How Cubs’ Edward Cabrera forces everyone to think differently about pitching

Posted March 05, 2026 11:07 am

By Sahadev Sharma

PHOENIX — It was a sight Chicago Cubs fans are going to enjoy seeing quite often this summer. In the first inning of the club’s matchup with the Milwaukee Brewers on Wednesday afternoon, Sal Frelick waved haplessly at a nasty changeup from Edward Cabrera for his first strikeout of the day.

“Cabrera is a nasty guy,” catcher Moisés Ballesteros said. “Every pitch is nasty.”

That is never in doubt when watching Cabrera pitch. The Cubs have been enamored by this full package for a while now. After trying numerous times to trade for him, they finally acquired Cabrera over the winter from the Miami Marlins for a package centered around outfield prospect Owen Caissie.

Looking at Cabrera, he clearly stands out. At 6-foot-5 and nearly 220 pounds, the 27-year-old is built like the prototypical workhorse pitcher. That his fastball sits at 97 mph could lead one to believe he’s the type of flamethrower who overpowers the opposition with his heater.

But the reality is, Cabrera’s fastballs are some of his weaker offerings.

Last season, nobody had a worse wOBA against their sinker, Cabrera’s primary heater in 2025, than the .445 he allowed. In 2024, when he leaned more heavily on his four-seamer, he had the sixth-worst wOBA in baseball against the pitch.

Those numbers, in short, are terrible. A more traditional baseball mindset would lead one to assume Cabrera can’t find success without an effective fastball. But manager Craig Counsell suggests it’s important to reframe one’s thinking with such a unique pitcher.

“It’s his fourth pitch, that’s how you look at it,” Counsell said. “You just have to think about him differently. It’s hard to think about — ‘Oh, you can’t have your fastball be your fourth pitch.’ But it’s just different with him.”

His velocity may stand out, but it’s the rest of Cabrera’s arsenal that can make him special.

“In this game, throwing hard is great,” pitching coach Tommy Hottovy said. “But being able to have multiple offspeed weapons you can command for strikes is what usually gives guys long-term success.”

Among eligible starters, his curveball got the highest whiff rate in baseball (45.2%). By Statcast’s RunValue metric, it was the third most valuable curveball. By the same RunValue metric, his changeup — a unique offering that averages 94.2 mph and that he often uses to both righties and lefties — is 15th in baseball.

“There are guys who have such good ‘secondaries’ which make them their primaries,” veteran catcher Carson Kelly said. “The changeup is his go-to pitch. Then it’s the curveball, and the slider is very good, too. So you get creative in how you call the game. Why do you call five change-ups in a row? Well, it’s his main pitch.”

His changeup is also odd because, traditionally, one expects that pitch to have a larger velocity gap from the fastball. A three-mph difference would normally suggest an ineffective changeup. And most people assume the pitch is being used off the fastball. But none of that is the case with Cabrera. His changeup is so hard with two-seam action that it works well with his curve and slider. If they were all in a similar velocity band, it could be cause for concern.

But that’s not the case. This makes Cabrera an outlier.

For Cabrera, his development has been a process. Part of that may be understanding that to find success, he has to forge his own path. It won’t be traditional. Establishing the fastball is assumed to be a basic fact for young pitchers. But it hasn’t been what’s worked best for Cabrera.

“I think a lot of Yu Darvish,” Hottovy said. “When he first came over, he said, ‘You have to be able to establish the fastball.’ He didn’t really have to at the time; he had great stuff. But they wanted him to be that kind of pitcher. Edward had been coached up that way through the Marlins’ organization. I understand why, he’s got electric stuff. But he’s got really good offspeed stuff, too. So it’s just about continuing to have conversations with him about how he can best use his stuff, unleash it, the right hitters to use it to and those things.”

As Hottovy said, he’s not blaming the Marlins for this. It had to be this type of winding road to success for Cabrera. In fact, Hottovy gives the Marlins and their pitching coach, Daniel Moskos (formerly an assistant pitching coach with the Cubs), credit for Cabrera’s big step forward last summer.

Cabrera posted a strong 3.53 ERA over 137⅔ innings last year. But what stood out was his 8.3% walk rate. That’s a massive improvement over his previous four seasons, when he combined for a 13.3% walk rate. A big reason for that was that instead of leaning on his four-seamer as his primary fastball, Moskos helped Cabrera trust his sinker more.

“The sinker is easier because it’s just trust it on the glove-side part of the plate and let it play,” Hottovy said. “That usage went up last year because he could throw it for strikes. That was a big thing because they wanted him to be able to pump the strike zone. He did a good job with that.”

Despite the success last year with strike-throwing by leaning more on the sinker, Cabrera wants to use his four-seamer more often. It’s been a focus early in camp, and for his first few bullpen sessions, he didn’t throw the sinker at all. Hottovy also pointed out that, for Cabrera’s sinker, you want takes for them to be successful — “you get swings, that’s where the damage comes,” Hottovy said. The more hitters see the sinker the more they could pounce on it.

Hottovy said there are a lot of levers they can pull when it comes to improving the four-seamer. Grip, shape, when it’s being used, where in the zone it’s being thrown and various other methods. Cabrera believes he has an answer.

“It’s just when to use it,” Cabrera said through an interpreter. “I think that’s a better approach to it than using it to use it. It’s having the mindset of ‘When can I utilize my fastball?’”

Ultimately, it gets back to what Counsell said. Obsessing over Cabrera’s fastball is foolhardy. When a pitcher has three nasty pitches, it’s rare to point out that their fourth offering isn’t good enough. Nobody is used to that being a fastball though. The key for Cabrera is to lean into his strengths, and of course, for a pitcher who has battled injuries over his career, stay on the field and log as many innings as possible.

If he can do that, success will likely follow. That’s why the Cubs acquired him. Counsell, Hottovy, team president Jed Hoyer and many others in the organization believe that Cabrera was just scratching the surface last season. Acquiring him when they did, in their minds, meant they were adding a pitcher whose best years were ahead of him. Cabrera, both affable and confident, agrees.

“I’m a very positive person,” Cabrera said. “I feel like I carry that in my heart. Every person should carry that and try to be the absolute very best version of themselves. That’s what my mindset is.”