Why 30-start season means so much to Justin Steele, Cubs’ outlook

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Once in a while, Justin Steele’s mom likes to remind her son of the inauspicious beginnings of his baseball career, pulling out pictures of him playing T-ball at about four years old. Well, playing is an overstatement.

“I’m kicking ant [hills] over and chasing butterflies,” Steele said in a conversation with the Sun-Times at the end of the season. “So it’s kind of funny looking back on it now.”

It’s funny because Steele is now the centerpiece of the Cubs’ rotation. In a year that earned him a fifth-place finish in National League Cy Young voting, the lefty said he was most proud of surpassing the 30-start threshold for the first time in his career. As the Cubs weigh the free agent market this offseason, Steele’s emergence as one of the best starting pitchers in the National League gives them flexibility. 

“We have some depth, and we want to give guys opportunities,” president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said. “But we always talk about, you can’t have enough pitching. So I certainly think that’s something that we’ll explore.” 

Steele’s path to becoming a young ace on a Cubs team with playoff aspirations began in Agricola, Mississippi. Steele grew up in that “small farm town,” as he described it, of about 350 people, according to 2020 census data. And he wasn’t chasing butterflies for long. 

Steele said he first started dreaming of a career in baseball at a young age. He’d tag along to his older brother’s baseball games, and the younger siblings would stage pickup games on the next field over.

Playing organized baseball, Steele’s skillset began to stand out. By his sophomore year at George County High School in nearby Lucedale, Steele estimated, he started putting on strength, and it became clear he had a chance to live out those baseball dreams. 

Steele committed to Southern Miss as a two-way player. When he wasn’t pitching, he played first base and outfield. But he was also on MLB teams’ radars, attending pre-draft meetings and filling out one questionnaire after another. 

“All doors were open for me at that point,” he said. “I was kind of like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing exactly in a few months.’ But it was a really exciting time. … It’s kind of crazy to think how long ago that was.”

The Cubs drafted Steele in the fifth round of the 2014 draft. His seven-year path through the minors took longer than he expected, thanks to a 2017 Tommy John surgery.

“Looking back, it made me stronger mentally in a bunch of different ways,” Steele said. “... Something I got really good at was taking things for what they were, taking every day at a time.”

It may be a cliche, but that kind of focus and compartmentalization is a skill over the course of a long season. Steele paired that mentality was a targeted offseason approach last winter to set himself up to reach that 30-start milestone.

The team wouldn’t have come so close to making the playoffs this year if it weren’t for Steele’s consistency. The team was built on run prevention, but the rotation weathered plenty of changes throughout the year, brought on by injury and performance. 

By contrast, Steele was a constant on his way to his first All-Star nod and a career-best 3.06 ERA. If it weren’t for a minor forearm strain at the end of May, which led to a short injured list stint, he likely would have met his other target: 180 innings. As it was, he fell short by 6 ⅔. 

“Those are mile marker-type things, the 180-inning mark, the 30-start mark, that you just never know if they’re going to be able to get you until they prove they can do it,” pitching coach Tommy Hottovy said. “And nothing you can do, nothing you can plan for, nothing you can prep for in the offseason is ever going to replicate what your body has to go through to get through that in a season.” 

Now, Steele knows without a doubt that he can maintain a high level pitching through that high workload. It’s a strong foundation for him to build on this offseason. He’s a long way from kicking over ant hills on the field, but his development in recent years suggests he has even more growth ahead.