As Cubs’ Ryan Pressly settles with new team, Chicago’s closer panic level is dropping

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The Chicago Cubs have built a vast pitching infrastructure that includes a high-tech laboratory at their Arizona training complex, a support system for Japanese pitchers, as well as “Ivy,” an information-sharing platform. Coaches, analysts and strategists routinely pore over video and data to help maximize players’ talents.

Through this collaborative environment, struggling closer Ryan Pressly identified the key to his recent turnaround.

“Throwing the ball over the plate in the air,” Pressly explained.

Pressly’s straightforward style made him a two-time All-Star and a postseason fixture with the Houston Astros. He’s carved out a 13-year career in the majors by filling up the strike zone, almost never spiking pitches in the dirt and keeping his composure.

While Pressly and Cubs officials didn’t overreact to a shaky early-season performance, they also didn’t ignore it, either. The bullpen was a key reason why the club fell short of the playoffs in each of the last two seasons, finishing with the same 83-79 record under two different managers and a front office that has largely avoided making big investments in relievers.

“The first couple outings were terrible,” Pressly said. “It was very frustrating. I wasn’t able to get anything for a strike. I was just wild. And that’s not who I am.”

Cubs manager Craig Counsell emphasized the “fine line” with closers — one pitch out of 15 can totally skew an appearance. Things are especially magnified at the beginning of the season. Ultimately, one week or two can’t outweigh a long track record of being trustworthy.

“Nothing dramatic has changed,” Counsell said. “But when you’re just a little out of whack, that one inning can kind of snowball.”

Pressly’s first impression as a Cub came during the Tokyo Series in mid-March, when he walked three hitters in a non-save situation and then induced a double-play ball to hold the Los Angeles Dodgers scoreless. When the regular season resumed, Gold Glove shortstop Dansby Swanson bailed out Pressly with a heads-up play to tag out a runner at third base and save a win over the Arizona Diamondbacks. Even in getting the last three outs of the Wrigley Field opener, Pressly still needed 33 pitches to put away the San Diego Padres.

One common thread is the quality of competition. As Pressly said, “The NL West is no joke.”

For further context, Cubs pitching coach Tommy Hottovy explained that Pressly and his camp had begun making mechanical adjustments well before the Astros approached Pressly about waiving his no-trade clause and approving a deal to Chicago.

The Cubs agreed with the thinking behind Pressly’s offseason program. At the age of 36, Pressly had to continue to adapt after taking a lesser role in Houston, where Josh Hader took over as the team’s closer after inking a five-year, $95 million deal. But the concepts emphasized in the weight room and in drill work on flat ground needed time to take hold.

“Translating that to a slope is hit-and-miss sometimes,” Hottovy said. “It’s continuing to help him understand what he wants to work on with his upper body and his delivery, and also making sure that he’s using the lower half the right way. It’s funny — he was just talking about being sore in weird places in his lower half because he’s starting to use muscles again that he wasn’t really using (before).”

Pressly and Hottovy first met while they were both pitchers in the Boston Red Sox organization, which added a built-in sense of trust to their new working relationship. During the Chicago’s recent West Coast road trip, Pressly pitched a clean ninth inning to secure a series win at Dodger Stadium and then earned the win in Tuesday’s 10-inning victory at Petco Park, which gave the Padres their first home loss this year.

“You get a little bit more comfortable on the mound,” Pressly said, “and things start to click.”

It would be kind of silly to label this as a turning point for a closer who notched the final out of the 2022 World Series and posted a 2.78 ERA across 17 postseason rounds with the Astros. Yet, the game always demands constant adjustments, and Pressly’s performance appears to be stabilizing and normalizing.

“It was basically just making him a little bit more efficient with how he moves,” Hottovy said. “And then just trusting that once he feels good there, everything will kind of take off. He’s been a guy who’s thrown strikes for his whole career. But sometimes when you have different mechanical cues, it kind of gets you out of whack with where your targets and lines are, so he’s just been working hard to get that back.”

Referring to that stretch as hopefully “just a little blip,” Counsell credited Pressly for limiting the damage while working through it. The Cubs have won seven of the nine games in which Pressly has pitched. Of those two losses, one was simply getting work in before leaving Japan — the Dodgers already held a three-run lead — while the other involved an unearned run off an error on a potential double-play ball.

In a pass-fail job, Pressly is 4-for-4 in save chances, helping the Cubs jump out with a 12-9 record against the toughest opening schedule in baseball. Everything here is a small sample, but an unsustainable WHIP (1.889) is dropping along with his ERA (3.00). The fastball velocity has decreased from his peak in Houston, but it’s essentially the same so far this season (93.4 mph) compared to last year (93.8 mph). And he was never a prototypical closer in the sense that he has a wider range of pitches to choose from, as well as a unique ability to spin the ball and create weak contact.

In trying to sustain momentum, and avoid the longer spirals that doomed the past two seasons, Pressly gives the Cubs the kind of presence that they had lacked.

“Anybody can pitch in this league when they feel great,” Hottovy said. “It’s the special ones that can pitch when something’s off mechanically, or you don’t have a pitch down that you need. That’s a competitor. That’s a guy who can handle the moment and control the moment.”

(Top photo: Geoff Stellfox / Getty Images)

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