The last two years, Matt Garza looked as good as he we had ever seen him. He had been a solid pitcher for the Rays, managing a 3.86 ERA (109 ERA+), a 7.1 K/9, a 3.1 BB/9, and a 1.1 HR/9 (4.32 FIP) from 2008 to 2010, but in 2011 and 2012 he was significantly better. He put up a 3.52 ERA (113 ERA+), an 8.7 K/7, a 2.8 BB/9, and a 0.9 HR/9 (3.47 FIP) in 49 starts and 301.2 innings pitched. Why has Garza gotten so much better? A big reason has been that he has been willing to go to his slider more often. After throwing it just 13% of the time from 2008 to 2010 according to Brooks Baseball, he threw it 24% of the time the last two seasons with spectacular results. But has Garza throwing his slider more not just caused his improved performance but also his injury issues?

Why would Garza throwing his slider more cause him to get injured? He might put more stress on his arm by either throwing the ball at a sharper angle or an angle that he’s not used to. Could Garza’s release point being higher or lower be the reason that he has been injured? Calculating Garza’s release angles using the Brooks Baseball data, no pattern at all seems to emerge.

The correlation between the average angles and Garza getting injured doesn’t seem to be very high as Garza got injured in 2008 when his release angle was the lowest in the data set and then in 2011 and 2012 when his angle was right around the middle. Looking at the slider, there is even less of a pattern as Garza got injured in 2008 when his release point was lower but then in 2011 and 2012 when it was around the middle again. Are we saying that Matt Garza gets injured when his release point is around his career average? That’s pretty ridiculous so we will have to delve deeper than this.

The 2008 injury seems to be the easiest to explain by far. His release point was the lowest of his career and his slider played a major role in that. The difference between his slider angle and his average release point was significantly more than any other year, coming in at 1.18 degrees less than average compared to his career average of just .56 degrees. The difference becomes even more pronounced when you compare it to his fastball as it was 2.96 degrees less, almost triple the 1.01 degrees lower than his fastball that it has averaged for his career. In 2011 and 2012, though, Garza is basically throwing all of his pitches right around his career average release points. He may be throwing his slider more, but it’s not getting his overall release point out of whack and it has in fact gotten closer and closer to his fastball. It has been .33 degrees and .32 degrees less than his fastball the past two seasons, the second- and third-best marks of his career, and that also helps explain why it has been so effective even as Garza has ratcheted up its use so significantly. So why is he getting injured? Maybe there’s something about the way he throws his slider that isn’t quantified simply by his release point, but if nothing else, it’s clear that his slider is not solely to blame for his injury concerns.

Why has Matt Garza dealt with so many injury problems the last couple of seasons? The fact that he’s throwing his slider more and then got injured has to be noted, but there’s no evidence that throwing his slider more has left him susceptible to injury. Throwing a baseball is an unnatural motion, and pitchers get injured all the time. Garza just got unlucky that he got injured several times in a row, and Cubs have to hope that his injury problems are behind him now. If Garza’s arm hurts when he throws his slider, they should limit the amount of times he throws it, but unless that’s the case, there’s no reason to stop him from throwing his slider as often as he has. By telling Garza to throw his slider more, the Cubs have turned Garza from a good pitcher into a potentially great one, and if they tell him to start throwing it less like he did during his time with the Rays, they’re doing nothing but being overzealous protecting their pitcher and limiting his effectiveness in the process.

The Cubs hope to progress from rebuilding to contending in just the next few years. A crucial part of making sure that contention period lasts as long as period is making sure cornerstone players are locked up for the future, and right in the middle of that for the Cubs was going to be first baseman Anthony Rizzo. The last two seasons in a Cubs uniform, Rizzo, 23, hasn’t quite lit up the baseball world but has still thoroughly impressed, managing a .283/.345/.485 line (123 OPS+) with 25 doubles, 24 homers, and 76 RBI in 527 plate appearances. With that being the case, the Cubs were going to have two options as they looked to extend Rizzo: the wait-and-see approach or the more aggressive early-career tactic.

Conventional baseball wisdom would tell you to let Rizzo play out a few more years and prove that he really will be a star first baseman for the long-term before you extend him. The Tampa Bay Rays, though, have taught baseball that if you take on some more risk and extend a talented player while his career is just starting, the potential reward is unbelievable, having an excellent player in your uniform for years to come making a salary a fraction of what he’s worth. Each player is different and it may be a long time before anyone goes all-in on the aggressive approach like the Rays. However, especially when a team knows that they have a special player, it has been surprising that so few times have been willing to show some faith in their guys, instead paying them exponentially more money a couple years down the line. In this instance, though, the Cubs did exactly that, signing Rizzo to a 7-year, 41 million dollar contract. They demonstrated their belief in Rizzo’s ability to be a pivotal piece of their franchise for the foreseeable future and their confidence that he was worth securing early even with all the risk involved.

The Cubs aren’t a team with the financial limitations of the Rays. If they had not locked up Rizzo now, they easily could have in two years, even if it took double the money that he’s receiving in his new contract. They’re not signing Rizzo out of necessity but only because it’s the smart move financially and baseball-wise as well–it will certainly help team morale knowing that there is never going to be a controversy about Rizzo’s future in the Chicago’s North Side. The Cubs are showing how MLB teams aren’t just innovating because they have to anymore. If ain’t broke, don’t fix it is no longer the guiding philosophy. When teams get opportunities to run their ballclub better, they are slowly but surely beginning to take them. The Cubs are just jumping on the bandwagon with this early extension for Rizzo, but it takes courage to jump on when there are so few people there. Before the Rays know it, their ingenuity will become common knowledge, and prior to that happening, they need to continue to find ways to get the edge they need to keep succeeding with their budgetary constraints in place. Nice job by the Cubs grasping the obvious reality that teams across baseball still want to deny for five more minutes, and for the Rays, it serves as a wake-up call knowing that other teams are beginning to see the light.

Delmon Young seven years ago and Jorge Soler today have a lot in common. Like Young, Soler is a 20 year old top outfield prospect expected to emerge as a cornerstone player for the franchise that signed him. And with this bat incident, their names will be irrevocably linked. Young’s story was different as he actually threw a bat at an umpire. It was not intentional- he meant to throw the bat not at the umpire, but towards the plate to argue a controversial call- but nonetheless it he made a stupid decision to throw the bat in the first place and no one was there to stop it. The critical difference between Young then and Soler now is that Soler has a support system around him, both physically and metaphorically, while Young was much more alone. Young was actually in the major leagues for the Devil Rays by the end of the year, with the team certainly disdaining wholeheartedly what he had done but regarding it as an isolated occurrence that would not happen again and being willing to move on. For Soler, the appearance of his teammates prevented his precipitate rage from turning into something much worse, and then there was Cubs President of Baseball Operations Theo Epstein, who emphasized after what happened that it’s the duty of the Cubs organization to help Soler keeps his emotions in check.

“We condemn the act of what took place, but we support the player,” Epstein said. “We believe in Jorge as a person as well as a player. It’s our responsibility to work with him to make sure he has a better way to channel his emotions on the field and to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again. So that’s our responsibility. It’s his responsibility to fully embrace that.”

The Cubs are going to do everything they can to work with Soler to make sure whatever emotional issues he has will be forgotten as he stays calmer and stands out on the baseball diamond for his immense talent and not anything else. Epstein described Soler as “tremendously remorseful” about what happened and unable to fall asleep that night as it set in just how horrible a thing he had almost done. Young himself was “sincerely regretful” about the bat-throwing incident and apologized profusely for his actions. But the difference now is that the Cubs are willing to go above and beyond to work with Soler and give him whatever help he needs to mature as a person. The Rays did nothing wrong, but with so much on the line for Young’s career and for their franchise, they could have done more.

The priority of MLB teams is to find players to help them win games. But baseball is only one peace of the puzzle. Just as much as injuries or mechanical flaws can ruin players’ career, so can emotional issues, and teams have to be willing to confront those problems equally fervently. Every team in baseball has to take note of how Theo Epstein the Cubs conducted themselves in this situation. They made clear first and foremost that Soler’s actions can’t happen but then took responsibility for what happened and stressed that Soler’s continued emotional development has to be as much of a priority for them as his development on the baseball diamond. The Rays for their part have made serious progress in a similar vein themselves, becoming a team that’s more accepting of enigmatic personalities than anyone, signing players like Yunel Escobar and willing to do whatever possible to work with them to be at their best on and off the field. Everyone realizes now that baseball is no longer a game where you can ignore what a player does off the field if he plays well enough when he’s on it, and they have to be able to adjust to that reality.

The Cubs have a long way to go reforming their franchise as they search for their first championship since 1908. However, with a support system in place to help their prospects develop not just as players but as people, they could not be doing anything better for the future of their ballclub. No matter what happens at the major league level for the Cubs the next couple of seasons, there is plenty of reason for optimism about what they can do in the long-term after this Soler situation demonstrated the atmosphere of support for their players that Theo Epstein and the front office has created throughout their franchise. It’s amazing how a team that has found so little success for the past century is quickly becoming a model for the rest of baseball for how to run their organizations.