Top Pitching Prospect Jaxon Wiggins Scratched from Start, Dealing with Sore Arm
Righty Jaxon Wiggins is currently ranked No. 2 among the Cubs’ top prospects, but he should jump to the top spot as soon as Moises Ballesteros exhausts his prospect status. That is, if Wiggins is able to stay healthy. Des Moines Register reporter Tommy Birch reported yesterday that Wiggins was being scratched from Friday’s start and was no longer listed among the Iowa Cubs’ probables for the next few games. That’s not great.
“We are being strategic with how we deploy our pitching,” Cubs farm director Jason Kanzler explained.
Forgive me for being a little skeptical of that explanation, Mr. Kanzler. Even if we don’t allow Cade Horton‘s season-ending elbow injury to color our opinions with all sorts of recency bias, the Cubs haven’t exactly earned themselves the benefit of the doubt with these things. Besides, being strategic about deploying their pitching might mean moving Wiggins back a day or maybe two.
Their strategy came into clearer focus on Friday, when Bruce Levine reported that Wiggins is actually dealing with a sore right arm. Oh boy, great stuff. Jed Hoyer confirmed that Wiggins is “being backed up for now,” though exactly what that means is anyone’s guess right now. All we can do is hope that this is merely precautionary, though that’s what Horton and Craig Counsell said about his injury at the time.
Let’s not even think about the fact that Wiggins, like Horton, also had elbow reconstruction in college. The 24-year-old righty posted a 2.19 ERA with 97 strikeouts over 78 innings at High-A, Double-A, and Triple-A. His fastball sits around 97 mph and has touched 101, plus he’s got a big slider that almost looks like a curve due to its depth. He does have an actual curve, plus a changeup that may be special in time.
The Cubs have been very careful with Wiggins so far, which I am not sure is the best tack. While they don’t want to push him too hard, I am growing increasingly concerned that some of the organization’s problems might stem from not being aggressive enough with workloads. Pitchers need to be exposed to increasingly intense workloads in order to adapt to them, which is why their injury rates are higher in spring training and early in the season.
Failing to maintain a high enough acute-to-chronic workload in the offseason and then ramping up too quickly are the main culprits here. Then you’ve got big jumps in workloads, which we’ve seen with Horton and Justin Steele in the past. Horton had presumably never thrown more than 100 innings at any level prior to last season, when he logged 118 innings in Chicago after 29 in Iowa. That’s about 113 more innings than he threw in 2024.
Wiggins logged only 78 innings last year after putting up almost 60 the year prior, but the Cubs only had him go four innings in each of his two starts so far in 2026. I sincerely hope this is just a big ol’ nothingburger and that my concerns about their workload management are just the ramblings of a big doofus, which is a decidedly non-zero possibility.
In sunnier news, Matthew Boyd (left bicep strain) will make a rehab start with one of the Cubs’ minor league affiliates in the next few days. More to come on that.
