Jameson Taillon’s Cubs DFA makes his Pirates criticism painfully ironic

Jameson Taillon has never exactly been eager to give the Pittsburgh Pirates credit for the best stretch of his major league career. That makes the timing of his latest career setback impossible to ignore.

The Chicago Cubs designated Taillon for assignment Monday, one day after the veteran right-hander was hammered for seven runs in four innings against Pittsburgh. The Pirates hit three home runs off their former starter, pushing Taillon’s season total to a league-high 25 allowed in just 76 innings.

Taillon leaves Chicago with a 2-6 record and 5.92 ERA this season, a disappointing ending to the four-year, $68 million contract he signed before the 2023 campaign. There's an obvious layer of irony considering how publicly Taillon has criticized the Pirates’ player-development operation since leaving Pittsburgh in 2021.

Jameson Taillon's public criticism of Pirates resurfaces after Cubs DFA

In 2024, Taillon wrote on social media that a significant part of his success with the Pirates came because he sought outside help for weight-room programming, analytics and scouting reports rather than simply following the organization’s instructions. He and former Pirates catcher Erik Kratz also mocked Pittsburgh’s pitching development on an episode of “Foul Territory” that year.

Some of that criticism was probably deserved. The Pirates of that era hardly established themselves as the industry standard for maximizing pitching talent, and several pitchers improved after leaving Pittsburgh. But Taillon’s own career makes the idea that the Pirates were merely holding him back a little more complicated.

In 82 starts for Pittsburgh, Taillon posted a 3.67 ERA and 112 ERA+. He was traded in 2021 to the New York Yankees, where those numbers slipped to a 4.08 ERA and exactly league-average 100 ERA+ across 61 starts. His Cubs tenure has been even worse: a 4.84 ERA and 93 ERA+ over 29 starts.

That doesn't mean Pittsburgh deserves all the credit for what Taillon accomplished as a Pirate. He clearly took ownership of his career, sought additional information and found methods that helped him succeed. It does, however, make the dismissiveness toward his Pirates years look a little different in hindsight.

Taillon was a very good pitcher in Pittsburgh. He has never consistently reached that same level anywhere else. And now, after a season in which hitters battered his fastball to a .329 average and home runs became an overwhelming problem, his Cubs tenure has ended immediately after the Pirates contributed one final ugly line to his résumé.

There's no need for Pittsburgh to take a victory lap over Taillon’s DFA. His broader criticisms of the organization’s old development infrastructure shouldn't simply be discarded because he struggled elsewhere. But the ending is undeniably ironic.

For all the effort Taillon has made to separate his success from the Pirates, the best sustained pitching of his major league career still happened while he was wearing their uniform. And in one final, cruel twist of fate, the team that drafted Taillon second overall in 2010 helped bring his Cubs tenure to an end.

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