Cubs Pitching Staff Unraveling in 2026 Like the Mets

The Cubs pounded the Mets 12-4 at Wrigley Field on Friday. Don’t look too hard at the fine print.

Chicago’s pitching staff is coming apart at the seams, and the 10-9 record entering the weekend obscures how serious the damage has become. Closer Daniel Palencia landed on the 15-day injured list Friday with a strained left oblique, the fourth or fifth blow to a pitching corps that’s been gutted before April’s out. Starter Cade Horton won’t pitch again in 2026. Reliever Porter Hodge is done for the year. Opening Day starter Matthew Boyd is only now clawing his way back from a stint on the IL. And then there’s Ethan Roberts, who somehow managed to slice one of his pitching fingers, an injury the Chicago Sun-Times treated as the grim cherry on top of a miserable pile.

That’s a lot of wreckage for 19 games.

The Cubs opened this seven-game homestand in last place in the NL Central. Friday’s blowout over New York snapped them into a three-game winning streak, their first of 2026, and Nico Hoerner has been raking. The offense is real. But the MLB transactions database tells a story that no amount of run production fully answers: this club has been cycling bodies in and out of the IL so fast it’s hard to keep a program.

“We’ll keep adjusting,” manager Craig Counsell said after the win, according to the club’s postgame availability. “The guys in that room have handled everything we’ve thrown at them.”

That’s the diplomatic version. What’s actually happening is that Counsell’s pitching depth has been stripped to the studs, and the lineup is carrying a staff that can’t carry itself right now. The question isn’t whether the Cubs can win ugly. Friday proved they can, 12 runs on a warm North Side night on Addison Street. The question is whether they can sustain a 162-game season when two starters, the closer, and a key reliever are all watching from the trainer’s room.

Look at the Mets if you want a cautionary tale worth taking seriously.

New York came into 2026 with the second-largest projected payroll in baseball, $370 million, a number that bought them Juan Soto, Francisco Lindor, Bo Bichette, Luis Robert Jr., and Freddy Peralta. It’s the kind of roster that’s supposed to make October plans. Instead, the Mets sat at 7-13 through Friday, last in their division, the National League’s biggest disappointment by any honest accounting. They didn’t expect it. They couldn’t stop it.

The Cubs aren’t the Mets. Chicago’s talent is real, the energy at Wrigley Field on a Friday night in April is something, and Hoerner at the plate looks like the player the organization needs him to be right now. But the structural problem the two clubs share is hard to argue around. Both built their 2026 plans on pitching that’s broken down. The Mets are drowning. The Cubs are treading water and calling it a winning streak.

There’s a version of this where the pitching stabilizes. Boyd comes back healthy, the bullpen pieces hold together, some prospect forces his way into a useful role, and the offense carries Chicago through the rough patch. It’s not an impossible scenario. But right now it requires some optimistic assumptions stacked on top of each other, and the NL Central won’t wait for anyone to get sorted out.

Palencia going on the 15-day IL means Chicago’s ninth-inning options are thinner than any contender’s front office wants to admit in April. With 162 games on the schedule and the team not yet three weeks into the season, the math on that bullpen depth gets uncomfortable fast.

The 12-4 win was real. The problems behind it are real too.