Ranking the 5 best expansion era seasons by Cubs rookie pitchers

Extra! Extra! The Chicago Cubs are developing pitchers! With an influx of rookie pitchers on the horizon, it’s a good time to look back on the five best Cubs rookie pitching seasons during the expansion era (since 1961). WAR figures come from Baseball Reference.

#5 Kerry Wood 1998, 13-6, 3.40 ERA, 129 ERA+, 3.9 WAR

Remember Pitcher Abuse Points? The basic idea is that somewhere beyond, say, 100 pitches each additional pitch does incrementally increasing damage to a pitcher’s arm. Kerry Wood’s career became a billboard for pitcher abuse: an extremely promising young pitcher done in by managers far more familiar with spittoons that statistics. Manager Dusty Baker is, to this day, vilified for grilling Wood’s arm like a cheap steak.

Let’s unpack that. Wood’s rookie season featured the impressive stats listed above, as well as league-leading strikeout and hit rates. But looming over all this was The Game, yes, that game – the one some have called the best pitched game ever. Twenty strikeouts and one feeble hit cemented Wood’s place in baseball history.

Wood threw 122 pitches in that game,120 pitches or more in eight games that year, and over 100 in 21 of his 26 starts. It was all too much for his ulnar collateral ligament, which downed tools after Wood’s stellar rookie season. He would miss the 1999 campaign, returning from Tommy John surgery – probably too early – in May 2000 to post his only ‘bad’ year as a starter. Wood threw over 3,000 pitches per season from 2001-2003. He would never again have a full season as a starter, though he had several effective seasons in short relief.

Baker was fingered as the villain, but he only showed up in 2003. He did put the most pitches in a single season on Wood’s arm of any manager Wood played for (3543 if you’re keeping score at home) but that arm already had a lot of mileage on it. Moreover, 3000 pitches in a season just wasn’t that unusual back then.

Arms control: Number of pitchers with at least 3000 pitches

• 2002: 57
• 2012: 54
• 2022: 13

Wood quite inadvertently helped change baseball, albeit slowly. He was brilliant for just long enough to demonstrate that his brilliance was no fluke, and ridden hard enough to demonstrate that the throw-until-it-shreds approach could derail not only a promising career but a significant piece of a team’s playoff hopes.

Kerry Wood probably couldn’t happen today; teams are unlikely to work a promising young pitcher that hard for that long, especially one with an injury history. Baker, for his part, moderated his approach to starter usage, to the point that he’s pulled Justin Verlander from two games this season in which Verlander had yet to surrender a hit.

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.