Hendricks a reminder to Cubs about pitching importance

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Kyle Hendricks’ family became so intertwined with the Cubs that his parents visited Wrigley Field this season to watch a game and catch up with old friends. Even though their son now pitches for the Los Angeles Angels at the tail end of a magnificent career.

Chicago’s charter National League franchise could play baseball for another 108 years and never again have a character quite like “The Professor.” The Dartmouth graduate somehow lasted a decade-plus on the North Side with a fastball that averaged 87 mph, and his clutch performances in the biggest games helped end a championship drought that stretched for more than a century.

“He’s on my Mount Rushmore of Cubs pitchers,” said Tommy Hottovy, who tracked every pitch Hendricks threw in a Cubs uniform, either in his current role as Chicago’s pitching coach or in his previous job as the run prevention coordinator for the 2016 World Series team.

Hendricks vs. Chicago formed the early storyline on Sunday afternoon at Angel Stadium, where the Cubs completed a three-game sweep with a 4-3 victory. The postgame angle became Cubs manager Craig Counsell explaining that he pulled winning pitcher Jameson Taillon after five innings due to left groin tightness, framing it as a precautionary move.

“There’s always concern when you take a guy out,” Counsell said, “so it’ll be something that we evaluate over the week.”

The idea of a “pitching infrastructure” can sound too abstract, especially as the Cubs have become such a data-driven organization guided by statistical models. But it’s also personified in Hendricks, an unheralded prospect who kept developing into a World Series Game 7 starter and remains a standard for composure and baseball IQ.

That pitching infrastructure now includes Gold Glove defenders who are often seen doing pregame work in the heat while the stadium is empty. It’s a through line to the underrated pitchers the Cubs identified as free agents, helping turn Shota Imanaga and Matthew Boyd into All-Stars. It’s the staffers working daily with Cade Horton to monitor his workload and push him into the NL Rookie of the Year conversation.

“Kyle was the epitome of pitching to your strengths, back when the game was changing and guys were trying to throw harder and have more spin rate,” Hottovy said. “He knew who he was, and he was committed to doing what he needed to do to be successful. He was going to study you and know where your holes were and where he could exploit you.

“Against the best hitters in the game, he was going to challenge you with what his strengths were. He wasn’t going to try to be somebody that he wasn’t.”

Although there are differences in pure stuff, Hendricks seems to have a follower in Horton, who threw his first 21 pitches for strikes in Saturday’s 12-1 win over the Angels and then gave this answer at his locker: “It just goes back to slowing the game down and hitting a target and letting the results play out.”

That same philosophy applies to Taillon, who already missed almost two months this summer while recovering from a strained right calf. A strong game-planning system has contributed to the success of Colin Rea, another low-key personality who kept quietly doing his job after All-Star lefty Justin Steele went down with a season-ending elbow injury in April. Organizational patience allowed Daniel Palencia to harness his 100 mph fastball, blossom into a dominating closer and work out of Sunday’s ninth-inning jam.

While August has been an angst-ridden month for Cubs fans, their team has made it this far with a better record than the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Milwaukee Brewers still hold a five-game lead over the Cubs in the NL Central, but this recent offensive slump did not turn into a team-wide spiral because the pitching has been so good.

It’s reasonable to expect Kyle Tucker to hit more home runs down the stretch. It’s less certain if the Cubs can keep Boyd, Imanaga, Horton and Taillon healthy for October while squeezing more out of an overachieving bullpen.

“We could be in an unbelievable situation, and I’d be concerned about our pitching,” Counsell said. “Maybe that’s my issue that I need to talk about.”

The Cubs are constantly talking about pitching. Javier Assad threw six innings in Friday’s 3-2 win over the Angels and then got optioned to Triple-A Iowa as the club took advantage of the roster flexibility. Michael Soroka — the trade-deadline addition who landed on the injured list with a strained right shoulder — is scheduled to throw off a mound Tuesday in San Francisco. This 10-day road trip will end at Coors Field, a pitching venue that is exhausting.

“We’ve gotten to this point in a good way,” Counsell said. “But things change fast. That’s why making sweeping statements about it are a little dangerous, (so) you try to come up with a lot of scenarios.

“You have to do some — I don’t want to say doomsday thinking — but you have to do some (planning for) if this doesn’t work. Just to make sure that you are prepared (to) handle different situations.”

Now 35, Hendricks recognized it was time to move on last offseason, quickly signing a one-year, $2.5 million contract to pitch for the Angels, the club based near his childhood home in Southern California. After an overhaul of their major- and minor-league pitching programs, the Cubs had created better options.

Without much margin for error, Hendricks (6-9, 5.04 ERA) has become even more of a bend-but-don’t-break strategist. After he walked off the mound in the fifth inning with the bases loaded and one out, Pete Crow-Armstrong lifted a sacrifice fly and Carson Kelly hit an RBI single off left-handed reliever Andrew Chafin to turn a one-run game into a 4-1 lead.

Waiting might have iced Taillon. “It was a long sit,” he said. “I went out there to try to step on the warm-up pitches to really get going and get the body moving again, and I just felt a tiny little cramp.”

Pitching is inherently fragile, another reason the 2016 Cubs were an outlier. Seeing Hendricks in an Angels uniform brought back memories of what the Cubs used to be, and how they once accomplished that singular goal. Pitching and defense made that an all-time team in terms of run prevention.

It’s also time for a new Cubs team to capture the imagination.

“The perspective was given to us,” Hendricks said, “by the front office and people who had been around for a long time, of what it would mean to win in a city like that. We really grasped that concept, ran with it, and they weren’t wrong.

“After winning in that city, it’s the number of times you get stopped, and people just saying thank you. They don’t want anything. They’re not asking for anything. They just want to tell you the story of where they were, where their grandparents were when it happened. Generational stories. That’s the special, special part of it, just how many people it impacted.”

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