That group, along with injured starters Cade Horton and Matthew Boyd, had excelled as a whole through the Cubs\u2019 first 13 games. Entering Saturday, the rotation\u2019s combined 2.47 ERA was the National League\u2019s lowest mark (second-lowest in MLB).<\/p>\n
\u201dEverybody going out there is just as important as the next guy,\u201d manager Craig Counsell said pregame Saturday. \u201cWe\u2019ve gotten very good starts from our starting pitching. Our starting pitching has been excellent. In the course of the season, we got 150 more of them, so it\u2019s a huge part of the game. They\u2019re pitching at a really high level and keeping us in games and keeping runs off the board. They\u2019re doing a great job.\u201c<\/p>\n
Facing the Pittsburgh Pirates on Saturday afternoon at Wrigley Field, though, Cabrera struggled to keep runners off base. He managed to work through the traffic enough to still deliver five innings, but he finished allowing three runs on eight hits and three walks in Chicago\u2018s 4-3, extra-inning loss loss.<\/p>\n
\u201dHis command was a little shaky, frankly, in the Cleveland game [on April 5]; just, it was 32 degrees, and he got away with some things, I think,\u201d Counsell said. \u201cBut his command got him into a lot of bad counts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cabrera\u2019s nasty changeup didn\u2019t record the usual making-hitters-look-foolish numbers. The velocity on 43 total changeups was only fractionally lower, and the movement profile looked similar to his previous two outings.<\/p>\n
Yet, it recorded only a 22.7% whiff rate \u2014 well below its 35.1% rate entering Saturday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat can I tell you? It\u2019s not invisible, so there\u2019s gonna be some days that that\u2019s gonna happen,\u201d Cabrera said through interpreter Fredy Quevedo Jr.<\/p>\n
For Cabrera, it seemed like a combination of the Pirates seeing him well and him not having his best command. But despite giving up each of his first three runs as a Cub on Saturday, still managing to get through the fifth inning was big. In this day and age, three runs over five frame is still giving your team a chance to win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That group, along with injured starters Cade Horton and Matthew Boyd, had excelled as a whole through the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":674173,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2399],"tags":[5,138,24,4245,161,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-674172","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago-cubs","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-chicago-cubs","11":"tag-chicagocubs","12":"tag-cubs","13":"tag-mlb"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116392372699473680","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/674173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}