Quick Thoughts on Ben Brown’s Role Moving Forward

Ben Brown has struck out 62 batters in 50.2 innings this season, which would be a much more impressive feat if it wasn’t almost entirely offset by the 63 hits he’s allowed. You might be surprised to know that only six of those hits have left the yard, a function of Brown being among the best in the league at limiting hard contact. Nearly every peripheral statistic indicates he should be getting much better results, but there comes a point at which you can no longer wait for positive regression.

Has that point come for Brown as a member of the rotation?

Many have already determined that he needs to be moved to either the bullpen or Triple-A, and it’s hard to mount a counter-argument based on the box score numbers. I’m still not convinced that he’s best suited as a reliever, so I’d like to take a quick look at a few facets of his game to see how the Cubs might best be able to deploy him.

As we saw with Kyle Hendricks later in his Cubs career, Brown tends to struggle in the 1st inning. So far this season, he has a 9.90 ERA in the opening frame with a 0.90 mark in each of the next two. That jumps to an 11.17 ERA in the 4th and a 14.14 in the 5th, so he’s being brutalized when going through the order for a third time. While working as a reliever would most likely prevent that from hurting him, there’s still the matter of his rough starts.

And that’s the trick here: Just because it’s not THE 1st inning, it’s still HIS first inning. Regardless of his role, Brown still needs to find a way to get his stuff working early in order to avoid digging himself into a hole right away. Working as a starter at least gives him the chance to make up for some of those mistakes, whereas hits and runs are magnified when working in shorter stints.

Than again, you can’t very well continue to start a guy who’s pretty much limited to facing 18 batters before the wheels fall off. He’s kind of like an electric car with a short-range battery and poor acceleration. What’s even the point, right? Except that Brown has shown enough flashes of being elite that the Cubs have to figure out a way to get the most out of him.

My thought would be to use Chris Flexen or Drew Pomeranz as an opener to set the stage for Brown to be the bulk man rather than a traditional starter. Flexen has recorded at least four outs in four of his six MLB appearances so far, so he’d be able to hand the game over to Brown with the top half or even two-thirds of the lineup out of the way. That would ostensibly mitigate his first-inning issues, along with the penalties from facing the order a second or third time through.

In the end, I still believe the most viable long-term solution is for Brown to get a third pitch. Whether that’s the new changeup he still appears to be getting used to or something else, hitters can quickly get familiar with his mix when it’s just fastball/curveball. Brown threw the change four times against the Reds, with all of them coming in the last three innings of his outing, and he did a good job of killing spin with better depth than in the past.

He’s still got a ways to go, as evidenced by his start against the Marlins in which the offspeed spun more and had a lot of ride. It really just comes down to having the confidence to throw it more than four or five times a game, preferably in the early going as well. Give the hitters a little something to think about, even if the pitch is never much of a weapon in and of itself.

However Brown and the Cubs go about figuring this thing out, I still believe he can have the most impact as a starter. That may not be this season, however, as they can’t just sit around hoping he figures things out on his own.