History Repeats Itself for Cade Horton

Cade Horton gave up a run on Wednesday night. Kind of. He was charged with a run because he exited the game with two men on base, but it was Andrew Kittredge who allowed the Vladimir Guerrero Jr. sea-skimming missile that brought the run home. Not to criticize Kittredge; the odd 111.8-mph double is an occupational hazard of pitching to Vladito.

That run was the first one Horton had surrendered in five starts since the All-Star Break; taking things back to his final outing before the Midsummer Classic, Horton’s scoreless streak had run to 29 innings. In those five starts, Horton has allowed 11 hits total, only one of them for extra bases.

As for his most recent start, I don’t think Horton or the Cubs will be too broken up about the inherited runner. Not only did Chicago win the game, but also Horton set a new career high with eight strikeouts and made the Blue Jays wait until the sixth inning for their first hit.

Horton came up to the majors for the first time in May and had a bumpy introduction to life in the big leagues. Those bumps peaked in his final two starts of June, when he gave up six runs to the Mariners and seven to the Astros in consecutive outings, failing to see the fifth inning on either occasion. Since July 1, Horton has a 1.13 ERA in 40 innings, and opponents are hitting .165 off him. In this weak and weird National League rookie class, I’d probably throw my Rookie of the Year vote (if I had one) behind Isaac Collins at the moment, but Horton is growing larger in the rearview mirror.

Pitching is a subtle art. There are nuances that take decades to master, bits of magic that are invisible to the untrained eye. Horton is not some such subtle pitcher. It is highly obvious why he’s good.

The best way I can describe it is that everything about Horton, from his set position to his windup to his pitches themselves, is curved and gnarled like the roots of an old tree. He coils himself up while taking the sign, swings his arm bent severely at the elbow, and crooks his wrist as he releases the ball from a high three-quarters slot.

Think of some of the tall, billowy-limbed power pitchers across the league — Tyler Glasnow or Jacob Misiorowski — and how they unfurl themselves as they come out of their windup. Long levers make for high-release velocity. Angular momentum, and all that nonsense.

Horton, all of 6-foot-1 and a former Oklahoma football recruit, punches the ball at the hitter. It’s a short, jabbing motion, and all of a sudden the ball is there.

You’ve already seen his four-seam fastball, which he throws at an average of 95.6 mph, touching 98. That’s good velocity for a starter, even very good, but Horton’s heater is not effective because it’s hard — it’s effective because it’s weird.

In most cases, you want a four-seamer to have what’s called arm-side run, where the spin of the pitch takes the ball up and away from an opposite-handed batter. Chris Sale and Paul Skenes both get more than a foot of spin-based arm-side movement on their four-seamers.

Out of 413 pitches who appear on Baseball Savant’s pitch movement leaderboard for four-seam fastballs this year, Horton is one of just eight to throw a four-seamer with either neutral or glove-side movement.

This is unusual to say the least. Horton’s heater is one of the fastest offerings with this kind of movement in the entire league. Here, I narrowed the sample only to pitches that broke at least an inch to the glove side, and sorted by average velocity. Horton’s four-seamer is fourth, and the pickings are so slim that Misiorowski’s slider actually breaks into the top 10.

A lot of pitchers do throw a hard fastball with cut, enough that, hey, maybe they should come up with a distinct name for that pitch type.

Rather than belabor the point, if you’re throwing a pitch that ends up on a leaderboard with Fairbanks, Burns, and Clase, that’s generally a good sign.

To right-handed hitters, Horton mixes in an occasional sinker, but the real out pitch is a sweeper that he can throw for strikes, but more often throws to get whiffs.

Horton has a 40.4% whiff rate on his sweeper, which as of Thursday afternoon ranks ninth in the league among pitchers who have thrown at least 200 such pitches this season. For comparison, Garrett Crochet is one spot behind him on the leaderboard.

But the real fun stuff Horton saves for opposite-handed batters. My favorite pitch of his, aesthetically, is his curveball. If you thought that sweeper to Trevor Story had some nasty vertical break, get a load of this.

The tight, angry arc on this pitch is just such a lovely complement to Horton’s coiled-up pitching technique. And with this demonic yo-yo action, he can throw the curveball anywhere, even dropping it down onto the top of the zone like a piano on occasion. Opponents are hitting .194 with a .204 wOBA against this pitch.

But it’s not Horton’s primary weapon against left-handed hitters. That would be a tumbling high-80s split-change that is quite simply one of the most unhittable offerings in baseball.

Out of every pitch that’s been thrown at least 100 times this season — 1,607 of them in total — Horton’s changeup has the 10th-highest whiff rate and the 37th-lowest opponent batting average.

My favorite offspeed pitches are the ultra-low-spin changeups and splitters that flop out of the sky like a stricken goose. Logan Gilbert’s splitter is the example I keep going back to. That is not Horton’s changeup. There is nothing remarkable, in isolation, about its spin rate or velocity or movement. But when viewed against Horton’s weird cut-action fastball, it looks like it’s getting vaudeville-caned down and away to lefties. Just a terrific pitch.

The Cubs might be watching the Brewers zoom off into the distance with the NL Central title between their teeth, but they are all but certain to hang on to a wild card spot. If and when they get there, Horton will be one of their two best starting pitchers.

I don’t know if that means he’ll get a start; we’ve still got six weeks to go, and who knows what will be in Craig Counsell’s mind then. Matthew Boyd will probably be the Game 1 starter on merit, and after that perhaps Shota Imanaga or Jameson Taillon will win out on a combination of seniority and the potential for Horton to be a devastating multi-inning relief weapon.

Either way, this kid is going to be a problem in the playoffs, if the Cubs can get him there healthy.

See, in 16 major league starts, Horton has completed seven innings only once. He’s never thrown more than 94 pitches; Counsell lifted him after 82 pitches on Wednesday, 67 pitches on August 6, and 71 pitches the start before that.

There’s an inclination to baby any highly touted starting pitching prospect, especially one with slightly concerning physical characteristics (short stature and a violent delivery) like Horton. More than that, he threw only 34 1/3 minor league innings in 2024 as he dealt with a shoulder injury. The Verducci Effect has been known to be bunk since Horton was in grade school, but with any strenuous physical activity, it’s smart not to pile on too much too quickly. Especially since the Cubs, as I’ve said, are hoping to squeeze a few more starts out of Horton than they anticipated.

If you have a passing familiarity with college baseball, alarm bells have been going off during the couple paragraphs about Horton coming back from injury and building his workload up before playing an integral role in a playoff run. “I swear I’ve heard this story before,” you’re saying, hippocampus positively buzzing with recognition.

Indeed, all of this has happened before. In 2022, Horton was the breakout star of Oklahoma’s run to the College World Series final.

Horton ended the 2022 regular season with a 7.94 ERA, but was called on to start the Big 12 Tournament championship game against Texas, and he ripped out nine strikeouts over 5 1/3 innings to win the game. He followed with four more excellent starts in the NCAA Tournament, culminating in the only two double-digit strikeout games of his career, in Omaha. That included a record 13 punchouts in a losing effort against Ole Miss in Game 2 of the championship series.

That hot month vaulted Horton from nowhere into the top 10 picks of the 2022 draft. How can a high first-round pick out of a huge school come from nowhere? I’m glad you asked.

Horton, in addition to being a two-sport recruit out of high school, was also a two-way baseball player. He missed his entire first season of college while recovering from Tommy John surgery, and played most of his redshirt freshman campaign as a third baseman and occasional relief pitcher, before he joined the Sooners rotation and went nuts in the postseason.

Because Horton had missed a season due to injury and has an early birthday, he qualified for the draft as a freshman, which is vanishingly rare in college baseball. That limited his college career to one season and 11 starts, and thanks to the shoulder injury that wiped out 2024, he arrived in the majors with an abnormally low quantity of game experience.

Horton has less than 300 innings pitched since he graduated high school in 2020. Those two double-digit strikeout games in the College World Series are two of the three double-digit strikeout games he’s had in college or the pros. Those are also the only two instances since high school in which Horton threw 100 pitches in a single outing. And after the Ole Miss game three years ago, he didn’t even throw another 80-pitch start until his third outing in the majors on May 21.

So yes, in addition to the workload buildup concerns around any 23-year-old power pitcher, and the responsibility to be cautious with a guy who’s suffered two serious arm injuries in the past five years, Horton is just wildly inexperienced for someone who’s spent so much of his career in high-pressure situations. Seriously, almost a quarter of his total innings as an adult have come either in the 2022 NCAA Tournament or this year in the major leagues.

In other words, it’s easy to understand why Counsell and the Cubs are keeping Horton on such a short leash. And full credit to them for doing so; after watching that changeup every week, the temptation to take off the restrictor plate must be overpowering. But it’s not about no-hitting the Blue Jays in August; it’s about winning in the postseason. We don’t know much about Horton, but we do know the postseason is where he’s at his best.