The 2026 MLB Draft is this weekend, Saturday, July 11 (rounds 1 through 4) and Sunday, July 12 (rounds 5 through 20). It’s arguably the most important event of the year in the life blood of an organization, and the Chicago Cubs are no exception in treating the opportunity to bring in new prospects with a certain level of reverence.
To their credit, the Cubs of recent years have overall been very successful in the draft, particularly in the early rounds, and particularly-particularly on the positional side. That has left something of an imbalance on the farm, and it’s expected that the Cubs might target a little more pitching this year than usual.
The Cubs are never, ever going to give away value in the draft JUST to try to fill an organizational gap – they’d rather maximize total value, and then figure out later how to transpose some of that value into other areas (e.g., max out on position prospects via the draft, acquire big league pitching other ways). Also: an organization has to be honest with itself about its core competencies, and recognize that some draft prospects might have MORE value in their organization than in other organizations (and vice versa).
HOWEVER, there does come a point where your balance can get so out of whack that you might have to force yourself to skew a little more toward one side or the other, and I do think we’ve reached that point with the Cubs and pitching.
Anyway, that’s all setup to two interviews Cubs VP of Scouting Dan Kantrovitz gave this week at Marquee, talking all things draft. I’ve embedded both below for your consumption, and I want to highlight a few quotes that stood out to me (but again, there’s a TON in the interviews):
“It’s no secret we’ve invested less in pitching in recent drafts, so there’s probably more scrutiny on that position than historically …. You can’t take good pitching if you don’t take pitching. One thing we’ve looked at the last few years is how to allocate more of our draft pool to pitching without leaking wins or overall draft value – that’s always been our north star. We go into the draft pretty agnostic of position player versus pitcher, just wanting the best player available and the most future wins. This year, the reality is we’re probably going to be a little less dogmatic about sticking to that, and realize that practically, to get more good pitching, we just might have to take more pitching. That’s the most obvious lever to pull. Operationally, we’ve revisited the process. Tyler Zombro and the pitching department will have their fingerprints all over this, which has been a huge help to me. We’ve made personnel changes within amateur – we have a new director of scouting operations. We’ve tried to revisit everything across the board, but honestly it mostly comes down to investing more of our draft capital in pitching.” “The tricky thing is you can’t just say, ‘We’re going to take more pitchers’ and then not leak wins from what you’re overall trying to collect. So it’s tricky to assess to what degree we’re willing to say we’re collecting as much pitching as we can, but we don’t want to do that at the expense of just having a really good draft. We don’t want to pass on the Josiah Hartshorns of the world just to take a pitcher in that round. It’s a tricky balance, but it’s in the forefront of our thinking right now, for sure.” “We’ve done a lot of work to figure out which pitchers are going to have the most success in our system. Everybody’s development approach is somewhat unique, and ours is no different. When you look at the pitchers who thrive in our system, the underlying pillars end up being velocity and spin. Those are two good places to start – they’re probably foundational.” “It’s fair to say there are elements of the draft that, from what I read and hear, sound like they’re being negotiated [in the CBA talks]. I don’t know exactly what those elements are, or what it means for the future of the draft. But if we’re not keeping up with what’s public about those negotiations, we’ve got our head in the sand. I just don’t know where it’s going to land …. We’ve internally talked about a lot of different scenarios for what could happen and how we might respond.” “The last month was the most grueling. That’s when you have conference tournaments, and then the combine, which is probably the most grueling week of the entire spring. It’s Monday to Saturday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., player interviews every 30 minutes, speed-dating style. It’s intense, and there’s stuff going on on the field too. We’ve got a lot of staff in our room interviewing these kids. After that, we shifted right into workouts at our complex in Mesa when the combine was over that weekend. Then the next day we’re in a conference room with Jed and Carter starting draft meetings. That’s when you have to slow it down, get your feet under you, and figure out where you are. At this point it’s just important to get on a sleep schedule, for all of us. I try not to have crazy late nights right now; that wouldn’t be productive once you get into the draft.”Hence then, the article about cubs vp of scouting dan kantrovitz talks about the upcoming mlb draft was published today ( ) and is available on Bleacher Nation ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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