I gotta tell you. This post would’ve been so much cleaner if not for that one Drake Baldwin swing. Alas.
Edward Cabrera made his relief debut for the Cubs last night in a one-run game, and, by the time he departed, it was a three-run game. The aforementioned Baldwin homer made that difference:
Drake Baldwin extends the Braves lead in the 9th! pic.twitter.com/kTSygHgcPl
— MLB (@MLB) September 16, 2026Definitely not where Cabrera wanted that 0-2 pitch, and since we know how brutal home runs can be for late-inning relievers, we cannot – by definition – call Cabrera’s outing a success. The final line was 2.1 innings, 2 ER, 2 H, 2 BB, 3 K. At a surface level, not good enough.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t be encouraged.
First, Cabrera entered into a dirty inning, like any other reliever might, and got out of it. That’s a big box checked right there, knowing that the Cubs CAN use him in any situation and he doesn’t have to exclusively start a clean inning. Second, the velocity played up, as you might hope in relief. Basically every pitch was up two clicks, and he touched 100 mph. That doesn’t ensure success, obviously, but it’s kind of a minimum thing you’d hope to see from a guy like Cabrera. Third, broadly speaking, he pitched reasonably well. He got whiffs. He got chase. He got strikeouts. Were he an established reliever already, you’d look at the outing and think, yeah, fine, maybe don’t walk two guys, but otherwise I get it.The home run was bad, and there’s just no way to talk around it. We have gotten into it ad nauseam with all the other pitchers, and you simply cannot have that late in close games. One very poorly-located pitch (especially a Cabrera fastball, because his don’t have great movement) can sink an entire game, much less an entire outing.
The reality is that no one should’ve been expecting Cabrera to show up as a bullpen savior out of the gate, and I’m quite sure no one is expecting it from here. But, for me, I did like what I saw last night from Cabrera VERY GENERALLY SPEAKING. I can imagine a world where, in a couple weeks, he looks like a good option out of the pen in certain situations. Do I think that actually happens? I probably wouldn’t bet on it. But I can at least imagine it now.
It sounds like Craig Counsell can imagine it, too. Here’s what he said when Edward Cabrera returned to the big league team and entered the bullpen (via The Athletic):
“A great example from last year is what Roki Sasaki did the last month, into the playoffs,” Counsell said Saturday at Wrigley Field. “That could happen. That’s a roadmap to how this could be really successful. Is that the best result? That was a pretty darn good result. But that’s what you keep yourself open to ….
“We’re going to take some time to get there, but that certainly resonates. And we don’t know if we’re going to get there, but it’s a good blueprint that you can hope to repeat.”
Sasaki struggled in his rookie season as a starting pitcher for the Dodgers, but wound up throwing 10.2 highly effective innings in the postseason (albeit with mediocre peripherals).
Edward Cabrera threw 40 pitches in the appearance, so you can expect him to be down for at least two full days. The big question is whether he can successfully pitch every third day or so, and/or whether the Cubs shrink his appearances to a single inning by the end of the year.
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