Chicago Cubs: Kyle Barraclough should be on Cubs’ radar

Will familiarity lure Davis back to Chicago?

The fact he knows the clubhouse culture on a first-hand basis and was a part of a deep playoff push bodes well. It’s fair to say that if the Cubs are as interested in him as other teams, they’d have a slight advantage.

If worst comes to worst and Davis decides to go elsewhere, the Cubs will more than likely search the trade market for a “diamond in the rough”. Allow me to propose a potential target: Kyle Barraclough.

Barraclough, 27, was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals in the seventh round of the 2012 draft. Oddly enough, he was later traded to the Marlins in July 2015 for – Steve Cishek.

He made his big-league debut later in that season and has quietly been a very successful reliever over the last three years, totaling 219 strikeouts in in 163.0 innings. That’s good for a 31.7 percent strikeout rate (want) with a 2.87 ERA from 2015-2017.

A swing and a miss

That strikeout rate has fluxed in his three years of service, starting at 30.6 percent (20.4 percent league average) in his rookie season. In 2016, that number jumped up to 36.9 percent (almost twice the rate of the 21.1 percent league average in 2016).

He took a step backwards in the K-department in 2017, only sitting down that opposition at a 26.6 percent clip (still significantly better than the league average 21.6 percent in 2017).

That could be because between 2016 and 2017, his average fastball dropped from 96.6 MPH to 95.0 MPH. He hit the 10-day DL in late July with a right shoulder impingement, so that shouldn’t come as a surprise, nor should it necessarily be a cause for concern.

He came back after the injury and turned in a much better second half. His strikeout rate jumped from 24.5 to 30.4 percent. Meanwhile, his walk rate deflated from 14.7 to 10.8, which is a significant improvement but still above the league average of 8.5 percent.