Breakout Breakdown: Justin Steele

For the longest time, the Cubs' inability to draft and develop pitching was a major organizational deficiency. Slowly but surely, that tide seems to be turning.

Chicago used a first-round draft pick on a pitcher in the 2021 and 2022 Drafts and looks to have hit on both of them. Jordan Wicks — the No. 21 pick in the 2021 Draft — reached the big leagues in 2023 following a terrific run in the minors and had some success. Cade Horton — the No. 7 overall pick in the 2022 Draft — is one of the best pitching prospects in baseball and is on track to reach the majors in 2024.

The Cubs' biggest recent player development success story, however, is probably Justin Steele. Steele was a fifth-round selection in the 2014 Draft and didn't start a game in the major leagues until he was 26. He was never included on any top-100 prospect lists. However, Steele was an All-Star in 2023 and finished fifth in the National League Cy Young voting. Let's dive into how he did it and whether it's likely to carry over into 2024.

Steele's 2023 season didn't totally come out of nowhere, of course. He was awfully good in 2022, as well, putting up a 3.18 ERA and 126:50 K:BB across 119 innings covering 24 starts. Steele's WHIP that year was 1.35, though, due mostly to a 9.8 percent walk rate. The left-hander's ability to dramatically cut down on the free passes was a driving force in his success in 2023, with Steele dropping his walk rate nearly in half to 5.0 percent, good enough to rank in the 93rd percentile. He was able to accomplish this while matching his strikeout rate from the year prior at 24.6 percent.

In truth, the improvement with Steele's control began a couple months into the 2022 season. Through the end of May that year, he had posted a walk rate of 12.6 percent covering 10 starts, collecting a 5.40 ERA and 1.58 WHIP along the way. From June on, the walk rate was shaved down to 8.2 percent, and Steele boasted a 2.05 ERA and 1.24 WHIP over his final 14 outings.

If you combine those last 14 starts in 2022 with his 30 starts in 2023, Steele has posted a 2.75 ERA, 1.19 WHIP, 24.5 percent strikeout rate and 6.0 percent walk rate over his last 252.1 frames. Of the 86 pitchers that have reached the 200-inning threshold over that span, Steele ranks sixth in ERA, behind only Max Fried, Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander, Shohei Ohtani and Blake Snell.

That's 10 months now that Steele has been among the best pitchers in the game. He's done it as a two-pitch pitcher, with his four-seamer and slider representing 96.5 percent of his repertoire, per Baseball Savant. It's not so difficult to understand why a guy like Spencer Strider can be so successful with two pitches. It's less straightforward as to how Steele — whose average fastball velocity is just 91.8 mph — can get away with it.

It's because Steele isn't really a two-pitch pitcher.

Confused yet?

Steele's fastball is one of the most unique pitches in the game. It ranked in the 86th percentile in spin rate in 2023 (after ranking in the 96th percentile in 2022) and the lefty is capable of manipulating it based on the hitter, the count or the situation. He can cut it and he can ride it. Because Statcast categorizes Steele's fastball as one pitch, it doesn't really capture the distinctiveness of its qualities.

Allow the man himself and also his pitching coach, Tommy Hottovy, to further explain. The quotes below are from an excellent piece written in April by Sahadev Sharma in The Athletic.

"When I'm going in to righties, I'm thinking straight line through and keep bearing in on them rather than throwing it in and having it leak back over the plate," Steele said. "I'm kind of more on the side of the ball. Still throwing it with true spin, but it's rotated a little bit so it stays in. When I'm going away to a righty, it looks like a ball the whole time and it just keeps riding and goes toward the plate."

"When you have a guy that can throw the ball relatively in the same area but make it do different things, it's just like tunneling," Hottovy said. "Throw it there, some you get on top of and supinate and it cuts. Others you stay behind and backspin it and it'll ride. They'll play off each other. It's like having two different fastballs that play off each other."

As you can see from the image below taken from Baseball Savant, Steele's four-seamer graded out with a Run Value of 15, which was the seventh-highest in baseball among all four-seamers. And, again, I'd argue that the grade doesn't really capture the unique properties of Steele's heater. 

Steele's slider is also no slouch. It was better than the fastball in some respects, producing a .203 xBA, .309 xSLG, .234 xwOBA and 31.1 percent whiff rate. That whiff rate jumped to 37.3 percent against left-handed batters.

A left-handed pitcher who throws only a fastball and slider would seem be vulnerable to right-handed batters. That wasn't the case for Steele, who had a .286 xwOBA against righties and .308 xWOBA versus lefties in 2023. He had a .303 xwOBA versus righties and .264 xwOBA against lefties in 2022. The cutting action he's able to produce on his fastball neutralizes righties, both by jamming them inside and also backdooring them.

Have I mentioned Steele is also one of the best groundball-getters in the game? His 49.4 percent groundball rate in 2023 ranked sixth among all qualifiers. That's a good number for anyone, but when you have one of the best infield defenses in baseball behind you as Steele does — particularly at shortstop and second base — it's even more important. He's also great at inducing weak contact, with an average exit velocity in the 75th percentile and barrel rate in the 85th percentile. All of these factors would seem to point to Steele carrying a low BABIP, but he was relatively unlucky in that respect last season with a .320 mark. We could see some positive regression there in 2024.

Steele's 24.5 percent strikeout rate is fairly pedestrian in today's fantasy landscape, but he upped that mark to 28.4 percent over the final two months of the season while also cutting his walk rate to 4.5 percent. Was that a sign of things to come? I'm honestly not sure, but that he was trending in the right direction in that regard is certainly encouraging.

I don't see many potential stumbling blocks for Steele in 2024, but regression with his control is certainly possible given his track record. His walk rate with the Cubs from 2021-22 was 10.1 percent and his walk rate during his time at Double- and Triple-A was 11.2 percent. Injuries have also been a problem for the southpaw in the past, as the last two seasons were his first two in pro ball that have seen him reach 100-plus innings. He did miss time last June with a forearm strain, but Steele required only a minimum stint on the IL and showed no signs of the injury lingering after his return.

Steele had a 54.1-inning jump from 2022 to 2023, easily setting a new career high with 173.1 frames last season. His ERA in the second half (3.62) was up from the first half (2.65), and the southpaw finished out his year with three poor starts in a row. However, Steele's other two September outings were terrific, and his stellar 95:17 K:BB and elevated .356 BABIP post-break suggest he might have simply had some bad luck. Some carryover effect is possible in 2024, but I'm not sure fantasy managers should be weighing that heavily when evaluating Steele's future prospects.

Steele's ADP in NFBC drafts sits at an even 100, with a min pick of 42 and max pick of 154. He's the 28th starter going off the board, just behind Zach Eflin, Joe Ryan and Kyle Bradish and just ahead of Walker Buehler, Joe Musgrove and Dylan Cease. While acknowledging Steele doesn't match the upside of some of those guys from a strikeout perspective, I think he might be the best value among this pocket of hurlers. At $17.90, Steele finished 12th among starting pitchers in terms of RotoWire's Earned Auction Values.