CHICAGO — Ryan Pressly pulled Ian Happ to the side and asked the Cubs left fielder for a favor.

Would Happ mock up a scouting report on him?

Pressly was coming off the low point of his 2025 campaign. He had failed to record an out and permitted eight runs in a brutal, extra-innings loss to the San Francisco Giants. He asked for help from Happ, and prepared himself for some brutal honesty.

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“You got to be humble in this game or you’re going to get humbled,” Pressly said after picking up the save in a Cubs 3-2 win over the Pittsburgh Pirates on Thursday at Wrigley Field. “I got humbled in front of the Cubbie faithful and all of MLB. So (you’ve) just got to take that and try to be a little bit (humble) and just build off of it and try to, I guess, build a good routine so that you can build off it and be better.”

“We’ve got enough gold out there that I don’t even know what to do with.”

Ryan Pressly loves pitching in front of this defense 👏 pic.twitter.com/jKA9oCBCXp

— Marquee Sports Network (@WatchMarquee) June 13, 2025

Happ wrote up the faux scouting report and then pulled Pressly to the side to go over it.

“When I get a report on me, I can kind of see what I’ve been doing and what my tendencies were,” Pressly said, “and I think we got a little happy with one pitch in particular and now (we’ve) just got to mix everything in.”

While he didn’t specify the pitch, he threw his curveball just once during his six-pitch save. He threw it once in his 12-pitch inning on Tuesday. Pressly through the curveball eight times in the 26-pitch outing against the Giants, the second-most thrown pitch in that time.

Cubs manager Craig Counsell had used Ryan Pressly in lower-leverage situations before gradually working him back into higher-pressure situations. The results were terrific.

He has thrown 13 straight scoreless frames since that blowup against the Giants and, on Thursday, was reinserted into a save opportunity.

“I think Ryan deserves a ton of credit here for how he’s bounced back,” Counsell said after the game. “If you look at his season, he’s had one bad inning and that inning resulted in some changes on our end, and he’s put up zeros ever since.

“And it’s just a lesson, man, for all of us as to what it means to be a professional and how this game, it’s going to knock you down. Are you going to stay down? Are you going to get back up? And he chose – it’s metaphors, I guess – but he chose to get back up, and battle his tail off and get better.”

And it has rejuvenated a veteran back-end reliever for Counsell. This isn’t a journeyman reliever. Pressly has pitched in the playoffs and recorded the final out of a World Series. They acquired him from the Houston Astros in an offseason trade with the hopes of having him be a key high-leverage arm.

And they might’ve brought that type of pitcher back out, with the assist from Happ.

“I just want to help this team win, whether it be pitching in the first inning or the ninth inning, I don’t care,” Pressly said. “I just wanted to be back in the postseason.

“Championship parades are really fun and I want to do it again.”