You won’t often hear professional sports teams openly admit their shortcomings in a public forum, but the Cubs’ flaws when it came to pitching development had become so obvious that they had no other choice. I mean, when Rob Zastryzny is still your most successful homegrown pitching product in the last decade, well, the results speak for themselves.
Rather than looking for tools that jumped off the page, the Cubs scouted for consistency. They wanted pitchers who could stay healthy and eat innings, a strategy that led to them selecting players whose ceilings were either too low or required perfect circumstances to reach.