Ben Brown continues to roll, bullpen helps secure walkoff

The home run ball has been kryptonite for the Cubs‘ pitching staff this season. Entering Saturday’s game against the Giants, they had given up 95 homers, the most in baseball. The only antidote to this problem that they’ve had so far has been Ben Brown.

And Brown has proven to be quite the outlier. He hasn’t given up a home run since opening day on March 26. Brown’s success extends further than just not giving up home runs, too. Thanks to an expanded arsenal and a well-established vision for the kind of pitcher he wanted to be this season, Brown is rocking an ERA well below 2.00, and his 1.6 fWAR going into Saturday’s start put him among the top 25 pitchers in baseball.

“As we walked out of the 2025 season, I thought [Brown] had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to improve,” manager Craig Counsell said. “I think he’s proven to me at least that he’s executed those ideas this past winter.”

There’s the aforementioned expanded arsenal that’s helping Brown this season — he’s added a sinker to his repertoire — but Brown is also pitching with increasing confidence in his other stuff. In Saturday’s 3-2 win over the Giants, Brown went to his knuckle curve over 40 percent of the time. It’s become his best pitch in some regards; Brown is getting a 47.4% whiff rate with the knuckle curve.

“From the bullpen on, it was just in a good spot,” Brown said of his curveball. “[I] really leaned on it, even down in counts. It came in really big for me today, for sure.”

Brown said he didn’t feel like he had his best stuff on Saturday. He only threw three changeups and said he didn’t feel like he was commanding his fastballs very well. In the past, that would have spelled trouble and an early exit for Brown. But this season, he is taking a massive step forward because of the growth’s he’s made since 2025.

“He’s pitching very confidently right now,” Counsell said. “That’s the biggest thing; it’s a confident guy on the mound, and I think we see that.”

The two Pete Crow-Armstrong home runs, especially his game-tying shot in the ninth inning with two outs, and Michael Busch’s walk-off single in the tenth will provide the highlight reel moments of Saturday’s win, but neither moment happens without the innings from Jacob Webb and Ryan Rolison after Brown came out of the game.

Caleb Thielbar took over for Brown in the sixth inning and gave up a solo shot to Rafael Devers before striking out Luis Arraez and Willy Adames to close out that inning. From there, Webb pitched two crucial scoreless frames, and then Rolison tossed a scoreless tenth after Daniel Palencia gave up a go-ahead run in the ninth.

“It’s a tough situation for any pitcher to come in, with a guy on second and no one out,” Rolison said. “But I’ve done it a cuple times this year, and I think this time I was a lot more in control of my emotions. You can’t do any thing but execute one pitch at a time, and I think I did a really good job of slowing the game down and getting in the zone early.”

Rolison had to navigate the top of the Giants order after getting a strikeout from the number nine hitter, and he punctuated the inning by striking Devers out looking and getting Arraez to roll into a groundout.

“I knew that if we could get through that inning, we were going to walk it off,” Rolison said. “I think the clubhouse needed that, and hopefully it’s a spark for us to keep going.”

There are several things that will need to change in order to for the Cubs to shake off the funk they’ve been in for nearly a month now. Getting the offense going is one of the primary things, and Crow-Armstrong getting hot is an encouraging sign on that front. He went 4-for-5 on Saturday and has a 1.632 OPS in his last seven games. But along with the offense starting to hit more consistently, especially with runners in scoring position, the Cubs need the rest of the pitching staff to be a little more like Brown. At least in terms of limiting the home runs.

The problem is, the Cubs have guys in their rotation and in their bullpen who are flyball pitchers who are always going to have to work around allowing the kind of fly ball contact that gets them into trouble.

“We have a couple of starters [who] that’s going to be a thing for them,” Counsell said. “They have to control the other things really well to mitigate them because that’s just how they give up runs. And the rest of it is we’ve got to execute better.

“If you’re a guy that gives up home runs, you’re probably a good executor. I think those things probably go hand in hand a little bit, and so we’ve got to improve at the execution level.”

Jameson Taillon and Shota Imanaga have combined to give up 37 of the Cubs’ home runs allowed, and they hold the top two spots in baseball in that metric. Taillon leads with 20 homers surrendered, which puts him easily on pace to have his worst season in that regard. In 2023, Taillon’s first season with the Cubs, he gave up 27 home runs.

As for Imanaga, this has always been an issue, but especially so in the second half of 2025. But at 17 home runs allowed so far this season, Imanaga is also on pace to put up his worst year in terms of home runs given up.

Neither pitcher is going to eliminate the home run ball from their starts entirely, but as the Cubs’ offense continues to sputter, they need more than just Brown’s outings every five days to start generating some winning streaks again.