NEWSLETTER
Another day, another dominant Double-A start from top Cubs pitching prospect Cade Horton.
The 22-year-old righty went 5.0 scoreless innings for the Tennessee Smokies, allowing five hits, no walks, and striking out six.
There sure doesn’t seem to be much more for Horton to do at Double-A at this point, other than grow his pitch count. He reached 72 pitches in this one, which seems significant. Through four starts this season, he’s got a 1.10 ERA, a 29.0% K rate, and a 3.2% walk rate. Just like last year, he’s basically been perfect.
I offered some thoughts previously on why Horton is still at Double-A:
“First, it could be that the Cubs believe Horton wouldn’t be challenged at Triple-A either, so they prefer to keep him in the nicer weather, while giving those Triple-A innings to other guys for various reasons. If the quality of the hitter doesn’t matter for Horton’s development right now (i.e., you’re not really looking at results anyway), then you could argue it doesn’t really matter whether he’s at Double-A or Triple-A.
Second, it could be that the Cubs are very confident that Horton is going to contribute in the big leagues this year. If so, they’d have incentives to keep Horton’s outings right now as low-stress as possible (save those bullets), and to keep Horton away from the Statcast data at Triple-A for a longer (why provide a huge dataset to other teams for deep dive analysis by the advance scouting departments?). It’s not THAT uncommon for tip-top pitching prospects to jump straight from Double-A to MLB.
We do have to keep in mind that Horton is still just 22, and barely beginning his second pro season. It’s not like he hasn’t already moved very quickly. I’m not COMPLAINING that he isn’t at Triple-A. I’m just curious as to the rationale.
It could well be that, as we get into the warmer spring months, Horton will head on up to Triple-A, and make some more short starts there until June/July, and that’s when the Cubs might decide to give him some big league run (depending on a number of obvious factors at the big league level).
I should mention the flip-side explanation, which seems unlikely to me, but is plausible: it could be that the Cubs aren’t expecting Cade Horton to reach the big leagues this year, and thus they really want to reserve Triple-A starts right now for keeping their big league depth options stretched out and ready to go. If that’s the case, then you probably wouldn’t see Horton at Triple-A until the summer months. Then, if needs dictate – and only if needs dictate – you could see Horton pressed into big league service.”
