Horton responds to big matchup with best outing
The pressure of competing against maybe the most famous pitcher in baseball didn't bother Cade Horton on Friday.
The Cubs rookie delivered the best start of his major league career and kept his team in a stalemate against Pittsburgh ace Paul Skenes. Horton allowed no runs, 3 hits and 1 walk, while striking out 4. He used just 76 pitches through 5 2/3 innings.
“It's fun. Iron sharpens iron,” Horton said. “So just being able to compete against him was really fun, and hopefully we're doing it for a lot of years. I'm not scared of the moment. I love the moment.”
The Cubs forced Skenes to throw 95 pitches through 5 innings and the game stayed scoreless into the eighth. Catcher Reese McGuire, who caught Horton at Triple-A Iowa earlier this season, shared an assessment after the game.
“He's a really big-time competitor,” McGuire said. “He's hard on himself, but that's almost like his strength is he expects himself to be great.
“He's attacking the zone. He's got really, really good pitches. His fastball, sweeper, his change-up's really developing. He used it quite a bit to lefties today. He wants the ball and he wants to go deep into the game, so I really like the way he handles himself.”
Pressly uses scout:
Cubs reliever Ryan Pressly has bounced back with 13 consecutive scoreless innings after the disastrous outing against the Giants on May 6 when he was tagged with 8 earned run in the 11th inning.
After recording his first save Thursday since April 13, Pressly credited teammate Ian Happ for providing a helpful scouting report.
“I had Happer write a full report on me and see what a hitter thinks on me and stuff like that,” Pressly said. “Hitters prepare for pitchers too. When I get a report on me, I can kind of see what I've been doing and what my tendencies were. I think we got a little happy with one pitch in particular. Now we've just got to mix everything in.”
It's been a strange year for Pressly. He's given up runs just once in his last 25 appearances, but it was the 8-run outburst that's kept his ERA at 3.81. In the aftermath, Pressly said he tried to find people to talk to who had similar experiences.
“Sometimes you get beat pretty bad like that, you just want to go crawl up into a little ball and not say anything or do anything,” Pressly said. “But if you want to prove yourself, you've got to go back out there.”
PCA stays ready:
To no one's surprise, Pete Crow-Armstrong said he did not enjoy getting his first day off this season on Wednesday in Philadelphia. He came back with a 2-run homer against Pirates lefty Andrew Heaney on Thursday night, so maybe the rest did him some good.
“I'm ready to play every day,” he said after the game. “I don't ever want the off-day. But Couns (Cubs manager Craig Counsell) has every one of our best interests in mind, so I trust all the decisions he makes. Whether I fight him a little bit or not, I respect him enough to just go with it. He knows best, for sure.”
When it came to watching from the dugout, Crow-Armstrong didn't think that part was difficult.
“Sometimes when it's a day off, I don't know what to do with myself,” he said. “(Was I) antsy? No. Locked in? Yes. All I've got to do is watch a baseball game, try to learn something.”