Chicago Cubs: Good news and terrible news on the pitching injury front

The Chicago Cubs made it to the second half of the season with a patchwork pitching staff after being absolutely besieged by injury over the first four months of the baseball year.

More News: Chicago Cubs early trade shopping? Mets are sellers, Padres dangling Mason Miller

The team currently has a full major league pitching staff on the shelf—a pretty good one—and is motoring into the thick of the pennant race stressed and strained, utilizing a number of emergency fill-ins and castoffs from other teams.

The hope is that the Cubs’ front office can acquire some high-end arms by the August 3 MLB trade deadline to reinforce a hopefully playoff-bound team. But, realistically, a couple of deadline pickups won’t be enough to replace what’s missing.

Chicago needs to get back some of its injured pitching assets or even the best trade deadline haul won’t matter all that much.

On Friday, manager Craig Counsell offered some updates on the team’s injured hurlers. And, basically, it was a good news/bad news kind of thing.

The “good” news

More News: Chicago Cubs prospect named as ideal trade bait ahead of deadline

Jameson Taillon, according to reporting from Elise Menaker of Marquee Sports Network, is ready to go and will be back for the Detroit Tigers series on Monday. The veteran’s left hamstring strain cost him about six weeks of a season that was going poorly anyway. At this point, though, even having a diminished Taillon starting every fifth day would be a positive. But if he can turn things around and get even remotely close to vintage form, his return will be huge.

Hoby Milner is recovering from surgery following appendicitis. Arm-wise, he’s fine and it’s now just a matter of getting him built back up to full strength. His return is targeted for “August 1-ish.”

Edward Cabrera was supposed to play a big role in solidifying the middle of the Cubs rotation and eventually grow into a front-of-rotation asset. Instead, he worked fourteen inconsistent starts before going down with a left hamstring strain.

“His first kind of real, big day off the mound yesterday, and that went really well,” said Counsell. “He should be a viable option for us second week of August, assuming everything goes well from here.”

The bad news

The news regarding closer Daniel Palencia couldn’t be painted with any positive brush stroke. Apparently, he’s not making much progress with the right elbow inflammation that put him on the IL, with Counsell’s ominous quote casting a dark cloud: “not moving forward… so we’re having to repeat some steps so far.”

Ben Brown was in the midst of a breakthrough year, posting a 1.85 ERA and becoming the team’s de facto ace. Then, the neck issues that cost him much of 2024 returned. The 26-year-old last pitched on June 19 and it’s unclear when/if he’ll be back this season or whether he can return to the rotation.

“Everything has been really good,” Counsell told Menaker, mentioning that Brown’s been alternating between throwing plyo balls and baseballs. “He’s been asymptomatic for a number of days now, but I don’t know if that means he’s healed up necessarily… we need to stretch that time out to make sure we don’t recreate them.”

On other words, they have no idea when Brown may be back, or if he’ll be back at all.

Justin Steele’s season, meanwhile, is still up in the air as he works through the setback that stalled his return from elbow surgery last season. Originally targeted for a May-June return, Menaker is relaying the news that the former Cubs ace is set to begin throwing bullpens the first week of August.

Given that timing, it’s likely that Steele sees just a sliver of regular season playing time, all of it likely from the bullpen—if he pitches this season at all.

And all of this, of course, is taking into account that Cade Horton is out for the season after Tommy John surgery and that guys like Porter Hodge and Shelby Miller will also definitely not see any playing time this year. Then there are wild cards like Hunter Harvey and Riley Martin who may also be done for 2026.

The post Chicago Cubs: Good news and terrible news on the pitching injury front appeared first on ChiCitySports.

Source: https://www.chicitysports.com/chicago-cubs-injury-updates-taillon-cabrera-steele-palencia-milner-brown/