A top Cubs trade deadline target has imploded over his last four starts

As Jed Hoyer prepares to die on the hill he's built in defense of the ill-fated Michael Soroka trade, one of the Chicago Cubs' top trade deadline targets has been near-unpitchable over his last four starts. But let's be clear: this is not a defense of Hoyer's inexcusable gamble on a reclamation project being his solution to the team's long-standing rotation problems.

Washington Nationals left-hander MacKenzie Gore is winless in his last four starts and has allowed two home runs in three of those outings. He's pitched just 15 2/3 innings over that stretch and has been torched to the tune of 23 runs on 29 hits and five wild pitches. That's culminated in an unsightly 13.21 ERA and 9.11FIP - hardly ace-level numbers.

Rumors of teams like the Nationals asking for Matt Shaw, Cade Horton and Owen Caissie in talks for top-of-the-rotation arms last week have made the rounds since the Cubs fell well short of expectations at the deadline - and some may point to Gore's recent rough patch and middling season numbers (4.29 ERA, 1.365 WHIP in 23 starts) as a defense for the Chicago front office.

It's not.

Cubs are in a mess of Jed Hoyer's making as the season winds down

It wasn't an either-or choice between trading for Soroka or Gore. There were other arms that moved at the deadline that fell in the middle of the spectrum between those two arms but, instead of acquiring one (or more) of them, Hoyer pushed his chips in on a pitcher with a lengthy history of injuries who had experienced noted velocity drops in the weeks leading up to the deadline. It's a decision that, despite the talking points and media sessions from the Cubs' president of baseball operations, remains absolutely indefensible given the circumstances.

Chicago entered Wednesday afternoon's matinee just looking to avoid a sweep at the hands of the Cincinnati Reds, who are, all of a sudden, hot on the Cubs' heels in the NL wild card race. There's a lot of baseball left to be played before the dust settles and the playoff field is set. But the team's play over the last two months has been disheartening, to put it mildly, and, even though Gore has struggled of late - I'd rather see the ship go down with an ace added to the staff than rolling the dice on what felt like a total long shot even before he hit the IL in Soroka.