Feature Photo of Matt Shaw, BJ Murray, James Triantos and Haydn McGeary by Rich Biesterfeld
January frequently marks the dead of winter – it’s usually cold and gray in the Midwest, plus people are dealing with the ‘post-Holiday blues’. For Cubs fans, that gets broken up a bit by the annual Cubs Convention in Chicago where even if you can’t attend the event in person, you can see reports and/or watch player interviews from various media outlets. Once the convention wraps up, players will often begin to migrate towards Sloan Park in AZ, and over the last several years, the team has held a prospect camp beginning in early to mid January that runs up to the beginning of spring training. Knowing this history, I swung by Sloan Park this past week and got to see a lot of players getting started on their work for the 2024 season. It was somewhat reminiscent of the first day of school – greeting players I hadn’t seen for several months and asking one another how the off-season had gone. The best part though was that it signaled baseball was beginning to start up again!
Big League Sightings
Pitchers and catchers are scheduled to report on February 14th, but a lot of players like to get a head start on working out and settling in. In spite of that, I was still surprised at the volume of players I saw from the 40 man roster already in camp (even if some were only here temporarily). I watched Justin Steele, Jordan Wicks, Luke Little, Daniel Palencia, Adbert Alzolay, Ben Brown, as well as recent 40 man additions Porter Hodge, Bailey Horn and Michael Arias throwing bullpens off a mound. I wasn’t expecting to see that in January. Pete Crow-Armstrong and Brennen Davis are also in camp and were working with MLB hitting coach Dustin Kelly.
Prospect Camp
One of the coaches shared with me that there are approximately 65 prospects in camp with a 50/50 split between pitchers and position players, although there are a lot more infielders than outfielders. There’s a lot of cage work, defense drills and conditioning being done to get players ready for the long season. Position players are taking BP twice a week right now, but they are hitting off of coaches or machines with a lot of coaches available to assist, critique and provide input.
A lot of the squad in camp is comprised of players drafted in 2022 and 2023 who are still fairly young in their pro careers. I’ve watched position players Matt Shaw, Josh Rivera, Michael Carico, Chris Paciolla, Brett Bateman, Jonathon Long and Haydn McGeary, amongst others participate in batting practice and other drills. Pitchers aren’t throwing to hitters this early in camp, but I’ve seen Will Sanders, Ty Johnson, Nick Hull, Mason McGwire, Connor Noland and Luis Rujano throwing brief bullpen sessions.
With limits on the total number of players each organization can have state-side, most teams haven’t brought up players from the DSL for Fall Instructs like they used to do. So far, the Cubs have called up infielders Derniché Valdez and Angel Cepeda, and pitcher Francis Reynoso, who all played in the DSL last summer. This would seem to hint that at least these 3 will be playing in the ACL this summer.
Intriguing Development
On Friday, the coaches were working with the infield group and had 2-3 players at each position and appeared to be going over defensive positioning and how to handle situations such as cut-offs. The interesting part was that Owen Caissie was with Haydn McGeary at first base. I know this has been a hot topic for most of the off-season (and probably before that) about whether the Cubs would have Owen start taking some reps at first. None of the group took ground balls that day, but stay tuned to see if there is more work done to increase the Owen’s positional versatility!.
Rehab Group
At almost any time during the year, there will be players going through some sort of rehab process – for some, it’s relatively minor, but for others, it’s long-term such as recovery from TJS. It was really good to see 2023 2nd round pick Jaxon Wiggins on the field playing catch. I don’t have any insight on where Jaxon is in the rehab process or when he may be targeting a return to game action, but just good to see him throwing.
Ben Leeper was a non-roster invitee to big league camp in 2023 but incurred an injury which required him to have a 3rd TJS. Only a few players have returned from 3 surgeries of this magnitude, but I wouldn’t count Ben out. I talked to Ben this weekend and he’s now throwing 3 times a week in pursuit of coming back again.
If you’ve been following Cubs prospects for a while, you’ll remember the name Jack Patterson. Jack was throwing ‘lights out’ in 2019 across Lo-A, Hi-A and AA and then the injury bug struck hard. He hasn’t seen game action since that 2019 season but has been working hard to get back to contribute. He threw a bullpen session on Friday and I spoke to him this weekend. He said he finally feels healthy again and is looking forward to being able to compete. Jack is an easy guy to root for and I’m hopeful he can achieve that goal of being back in game action this season!.
Biggest Makeover
It’s almost a tradition that every year you hear about a player coming into camp ‘in the best shape of their life’. This isn’t what I’m referring to though…. Living in AZ, I get the opportunity to see almost every player in the organization during spring training or during the rest of the year and I do my best to recognize each individual. It took me a minute to recognize infielder Brian Kalmer last week because he had done some major shearing of his locks! Looks good – I just had a hard time recognizing him at first as shown by this side-by-side from Fall Instructs and the prospect camp.
