Scouting Notes on the Rehabbing Cubs and Diamondbacks Pitchers

Eric Longenhagen-FanGraphs I had Tuesday’s Cubs-Diamondbacks Bridge League game circled on the calendar. Chicago’s big league squad is in town this week (for a series that has become spicy), and I thought this meant the organization’s recently drafted pitchers might throw in front of traveling Cubs brass who could see their new talent in the morning before heading to Chase Field for the second game of that series. “Bridge League,” for those unfamiliar, is a fairly informal, month-long slate of backfield games that take place at the spring training complexes between the end of the Arizona and Florida Complex League schedules and the end of the other minor seasons in September. It mostly exists to give newly drafted players a soft landing spot to start their pro careers. But instead of a first glimpse at Cade Townsend or Carson Jasa, I ran into multiple, big-name rehabbers from both clubs: Justin Steele (who threw a live BP) and Ben Brown of the Cubs, and Corbin Burnes and Zac Gallen of the Diamondbacks. Here is a rundown of my day and how those guys looked, as the two teams eagerly await reinforcements during their respective playoff pushes. I ventured to Sloan Park way, way early (which is not typically my style) because I feared that the heat (it was 114 degrees here) might trigger an unannounced change to the start time of the game. Though first pitch hadn’t been altered, and I sat in the stadium reading Chuck Klosterman’s new book for a while, arriving when I did allowed me to run into Steele’s live BP. Steele, an All-Star in 2023, hasn’t pitched in affiliated ball in nearly 17 months. He had elbow surgery in April 2025 and then suffered a setback (flexor tendon strain) early this year, which has kept him shelved all season. The Cubs set up a screen and portable TrackMan unit behind home plate before he warmed up. Craig Counsell and other team personnel filed in behind the screen as he got ready to throw. Eric Longenhagen-FanGraphs Steele threw two innings against Cubs Complex hitters who were wearing shorts and Catapult wearable tech, with a 10ish-minute break in between. I didn’t film any of Steele’s live BP on my phone, nor did I shoot it with FanGraphs’ high speed camera, “Slowmie,” as it felt like bad form to subject a guy at this stage of his rehab to the panopticon. Steele worked in the 90-91 mph range with natural cut at times, and the occasionally nasty slider. He gave up some flush contact in his first inning, and less of it in the second. His physique looked a bit more trim than it typically does, he seemed to handle the heat well, and happily signed autographs at the mouth of the team tunnel as he left the field. This guy is pretty clearly in the early stages of his rehab, and Counsell downplayed the speed at which he might return. The deceptive cut action on Steele’s heater and his slider quality would, at the very least, be nice fits in an October bullpen role. As Steele rested between his innings, Burnes arrived at the ballpark (ahead of the Diamondbacks’ minor leaguers) and carried his bag into the road dugout. He and Counsell, his former manager with the Brewers, shared pleasantries on the field before Burnes stretched and warmed up with Aramis Garcia. When Burnes got on the mound for the bottom of the first inning, he immediately noticed the ball he had been given was not a Major League baseball, but one of the minor league balls with slightly higher seams and different sort of tack to it, and the umpire had to fetch a batch of big league ones from the dugout for use. Burnes threw 24 pitches in the game before finishing up in the bullpen, his cutting fastball peaking at 93 mph, per Diamondbacks personnel in attendance (there was no live data feed available for this game). He folded several different pitches into his lone inning, mostly curveballs and sliders. Though his delivery is not currently as explosive as it is when he’s operating at his peak, Burnes looked comfortable and athletic when he had to sprint off the mound to cover first base, and his breaking ball quality was still pretty good. The drop in velocity compared to his peak (when he was sitting 96) and his recent healthy seasons (when he sat 94-95) is concerning, but Arizona’s pitching staff needs whatever warm bodies it can get. Burnes told the Arizona Republic’s Nick Piecoro on the concourse as he left the ballpark that his next outing was likely going to be a true rehab start at an affiliate, and that he hopes to return to the big leagues shortly thereafter in a short-outing capacity. He is in the second year of a six-year, $210 million deal that runs through 2030, and obviously the way his arm strength trends the rest of this season and into early next are going to tell us a lot about whether that contract is salvageable. You Aren't a FanGraphs Member It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed. We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member. 1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other. 2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off. 3. Dark mode and Classic mode! 4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them. 5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects. 6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.) 7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only. 8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO. 9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members. 10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features! We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it. Though Burnes was immediately attuned to the subtle differences in the minor league ball, Brown was either correctly given big league baseballs, or didn’t know or care that he wasn’t. He looked totally healthy, sitting 95-96 mph and touching 97 across two innings of work, while flashing his nasty, trademark spike breaking ball. He also threw some sinking, right-on-right changeups. His command wasn’t especially fine, but he bullied the strike zone enough to coast through his innings of work against Arizona’s Complex kids. Here is one of them: Not long after publication, it was reported that at the end of Brown’s outing, he experienced symptoms in his neck, which according to Counsell worsened as the day went on. This setback leaves his availability for the stretch run in some doubt. Finally, Zac Gallen followed Burnes and threw 45 pitches across three innings. Like Brown, Gallen’s stuff looked sharp. He was up to 94, mostly 92-93 on the radar gun I was peeking at, and his cutters and curveballs both had late movement. He carved during his first inning of work, and then his command waned during portions of his other two innings, as the temperature climbed to levels no big league pitcher would ever actually have to pitch in. Here is Gallen’s best inning: The Diamondbacks shifted Gallen from the 15-day IL to the 60-day IL at the trade deadline to make room on their 40-man roster for the acquisition of Lars Nootbaar. That designation means Gallen is eligible to return on September 7, a little later than he probably needs to get fully ready, based on how he looked Tuesday. As Gallen left the ballpark, Piecoro and I asked him about his outing. Here’s what he said about how he felt overall: “It brings me back to when I first signed and I was in the GCL and it’s hot and you know, you just want to play baseball, so it was fun. Today was the first time I used finger signs in a game in I don’t know how long. So that was taking most of my attention, trying not to cross up A.G. and hit the umpire back there. But yeah, it was good. It’s just nice to get to work, and things were getting better as the game went on. Really happy with the cutter today, and with the changeup. Fastball… getting the vert back would be nice. I think, all in all, a good day.” Finally, I asked Gallen about something very specific and weird that I’ve been interested in for a while — his elbow skin. When I first shot Gallen on high-speed video, his weenus (the skin at the tip of one’s elbow) was flapping all over the place. He was one of the very first pitchers I filmed with Slowmie, and I assumed that other pitchers would have similar physiology. That hasn’t been the case. “You’re the first person to ask me this on the record, I think,” he said. “I’ve had people send me a message on social media or whatever, but yes I have seen it. I have no idea why. I would like to think I’ve got a lot of skin and have a fast arm, that’s what I tell myself. But yeah I have no idea. I’ve been tagged in a handful of pictures with my weenus, essentially, and I guess I have a lot.” As the three of us stretched out our weenuses (weeni?) to compare, Gallen said: “I mean, I’m pulling it good.” “From years of throwing I would imagine it stretches out a good bit,” I said. “Like a pizza dough.” “I would guess,” Gallen said. “I honestly have no idea, I just know I’ve been tagged and people have been like, ‘Ew, that’s disgusting.’ I didn’t think I’d be getting body shamed at 30.”