Having missed 2 ½ weeks with a strained left forearm, Cubs left-hander Justin Steele is well behind the pace of the National League’s best workhorses with 85 ⅓ innings this season.
But after he blanked the Guardians for 6 ⅓ innings Friday afternoon at Wrigley Field, everything else about Steele in 2023 suggests he deserves to hear his name called when the full NL All-Star roster is announced Sunday. A breezy 10-1 victory snapped the Cubs’ four-game losing streak and was their first win since, fittingly, the last time Steele started.
“That’s pretty obvious to me,” manager David Ross said of Steele’s All-Star cred-entials. “Him and [Marcus Stroman] have been phenomenal.”
Said Steele (9-2): “It’d be quite the honor. It’d be really cool. 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.”
In Steele’s third start since returning from the injured list, he allowed no hits for the first four innings, lowered his ERA to an NL-best 2.43 while striking out six and walking one, and defanged the Guardians’ attack by holding peren-nial All-Star Jose Ramirez 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. After that error, with two runners on and no outs, Steele threw his signature cutting inside fastball to strike out Ramirez and start his way out of the jam. From there, with the Cubs’ offense shaking off its struggles against right-handed pitching to chase Guardians starter Cal Quantrill (2-5) after just 10 outs, the high-tension moments for Steele were few and far between.
“That first inning was a little shaky, and obviously it was self-inflicted,” Steele said. “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.”
Before the game, Ross, the former Cubs catcher, compared Steele’s ability to manipulate 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 that of his old 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 [Steele] 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.”
Steele called Lester “definitely not someone bad to get compared to.”
“Coming up through the [organization], he was on the big-league team and I was obvi-ously watching a lot of big-league Cubs baseball,” Steele said. “I was watching him pitch a lot.”
A Statcast breakdown showing that all of Steele’s 96 pitches Friday were fastballs or sliders belies the actual level of variation — just as such a breakdown wouldn’t paint an accurate picture of Lester’s work. (Steele’s pitches were “moving all over the place,” Ross said.) A middle-of-the-pack 22% strikeout rate, and the fact that Steele topped out at 93 mph, also doesn’t speak to the effectiveness of his stuff.
However, there are advanced metrics that capture what Steele is doing. He entered Friday top-five in the NL for wins above replacement, according to both FanGraphs and Baseball Reference.
He also 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 that will determine the direction they take at the trade deadline.
“Good response,” Ross said. “It started with our starting pitching.”
