the plate.
- Curveball. The key for the Cubs during Wicks’ development process was maximizing the difference between his curveball and slider, particularly adding lateral movement to the slider and adding depth to the curveball. Wicks now gets upwards of 55″ of vertical break (with gravity) on the upper 70s pitch, but still probably gets on the side of it a bit too much. It’s not going to be a world-beating pitch in MLB, but it can certainly be a strike-stealer for him.
- Cutter. Added to the mix during the season last year, the Cubs were happy with how successful it was down the end of the season with Tennessee last year. I don’t think the feel has quite gotten over the hump yet to be a regular offering, but I think the potential for this pitch as a belt-high and glove side offering designed for soft contact is very high. Wicks is throwing this pitch about 87-90 with just about an inch of actual cut to it, but the actual specs aren’t as important as subverting hitters’ expectations with it.
It goes without saying that in-zone location is going to be the massive make-or-break key to Wicks success, both today and in MLB in general. At Triple-A, Wicks has been in the middle of the strike zone too often, and he needs to avoid that to not have home runs be a problem (he’s always likely to walk the tightrope between an acceptable and non-acceptable home run rate). In particular, Wicks needs more success than he’s had lately locating that four-seam fastball into the upper third of the strike zone (though he was way better in this regard last outing).
In college, Jordan was able to succeed by pretty much living on the armside half of the plate with little more than fastballs and left-on-right changeups. The gloveside third of the plate, particularly to right-handed hitters, is something the Cubs have been adamant about having him stay committed to, and it’s something to watch for today. We already talked about Justin Steele above, but Justin’s career taking off was built on the success at conquering his location to that part of the plate. Wicks is so good on the armside third that he doesn’t need to be dominant busting righties inside, but he needs to make them think about it.
These seven starts at Triple-A are basically the first time in Wicks’ life that he hasn’t struck out at least a batter per inning, and the strikeout rate is the number I’ll be watching most closely in MLB. Getting chase is so important to big league survival: beyond the literal outs it creates, it limits walks and allows for more in-game efficiency.
His best changeups are going to work, I don’t have any doubt about it. Can the four seamers be spotted well enough and is the slider quite good enough to get enough swing-and-miss? I can’t wait to find out.
