Chicago Cubs: Update on Justin Steele is yet another gut punch for team

The Chicago Cubs are currently working through a nightmare scenario. If one had predicted things as they currently are, that person would’ve been accused of being exaggeratedly pessimistic.

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Really, just imagine the bad mojo involved in losing your three projected top starters to injury (Cade Horton for the season, Matthew Boyd twice—with a comeback slated for around mid-June—and most recently Edward Cabrera with a 15-day IL stint due to a blister), as most of the rest of the rotation struggles to tread water. Add in the loss of a good chunk of your bullpen early on, also due to injury. Now, cover that mound of fetid misfortune with an extended—and ugly—team-wide offensive slump.

The recipe above gets you the current 2026 Cubs, losers of ten in a row and fourteen of their last sixteen who have now completed the downward-bound journey from first to last place in the NL Central Division.

But, on Tuesday, amid a 12-1 shellacking at the hands of the Pittsburgh Pirates at PNC Park, the news somehow got worse.

Justin Steele update is bad news for struggling Cubs

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Lefty ace Justin Steele, who recently suffered a setback in his recovery from last year’s elbow surgery, is still weeks away from even beginning to throw a baseball again. The official update from the team is now significantly less optimistic as the target has shifted from the May-June return mentioned in early April to a more vague and ominous “by the end of the year.”

“So we’re at the start of making progress in terms of moving forward,” Manager Craig Counsell told reporters before Tuesday’s game. “No timelines created from it. He’s not going to be throwing a baseball for multiple weeks still, but we’re going to progress to active strengthening and then to plyo balls…Until he starts throwing, it’s just hard to put that in an accurate timetable.”

Counsell termed the update “good news,” but that’s clearly only in a human ‘he’ll get better’ sense. Because, in a baseball sense, this is horrible news for a Cubs team that has never needed reinforcement and a shot in the arm more than right now.

A late summer return, maybe

Current talk has him, maybe, coming back around mid-August, but only if everything goes absolutely perfectly in his rehab and recovery the rest of the way.

“We’re just hopeful to get him back,” Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer told The Athletic. “Obviously, there comes a point where you run out of days, but I don’t think we’re there yet. I know Justin wants to come back more than anything…Obviously, our hope is that we can get him back by the end of the year and he can really help us.”

The 30-year-old Steele has been the Cubs’ most consistently effective starter over the last few years prior to his injury. Through 82 starts and four years as a full-time Cubs rotation piece, Steele has posted a 3.18 ERA.

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Source: https://www.chicitysports.com/chicago-cubs-justin-steele-injury-update-bad-news/