Ranking the 5 best expansion era seasons by Cubs rookie pitchers

Over the years, the Cubs have had a handful of rookie pitchers rise above

#4 Dennis Lamp 1978, 7-15, 3.30 ERA, 122 ERA+, 4.0 WAR

Dennis Lamp was an unspectacular but very durable pitcher who gave the Cubs two very good seasons – his rookie and sophomore years – before losing some of his effectiveness in 1980. His ERA jumped from 3.50 in 1979 to 5.20 in 1980, though his FIP was a much less alarming 4.19. The Cubs had seen enough and before Opening Day 1981 shipped him down I-94 to the Fighting LaRussas in exchange for … no, this can’t be right … Ken Kravec??

WAR is hell: Career WAR after  the Lamp-Kravec trade

• Lamp: 8.2
• Kravec: -0.7

An important part of assembling a competitive team is finding useful pieces – not everyone is a star, but not everyone has to be. Lamp had a long career helping his teams win a few games. Kravec, well, didn’t. This trade is emblematic of the Cubs’ sloppy roster construction efforts during this period.

#3 Randy Wells 2009, 12-10, 3.05 ERA, 146 ERA+, 4.2 WAR

Now almost forgotten, Randy Wells burst onto the scene in 2009 with a near-All-Star caliber season, culminating in a sixth-place finish in Rookie of the Year voting. The 2010 campaign would see Wells’ ERA jump by more than a run but his FIP held steady and he threw almost 200 innings.

And … that was about it. Injuries ate him up; he would never see another FIP below 5.00. Two seasons and 164 innings later, Wells was done.

It does not, on the surface, seem to have been a workload problem. During his two good years with the Cubs Wells threw more than 120 pitches just twice. In many games he didn’t reach 100. But this may illustrate one problem with relying on raw pitch counts as a management tool: every arm is different.

Unlike Wood, Wells could still happen today; probably is happening in several organizations around the league. But it’s getting less likely as teams learn better not just how to monitor workload, but how to match that workload to the person bearing it. Failure through injury is a recurring theme in pitching development, but teams are attacking the problem aggressively with new types of information, new ways of disseminating it, spurred by the overwhelming necessity to spend more efficiently. If pitchers are going to cost this much, may as well figure out how they work.

Cubs could add to this list sooner than later with improved development

#2 Mike Harkey 1990, 12-6, 3.26 ERA, 126 ERA+, 4.6 WAR

And speaking of injuries, Oh, Mike! That said, Mike Harkey’s medical records would have been a multi-volume set even if he hadn’t tried to get his Oksana Baiul on. Not to belabor the belabored, but here’s a list of 160-pitch performances by Cubs hurlers since 1961:

• Greg Maddux, 167 pitches on May 17, 1988 (3-0 loss to St. Louis)
• Mike Harkey, 160 pitches on June 24, 1990 (3-2 win over St. Louis)

Harkey and Dick Ellsworth appear twice each in the top 10 Cubs pitch-count outings in the expansion era; nobody else appears more than once.

Maybe some arms could handle this kind of workload, but we now know Mike Harkey’s couldn’t. Even more than Wells, Harkey’s value is overwhelmingly concentrated in his rookie season. Out of his 5.7 career pitching WAR, 4.6 of it happened in 1990.

#1 Burt Hooton 1972, 11-14, 2.80 ERA, 135 ERA+, 5.0 WAR

After his stellar rookie season, Burt Hooton received as many Rookie of the Year votes as you will this year. Part of that is because Hooton had the remarkable misfortune to debut the same year as Jon Matlack, who did indeed have an even better year. But part of it is probably down to the importance voters placed on his won-loss record. That idea has now, of course, been driven from the field, but far too late for Hooton, who at least should have been in the running.

Hooton also had the misfortune to arrive in the majors as an unconventional pitcher for a team being badly run by conventional men. They tolerated Hooton and his newfangled knuckle-curve until Burt stumbled to a 4.80 ERA in 1974. On the bubble to begin1975, his bubble burst after two starts of 8.18 ERA ball. So the Cubs traded him to the Dodgers for … no, this can’t be right … Eddie Solomon and Geoff Zahn??

Solomon would throw just six innings for the Cubs before they traded him for … yeah, that’s right … the immortal Ken Crosby. Twenty innings and 16 earned runs later, Crosby would leave The Show for good. Zahn was a better player than either of these guys, a groundball specialist miscast in front of a shaky defense. He pitched for four different clubs over a 13-year career; the Cubs were the only team for which he failed to attain a league average ERA. Unable to figure out what to with him, the Cubs released him after two years.

During the Cubs’ century-long night, the goat had help. Gormless trades like these contributed to the franchise’s seemingly endless drift through a Sargasso Sea of mediocrity.  Hooton, for his part, would become a rotation horse for the Dodgers and enter the Hall of Pretty Darn Good with a career WAR of 35.5.

Chicago Cubs pitching: a developing situation

It’s been a fairly bleak trip, but in reviewing these great Cubs rookie pitching seasons, we see the team making a number of mistakes that it would not make today. In addition to innovative individualized pitcher development, the Cubs have also begun attacking the pitching development problem the good-old fashioned way, by accumulating a vast horde of young arms. Between this year’s draft and in-season trades, the Cubs have added numerous pitching prospects to a now highly-ranked system.

Most of these guys will not become rotation mainstays, but most of them don’t have to. By enhancing the team’s ability to obtain the maximum performance from each player, and building in a lot of redundancy to account for the high pitcher prospect attrition rate, Hoyer & Co. are at least approaching the problem the right way.