Page 2 - Vertical Approach Angle News Today

It'll be interesting to see how various players train up this month. That, and a whole lot more to get into this morning.

García is due for a big comeback in 2022

Has a postseason velocity boost that has altered the movement on his offspeed pitches a good thing overall?

Honorable Mention: Matteo Bocchi and Adrian Sampson With Shelby Miller lost in the 40-man crunch, the Iowa Cubs don’t have five starters right now. Sampson, signed just weeks ago, stepped up and allowed just 1 run over 4.2 innings. Respect. Bocchi, meanwhile, was asked to enter the South Bend game during a rainy first inning after Ryan Jensen was removed. The Cubs have a rule that if you’ve thrown 30 pitchers in an inning and aren’t yet out of it, you come out of the game. And Jensen had ...

I never expected to find the Triple-A Cubs in Schaumburg, Illinois, but yesterday I made the drive to the Western Suburbs to see exactly that. We’re in the final few days of the Alternate Training Site format for the minor leagues, setting up Wednesday’s contest between the Cubs and White Sox as more of a tune-up for the Triple-A squads. The star of the day was Ben Holmes, the left-hander the Cubs signed this offseason coming off a Driveline Pro Day event in Arizona. When they did so, I exp...

April 6, 2021 This is Justin’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Justin has always been a baseball fan and a writer, but it wasn’t until Hyun Jin Ryu began dominating in 2019 that he started to fuse those interests together. He’s written for a few places since then, including Prospects365 and Dodgers Digest, and is now hoping to pester the good people of FanGraphs with his deep-dives into niche topics. Outside of the baseball blogosphere, he’s a student at Washington University in...

Yesterday, Michael highlighted five free agent starting pitchers Jordan Bastian had brought up as potential fits for the Cubs (given their self-created constraints). While we know the Cubs are unlikely to offer these five the highest dollar amount, you can bet part of the sales pitch is that a year with Tommy Hottovy, Craig Breslow, The Pitch Lab, and the rest of the Cubs pitching infrastructure team will help rehabilitate value for the next contract. I know in the past, the Cubs have gone to ...

We should know going in – it should be baked in as an assumption to this post! – that the odds of any Cubs big league Rule 5 selection sticking long-term in the organization is very unlikely. Rule 5 pick Gray Fenter probably ends up a trivia question answer and not a significant contributor, but what’s the fun in pointing out the realities? And, hey, the Cubs did pick him for a reason, right? I find it more fun to go through the process of attempting to reverse engineer the Cubs fascinati...

If there is one aspect of the Winter Meetings that isn’t hampered at all by the lack of actual meetings, it’s the Rule 5 Draft. Major League teams enter today with the knowledge of both whether or not they will make a pick, as well as who their selection would be. With a 40-man roster containing only 34 names, and a front office history of giving the Rule 5 the old college try, my bet is that we do see the Chicago Cubs make at least one selection today. Below this introduction, I’m live...