Will the Cubs finally have the pitcher-heavy draft they’ve lacked in recent years?

Cubs team president Jed Hoyer was pretty candid this past winter about the state of the farm system’s pitching. After Jaxon Wiggins, there seemed to be a rather large drop-off in talent, especially of the high-end variety.

Hoyer seemed determined to change that narrative by addressing the issue head-on. The blame can be spread around. Player development, along with amateur and international scouting, deserves scrutiny. Each area has had tweaks made, small to significant, over the last year-plus.

With the draft beginning on Saturday, VP of scouting Dan Kantrovitz addressed the elephant in the room. Kantrovitz agrees that the problem isn’t singular and there are multiple ways to address it. The first, and very simple, way would be to just draft more pitchers.

“You can’t take good pitching if you don’t take pitching,” Kantrovitz said. “One of the things we’ve looked at in years past, the last few years in particular, how do we allocate more of our draft pool to pitching without leaking wins or overall draft value? Which has always been our North Star. We go into our draft being pretty agnostic of position player vs pitcher. We just want to take the best player available in the spirit of trying to get the most future wins.”

The Cubs have had success in taking position players in recent years. Whether it’s first-rounders like Cam Smith and Matt Shaw who have already made it to the big leagues, or later-round finds like Josiah Hartshorn, Kane Kepley and Owen Ayers, they have shown an ability to add quality position-player talent. Last year’s first-rounder, Ethan Conrad, only recently got into games, but the organization is very high on his ability. Even the ones they’ve traded, like Zyhir Hope, Ronny Cruz and Alfonsin Rosario, suggest the amateur group has done well identifying quality position players.

So while this strategy has worked well for the Cubs in one sense, the system is still not where they want it to be as far as being well-balanced and stocked with arms. Kantrovitz admitted they may have to be a little less “dogmatic” and be a bit more aggressive in selecting pitching while also not straying so far as to hurt the overall value of the draft class.

The Cubs haven’t drafted a pitcher in the first round since they selected Cade Horton out of the University of Oklahoma with the seventh pick in the 2022 draft. In that draft, they selected four pitchers with their first five picks. In the subsequent three drafts, they selected a combined four pitchers in the first five rounds.

Here's how much teams have allocated draft bonus $ to pitching since the 2023 draft...

Rays/Brewers - deep-round hunters
Cubs/Nationals - allergic to pitching
Braves - mostly early-round spend
Angels - addicted to pitching

X-axis: post-rd 5 spend. Y-axis: all-round spend pic.twitter.com/x7gpQBMVwr

— Lance Brozdowski (@LanceBroz) June 30, 2026

“For the most part, it just comes down to investing more of our draft capital in pitching,” Kantrovitz said. “Our percent of spend based on pitching versus position players just really hasn’t been there in the recent past. If you’re going to accelerate the amount of pitching that we have throughout the system via the draft, that’s just the most obvious place to start. Take more pitching, invest more in it.”

But it’s not just about selecting pitchers in bulk. The Cubs need to do a better job of identifying the right pitchers. To be fair to Kantrovitz and his group, some talent they’ve identified has been traded away. Jackson Ferris, Ty Johnson and Sean Gallagher would all be solid pitching prospects had they not been moved in deals to bring in win-now talent.

But outside of Wiggins and Kaleb Wing, a high-schooler selected last summer in the fourth round, the upside picks have been lacking in recent years. The Cubs will likely have a slightly different vision for what they’re looking for this year. One reason for that will be that Tyler Zombro, who was promoted this offseason to VP of pitching, will be a much bigger voice in the draft room.

Zombro’s promotion in the offseason came with a primary focus on having more say in the player development side of things. But his role spans multiple departments, including major-league acquisitions and the amateur draft. Kantrovitz said, “Zombro and the pitching department will have their fingerprints all over” the draft.

“In a modern draft environment, you need your pitching gurus side-by-side to help you,” Kantrovitz said. “Whether it’s back in January to help identify a pool of players that you’re keying in on. Whether it’s in the months that follow to help be a sounding board for whether we think we can optimize this guy’s pitch mix, what we think we can adjust or unlock. Then leading up to the draft to help really focus in on the right pool of players.”

With Zombro so heavily involved in the draft, the Cubs hope they will do a better job of selecting talent that the development group can work well with.

“We’ve done a lot of work to try to figure out which pitchers are going to have the most success in our system,” Kantrovitz said. “Everybody’s development style and approach is somewhat unique. When you look at those pitchers that thrive in our system, the underlying pillars end up being velocity and spin. Those are two good places to start when you’re talking about if we’re going to increase volume, what do we want to see out of those pitchers? Velocity and spin are probably foundational.”

Kantrovitz wouldn’t come out and say that this would certainly be a pitching-heavy draft. He pointed out that the draft is unpredictable and they can’t control which players are available and what other teams do. Still, for the first time in a while, the Cubs seem hellbent on addressing a serious lack of pitching talent in their farm system.

“Have we had extensive conversations about, given the opportunity and given the chance it doesn’t leak value, to increase our volume of pitching?” Kantrovitz said. “I think that would be fair to say that’s a goal.”

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