Cubs: Trevor Williams can no longer be trusted in the starting rotation

While much of the Cubs rotation has begun to rebound from a rocky first month, Trevor Williams has lagged behind, and it’s becoming a problem.

When the Cubs brought in Trevor Williams on a one-year, $2.5 million deal this past winter, it seemed like a decent enough move at the time. Despite coming off dreadful 2019 and 2020 seasons with the Pirates, Williams had also seen a good amount of success before that and seemed like the perfect bounce-back candidate for the back of the rotation.

The right-hander also had a feel-good story related to his father that came along with his signing, so most were in support of the signing. Williams’ tenure also got off to a start that was ripped straight from a dream, with his Cubs debut being a rock-solid outing against the Brewers at Wrigley, in front of his father. Since that first start, however, Williams hasn’t had nearly the same success.

In many ways, Williams’ season has been indicative of the Cubs’ rotation, as a whole. He has struggled mightily to work deep into games, with his longest outing since then being just five innings in length. This has been a staff-wide issue for much of the year as the rotation is ranked near the bottom of the league in innings pitched per start.

While the rotation has suffered from inconsistency all year, guys like Zach Davies and Kyle Hendricks are finally starting to put up some positive results, while Williams continues to struggle, and it’s beginning to hurt the team.

Cubs: Trevor Williams is holding down the rest of the rotation

Williams has not been able to put up consistently solid performances or eat enough innings to be considered a net positive for the Cubs. While he does have a career-best strikeout rate so far this season, he also has a career-worst walk rate and strikeout-to-walk ratio. All of this has led to Williams being very inefficient with his pitches and being pulled from games far too early, leaving the bullpen in a tough spot consistently.

While May has been a turn-of-fortunes for many players on the team, the same can’t be said for Trevor Williams. Through four starts so far this month, William’s longest outing has been just 4 2/3 innings. He is averaging just 3 1/3 innings pitched per start this month which is quite frankly unacceptable for a team that is now in the midst of its possible last year of contention.

Williams hasn’t been keeping runs off the board in his short stints either as he sports an ERA of 8.78 in the month of May and 5.97 on the season. He also doesn’t have much of anything to hang his hat on as he has been below average in every single possible category according to his Baseball Savant numbers. All of this begs the question: what can the Cubs possibly do to fix the situation?