After missing two and a half weeks with a left forearm strain, Cubs starter Justin Steele’s 851⁄3 innings sit handily behind the pace of the National League’s best workhorses.
But after blanking the Guardians for 61⁄3 innings Friday afternoon at Wrigley, everything else about Steele’s 2023 track record suggests he deserves to hear his name called for the National League All-Star team when its full roster is announced on Sunday. A breezy 10-1 victory snapped the Cubs’ four-game losing streak, and provided their first win since, fittingly, the last time Steele made a start.
“That’s pretty obvious to me,” said Cubs manager David Ross of Steele’s All-Star credentials. “Him and [Marcus Stroman] have been phenomenal.”
“It’d be quite the honor, it’d be really cool,” said Steele. “But I just kind of take pride in showing up each and every day, and when the ball is handed to me, giving my team a chance to win.”
Steele marked his third start since returning from the injured list by holding Cleveland hitless for the first four innings, lowered his season ERA to an NL-best 2.43 while striking out six and walking one, and defanged the Guardians attack by holding perennial All-Star third baseman José Ramírez to an 0-for-3 day, striking him out twice.
Not bad for an afternoon that began with Steele plunking the leadoff man and throwing a comebacker into center field. With the Cubs offense shaking off their struggles against right-handed pitching to chase scuffling Guardians starter Cal Quantrill after just 10 outs, the high-tension moments for Steele were few and far between after the first inning. But with two runners on and no one out for Ramírez after Steele’s throwing error, a signature cutting inside fastball to strike out the Guardians third baseman started the way out of an early jam.
“That first inning was a little shaky and obviously it was self-inflicted,” said Steele. “I’ve definitely grown over the years. There’s a lot of different scenarios where that first inning goes differently. But I was able to regain my composure and make some pitches against some good hitters.”
Pregame, Ross compared Steele’s ability to manipulate the action on his four-seam fastball—riding it when he needs to work up, cutting it when he needs it to dart to his glove side, pairing it with a slider to get hitters out in front of it—to his former battery mate Jon Lester.
“[Lester] is the one that I point to, but I definitely don’t have anybody that I could compare just the raw, like simplicity of the mix that he has,” Ross said. “It’s just uniquely his own. This is what he’s going to do. It feels like no two pitches are the same back-to-back.”
“Definitely not someone bad to get compared to,” said Steele. “Coming up through the Cubs [organization], he was on the big league team and I was obviously watching a lot of big league Cubs baseball. I was watching him pitch a lot.”
As it would with Lester, a Statcast breakdown showing that all of Steele’s 96 pitches were either fastballs or sliders belies the level of variation present, or how his ball was “moving all over the place,” as Ross put it. A middle of the pack 22.2 percent strikeout rate, or the fact that Steele topped out at 93 mph Friday, doesn’t speak to the effectiveness of his stuff either.
Luckily there are other advanced metrics that can speak to what Steele is doing: he entered Friday’s start top-five in the NL for wins above replacement according to both FanGraphs and Baseball Reference. Then he went out and dominated to help end a losing streak, keeping the Cubs within arm’s length of the division lead ahead of a crucial month to determine this team’s trade deadline direction.
“Good response,” said Ross. “It started with our starting pitching.”
