Justin Steele Hits the Injured List With Left Elbow Tendinitis

Over the last three seasons, Justin Steele has blossomed into a top-of-the-rotation arm for the Chicago Cubs.

He’s put up some great numbers on the mound. His goal every year, though, is to make 30-plus starts and pitch at least 180 innings. He hit that first mark once (2023) but hasn’t hit the second.

You’d expect Steele to have kept that goal entering 2025. That’s part of the reason why, when the Cubs placed him on the 15-day injured list Wednesday morning with left elbow tendinitis, Steele described what he was feeling as simply “frustration.”

After beginning the season with a 6.89 ERA (and five home runs allowed) through his first three starts, Steele rebounded Monday night. He held the Texas Rangers scoreless across seven innings and struck out eight. It was far and away the most dominant he’s looked to start the year.

But Steele started feeling some discomfort mid-game. He alerted Cubs manager Craig Counsell and pitching coach Tommy Hottovy that his arm was “starting to tighten up on me a little bit.” Given the game-time temperature of 34 degrees, it was difficult to determine how much the cold was affecting things.

“We had some long innings in there. He said he felt good going out there,” Counsell said. “That’s essentially what happened. Felt it kind of middle-ish of the start, [in the] fifth, sixth [inning]. I think he himself was a little confused — ‘Is it the cold or is it my elbow?'”

The feeling never escalated to the point where the 29-year-old southpaw felt he needed to exit the game.

“I was wanting to continue to pitch,” Steele said. “Felt good. Felt like I was executing pitches and stuff, so I wanted to keep going.”

Asked if the weather played a contributing factor, Steele said he “would definitely say so.” He noted pitchers’ velocity being down during the cold homestand at Wrigley Field.

Prior to the Cubs’ decision to place him on the IL, Steele came in Tuesday prepared to start building toward his next outing. However, he also told the Cubs’ trainers he was still “kind of sore, kind of tight.”

The feeling is similar to the elbow tendinitis that landed him on the IL last September, Steele said. Given the injury history there, the Cubs opted to be cautious.

“We’re going to take the conservative route here,” Counsell said. “He had symptoms of an injury that he experienced last year. And for that reason, rather than having him focus on his next start, I think it’s best that we just back off that and make sure he recovers in a really good place.

“… We just got to get him symptom-free and then back on the mound. But I think the fact that there was an injury last year, and we have symptoms of that injury again, makes you want to be conservative.”

Steele is scheduled for an MRI on Thursday, and the Cubs will proceed from there. Last time, his IL stint lasted 17 days before he returned to make two more starts. The hope is this could follow a similar timeline, though more information gathering will help set a road map for his recovery.

“I was coming in yesterday prepared to kind of go about the normal rotation, normal standard in-between-starts stuff,” Steele said. “Now we’ll, I guess, just be able to figure out exactly what it is and attack it.”

In a corresponding move, the Cubs recalled Ethan Roberts from Triple-A Iowa. He’ll join the bullpen and help cover innings moving forward.

Obviously, with Steele now out until at least April 23 — the move was retroactive to Tuesday, so April 22 would be day No. 15 — the rotation is down a man.

Counsell said there’s a “tentative plan” for how they’ll go about filling in, noting Sunday and Monday on the upcoming West Coast trip as the days they’ll look to make a fifth-starter decision. They’ll monitor how things go pitching-wise over the next couple of games before getting there.

Matthew Boyd and Ben Brown are the probable starters for Friday and Saturday’s games in Los Angeles. The Cubs could skip Steele’s turn and have Jameson Taillon pitch Sunday and Shota Imanaga pitch Monday, though both would then be on a regular four days of rest.

On the other hand, if they wanted to give Taillon and Imanaga that extra day, the Cubs could instead use a spot-starter Sunday.

That could be Colin Rea, who’s currently in the bullpen but is built up enough to provide length. If the Cubs decide to dip into the minors, Jordan Wicks is on the 40-man and is the most logical choice in Triple-A.

They also do have a number of off-days coming up in their schedule. There’s one Thursday before they hit the West Coast. They then have them on April 17, April 21, April 24 and April 28. That means, beyond whichever day they decide to use a fifth starter on the road trip, they have enough off-days coming up where they could roll with a four-man rotation for a while.

Let’s just say they use a spot starter Sunday. Theoretically, they can then use a rotation of Taillon, Imanaga, Boyd and Brown on at least a regular five-day schedule (even in some cases giving them an extra day of rest) without needing to activate Steele or use another starter until May 3.

Counsell does like to give starters the extra day when he can, though, especially this early in the year. So we’ll just wait and see how Counsell tackles this upcoming stretch of the schedule.

“We’re in a position to just keep everybody kind of on good rest,” he said. “I don’t think we need to push anybody right now. I think that’s how we’ll think about it.”

And in any case, Steele being out for anything close to a minimum stint would help clear things up.

“Just take it a day at a time,” he said. “I’ve dealt with a lot of injuries, unfortunately, in my career, and that was kind of something I’ve always defaulted to is just taking it a day at a time.”