Article: Are the Cubs Just Going to Let Talent Melt Off Their Roster This Spring?

[Matthew Trueblood]

On Wednesday, pitchers and catchers officially report for spring training. The Cubs' roster is incomplete; we know that much. What we don't know is how they'll address the places in which that roster is bloated, rather than emaciated.

Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

The Cubs are short on middle-of-the-order bats. The only credible, relatively certain one they have right now is Seiya Suzuki, and even that statement hinges on one buying heavily into two very good months at the plate to close 2023. They're arguably one dominant relief arm and one front-of-the-rotation starter short, too.

Yet, they have a superabundance of flawed corner infielders. They have a plethora of strong fifth starter types. They're awash in usable but not quite can't-miss outfielders. That doesn't make them unique, in MLB, but they're better off in these ways than most other teams in the league. While the team tries to win its protracted standoff with Cody Bellinger (by way of Scott Boras), Mike Tauchman, Alexander Canario, and Pete Crow-Armstrong wait in limbo. If the team did sign Bellinger, they might not jettison even Canario from the roster in the process, but then the squeeze would be on for one of Matt Mervis, Patrick Wisdom, and Nick Madrigal. 

It's less clear just how interested the Cubs are in the two marquee starting pitchers still available in free agency, Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery. I did, however, make the case for each of them being a good fit on Thursday. If the Cubs signed either, what would become of their mélange of relatively exciting back-end starter options? At present, the projected rotation consists of Justin Steele, Shota Imanaga, Kyle Hendricks, and Jameson Taillon, with a real humdinger of a battle brewing between Drew Smyly, Hayden Wesneski, Javier Assad, Jordan Wicks, Ben Brown, and Cade Horton for the final slot. Add one of these star slingers instead, and all of the lesser lights are stuck waiting for injuries and working either in relief or in Iowa.

Canario. Tauchman. Mervis. Wisdom. Madrigal. Smyly, Wesneski, Assad, Brown. Christopher Morel isn't even fully immune to the forces we're pondering here. At some point, the Cubs are going to add to this roster. If it's only Bellinger whom they add, that will still foreclose the likely paths to robust opportunity for a couple of players. If it's Bellinger and more, a handful of guys end up blcoked, redundant, or too expensive. Perhaps part of Jed Hoyer's desire to wait out the key free agents (and any potential trade partners) is a desire to make sure he knows what he's doing with his surpluses once he addresses his deficits.

This is an important question, because managing the edges of the 40-man roster (and especially giving young players the runway requisite to show what they can do, or not do) has not been a strength of Hoyer's regime. Talent, like any treat you can think of left out in the sun, melts. As you reshape and upgrade your roster each year, some of the existing talent loses its structural integrity and reshapes itself simultaneously. Good player development can slow down that process, until you can get the talent more firmly sculpted and back in a secure place again, but that's not a foolproof endeavor. Sometimes, an executive has to help that maintenance process by trading away talented players before they lose both their on-field and their trade value, and end up leaving the organization in messy or merely unhelpful ways.

Proactivity has been in too-short supply for most of Hoyer's time at the head of baseball operations. He broke out of that at the 2021 trade deadline, which might go down as one of the more important moments in team history, but it shouldn't have gotten that far. He broke out of it for one isolated move, when the team acquired Michael Busch from the Dodgers last month. In order to sustain better efficiency and win the little battles at the margins that underpin his approach, though, Hoyer needs to take a few more risks, and that includes making the odd swap that strains one part of the roster, because it eases a glut or a logjam at another node. 

Sometime between now and Opening Day (and ideally, between now and Wednesday), Hoyer needs to get proactive. There are slightly risky, slightly awkward, ultimately helpful moves out there to be made. It's time for the Cubs to start making them again, before they leak value by getting virtually nothing in return for some talented players they never got a chance to properly evaluate.

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What creative low-level moves would you like to see the Cubs make this spring? How can they best handle some of the looming roster crunch, if and when they spend appropriately to improve the team? Let's discuss that in the comment section.

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[Bertz]

To me I'm not worried about any pitching.  Even if Jed pulls a last minute Snell/Montgomery, the age and injury history of the rotation means that if anyone deserves innings, they'll get innings.  Maybe they come a few weeks later than we'd want but they're going to get their chances.

Offensively there are two guys I am a bit worried about: Canario and to a lesser extent Wisdom. 

I brought up Canario in the mega thread a few days ago, but the tl;dr is that it's pretty hard to see him actually getting significant playing time short of a rash of injuries.  Right now he'd be the 4th or 5th outfielder in the pecking order and behind Morel/Wisdom at DH.  After the team adds another bat, that guy will either directly or indirectly knock him back a spot.  Not only that, PCA and Caissie are not very far behind him on the development curve.  I would expect something akin to Mastrobuoni's playing time last year.  That would be fine except we're on his last option year.  If we get to November and he's got ~250 MLB plate appearances and no minor league options, he's going to have to get sold off for pennies on the dollar.  Especially since Canario seems relatively valuable at the moment this feels like more of a problem than typical back of the roster churn.

Wisdom’s less of a prospect so it matters less, but I don't love how much overlap there is between him and Morel.  And if we add Chapman he's suddenly completely redundant.  Although the one thing about Wisdom is that if we are in the beginnings of a sinker/splitter Renaissance he will start getting far more advantageous matchup opportunities than he's gotten the previous two years.  Maybe having Chapman, Morel, and Wisdom all in the same lineup a lot of days wouldn't be as unthinkable as it would have been last year.