The manager takes the heat when “collaborative” decisions go wrong, a dynamic David Ross understood when he took over the Chicago Cubs. Coaches inevitably get dismissed after a September collapse. Baseball’s executive class is so insulated that Jerry Dipoto told Seattle fans the Mariners are actually doing them a favor by trying to win 54 percent of their games over a 10-year period. But this isn’t math class or computer science. It’s always about the players.
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Justin Steele made this happen. That breakthrough from a left-handed pitcher with potential to a genuine Cy Young Award candidate might be the biggest development from an uneven season at Wrigley Field. Where it goes from here will be the question hanging over Steele and a big-market franchise that hasn’t won a playoff game in six years.
“I’ve always believed in myself,” Steele said. “I’ve always believed I was capable of doing really good things. I just kind of feel like the dominos have fallen where they have. It’s a blessing.”
Those dominos started with the scouting process that led to the Cubs selecting Kyle Schwarber with the No. 4 pick in the 2014 draft and using money left over from Schwarber’s under-slot signing bonus to buy out Steele and Dylan Cease from their college commitments. The Cubs did not trade Steele after his recovery from Tommy John surgery, an experience that solidified his sense of routine. Without a minor-league season in 2020, Steele used the alternate training site to learn how to throw an effective slider.
Starting a family gave Steele, 28, a new perspective and a sharper focus. Jon Lester reached out to Ross with advice for Steele on how to attack hitters. Steele relocated to the team’s training complex last offseason to prepare himself for a much bigger workload (173 1/3 innings). Ross made that connection after watching Steele power through eight scoreless innings to beat San Francisco Giants ace Logan Webb on Labor Day at Wrigley Field, where the temperature was 89 degrees at first pitch.
“Justin Steele moved to Arizona so he could take care of his body,” Ross said. “On a hot day like that last year, that was a red-faced kid that was gassed in the fifth.”
“So much of what we see in season is born of what people do in the offseason,” Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said. “We challenged him at the end of last year: ‘There’s a lot more in the tank for you. You need to live in Arizona, work out like crazy, come to spring training in great shape.’ He did all those things.
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“Every time he took the mound, I thought we were going to win. That’s the best thing you can probably say about a starting pitcher. He’s a great example for all our young players that you can take yourself from really good to great through hard work.”
This also happened during Steele’s 10th season in the organization, which means the Cubs need to find ways to speed up that process for pitchers such as Jordan Wicks, Ben Brown and Cade Horton. Steele’s template will also be harder for others to replicate because what he does is unique. He does not have outstanding fastball velocity. He essentially throws a fastball or a slider almost 97 percent of the time. He creates so much movement and deception that his mix functions as more than just two pitches.
Perhaps Steele can refine his changeup, sinker or curveball to stay another step ahead of the hitters. But this baseline was good enough to finish third in the National League in wins (16) and ERA (3.06). He excels by limiting walks and hard contact and getting groundballs. The Cubs went 19-11 in his starts — and 64-68 across the rest of their schedule — while finishing one game out of the playoffs.
Again, this is still a business that revolves around people and razor-thin margins. Steele has the kind of “Do Your Job” mentality that Bill Belichick or Tom Thibodeau would appreciate. Becoming an All-Star didn’t change his bearing in the clubhouse. Making 30 starts was a byproduct of years of hard work, some trial and error, and leaning into his strengths.
“When you think about these guys when they first come up, they all have stuff, right?” Cubs pitching coach Tommy Hottovy said. “Then it’s like, ‘Hey, now what do I have to learn to be a professional every day?’ The routine, the recovery, the health, the eating, the sleeping, all the little things that are going to make you the best version of yourself, he’s taken ownership of that.”
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“He’s always paying attention,” Cubs pitcher Kyle Hendricks said. “He’ll just ask you little things about your routine or what you do. It’s nothing overloaded. But I know I had those similarities when I came up. I had these older guys to look to — the Lesters, the (John) Lackeys, the (Jake) Arrietas. (You) ask them little things here and there. But for the most part, just watch what they do and learn from that. I know Steeley does a ton of that.”
Ross sees some similarities between Lester and Steele without going overboard on the comparison. Hendricks and Hottovy, two more links to the 2016 World Series team, believe Steele has what it takes to keep pitching at the top of the rotation. The Cubs will have to put a value on that potential as MLB Trade Rumors projected Steele will earn $4.1 million next season in the first of potentially four years in the arbitration system.
Cubs general manager Carter Hawkins looked at Steele with fresh eyes after working 14 years in baseball operations for the Cleveland Guardians, an organization that’s known as a pitching factory. Steele’s name wasn’t all over the rankings of the game’s top prospects, and his emergence didn’t entirely cover up some of the issues in player development and the major-league operation.
Certain pitchers who looked like key contributors at the end of the 2022 season wound up being largely injured and/or ineffective this year. The bullpen formula that worked for most of the summer wasn’t particularly effective at the beginning or the end of the 2023 season. Even if the Cubs had squeaked into the playoffs, the state of their pitching staff made it look extremely doubtful that they could win multiple rounds in October.
“It’s just a really long path to get to where you want to go,” Hawkins said. “It’s looking at the guys that might have struggled a little bit more, might have been a little bit below what we hoped they would be this year and realizing that’s just one data point in a sea of data points. It’s the (Hayden) Wesneskis, the (Caleb) Kilians, the Keegan Thompsons. It’s saying, ‘OK, the stuff is still there. The components to be a really good pitcher are still there. How do we figure out a way to tap into that consistently? What’s our offseason plan? What are the gaps between where he is and where he wants to go?’”
Determining what went wrong is always the focus of the organization’s end-of-season debrief, but it’s also important to acknowledge what went right and apply the lessons from Steele’s success.
“That’s not the (same) answer for everybody,” Hawkins said. “It’s figuring out what those levers to pull are, and just being consistent with it and making sure those guys know that there’s zero percent of us that’s giving up on anybody. Who knows who the next Justin Steele is? It could be anybody that’s in our system right now.”
(Top photo of Justin Steele: Quinn Harris / Getty Images)
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