The Cubs Must Evolve in One Major Area This Offseason to Take the Next Step

Looking back at the Chicago Cubs team that won the 2016 World Series, there’s something pretty remarkable about how they were constructed.

The Cubs, far and away the best team in MLB in that regular season, were spearheaded by the quiet, unassuming, soft-tossing Kyle Hendricks.

The Professor was unmistakable on the mound. He puzzled hitters left and right. His 2.13 ERA led MLB that season, making him the first Cub since 1938 to do so. He started the National League Pennant-clinching Game 6 of the NLCS and Game 7 of the World Series in Cleveland.

And Hendricks did it all with a fastball that barely touched 89 miles per hour.

That season, Hendricks’ average four-seam fastball velocity of 88.9 mph was seventh-slowest in MLB. The 2016 Cubs pitching staff as a whole ranked No. 17 in terms of average fastball velocity (93.3 mph) and yet produced the fourth-most fWAR (18.8).

A decade ago, velocity wasn’t the be-all, end-all of a pitching staff. But looking at how things shook out for the Cubs in 2026, it’s starting to appear that it is.

The MLB-average four-seam fastball in 2016 was 93.4 mph. This season, it reached a new high for the sixth straight year and sits at 94.8.

Between the 2016 and 2026 seasons, the Cubs’ 10-year average four-seam velocity is dead last in MLB at 93.1 mph.

The 2026 Cubs, who averaged 93.6 mph on four-seamers, were the fourth-slowest in MLB. Not one of the three teams below them — the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Kansas City Royals or the Washington Nationals — was a playoff team.

Shota Imanaga led the Cubs in innings pitched this year and threw his fastball at an average of 91.6 mph — the second-slowest in MLB among qualified pitchers.

The Cubs were an anomaly this season. They both hit the most home runs (220) and allowed the most home runs (231) in the NL. For as potent as the offense was and as airtight as the defense was, the pitching teetered all the way on the other end of the spectrum of excellence.

“Right now, I feel like we’re a bit imbalanced,” Cubs President of Baseball Operations Jed Hoyer said in his end-of-season press conference on Oct. 2. “We’re leaning on our defense too heavily, and the overall quality of our pitching has to improve.”

Their fWAR of 6.0 was third-worst in MLB, behind only Kansas City and Washington — two of the aforementioned softest-tossing teams in the league. The Cubs pitching staff’s strikeout rate of 20.8% was eighth-lowest in the league.

That was never going to be sustainable in the playoffs, where pitching is king and everything else takes a back seat. It was apparent as soon as Matthew Boyd’s first pitch of the NL Wild Card Series in San Diego left Fernando Tatis Jr.’s bat.

Cubs pitchers allowed 12 runs in the series, five of them coming on home runs. The offense scored just one run.

“When I think about the offseason, when I think about seasons to come, that has to be our goal — to get our pitching infrastructure and our pitching quality to the level of our position players,” Hoyer said.

It’s no coincidence that a lack of velocity in modern baseball equates to a lack of production, or that an abundance of it has the opposite effect. It’s clearly something that the Cubs have struggled to both acquire and develop over the last decade, and something that the league's best have excelled at.

Jacob Misiorowski and Cam Schlittler, the two likely NL and AL Cy Young Award winners, were drafted and developed by their respective organizations.

Misiorowski (100.5 mph) and Schlittler (98 mph) threw the two hardest average four-seamers in MLB this season. The Milwaukee Brewers (No. 2 in MLB) and the New York Yankees (No. 7) were two of the hardest-throwing staffs in the league at 95.9 and 95.3 mph, respectively.

Cade Horton has been the one bright spot among many failed Cubs pitching projects over the years, but his devastating UCL injury in April has made his future a bit more unclear. Justin Steele was on the same kind of trajectory but hasn’t pitched in nearly two full seasons due to UCL surgery and some setbacks.

Horton throws the ball hard (his fastball averaged 95.5 mph in 2025) and has Cy Young-level talent. His 2025 campaign made that more than obvious. But he and Steele are just two success stories among the many, many pitchers that the Cubs organization has tried and failed to develop adequately.

Hoyer told reporters that the organization would look into what caused the lack of swing-and-miss and the volume of home runs off of Cubs pitchers this season.

“Right now, the gap has widened a bit,” Hoyer said of the Cubs’ pitching development compared to some of the league’s best. “We need to address it.”

The Cubs’ first step this offseason needs to be to revamp the starting rotation with velocity. That’s the only way they’ll be able to get over the hump that’s been in the way of another ring for the last ten seasons.

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