Chicago Cubs: Three underrated players to watch in 2021 spring training

The Chicago Cubs rotation is going to look a lot different from 2020 to 2021. Jon Lester, Jose Quintana, and Yu Darvish are all gone. They brought back Jake Arrieta but he is certainly not the player we once knew earlier in his Cubs career. As a result, they are relying hard on Adbert Alzolay to get the job done this year. He will probably be right in the middle of the rotation from the very start of the year.

Some people might now feel comfortable knowing that Alzolay has the job that he has right now. Well, some people probably should give him a little more respect. In 2020, he came up later and had a pretty good stretch with the Cubs. He made four starts and had six appearances over the course of the 60 game season so his sample size wasn’t huge but he was still good nonetheless.

He had a record of 1-1 with a 2.95 ERA and 1.172 WHIP. He had 29 strikeouts and 13 issued walks all year long. All of this came in only 21.1 innings of work. You might expect the WHIP and ERA to climb a little bit but that would be okay. As long as he is a good starting pitcher for the Cubs in 2021, they should be alright. If he was somehow able to maintain his 2020 numbers over the course of a 162 game schedule and 32 starts, we could be talking about something special near the top of the Cubs rotation.