Cubs Finally Reach Literally David Bote Levels of Roster Desperation

[Matthew Trueblood]

For a year or so, now, it has been clear that the Chicago Cubs badly wanted to avoid bringing David Bote back to their big-league roster. After a woeful May in which they exhausted other options, though, Bote is once again shedding the 'Iowa' script above his uniform's Cubs logo.

Image courtesy of © Allan Henry-USA TODAY Sports

Nick Madrigal heads back to Iowa in exchange for Bote, with Adbert Alzolay hitting the 60-day injured list to accommodate the reinstatement of Bote to the 40-man roster. It's a move that signals, in no small measure, a defeat for the Cubs front office, because they fought hard to make one of Madrigal, Miles Mastrobuoni, Matt Mervis, Alexander Canario, or Garrett Cooper stick to that roster spot, instead. Nothing worked, and now they're going back to Bote, which they desperately did not want to do.

Presumably, Bote will become the de facto backup third baseman and second baseman, taking Madrigal's place in that role and keeping Patrick Wisdom's just about the same as it was. He's not the defender Madrigal is, but Bote has a chance to have some kind of positive offensive impact, and he won't embarrass himself when asked to man the hot corner or the keystone. If Madrigal were a successful version of his own profile, he'd be a better bench player than Bote. Ditto for Mastrobuoni. After months of failures from each, though, the Cubs have finally buckled and turned to an old friend to rescue them from the unrealized potential of his two younger teammates.

You can make a case for the way the Cubs have handled Bote since outrighting him off the 40-man roster in November 2022. Once they did that, bringing him back came with risks. Gone is the luxury-tax loophole that kept Red Sox outfielder Rusney Castillo stranded in Triple-A for years after he busted as a big-leaguer, but even without that incentive to keep Bote stashed, the team had to think about what would happen if and when they did recall him.

Firstly, barring a 60-day injured list placement, bringing Bote back had to mean losing another player, or passing up the opportunity to acquire one. That's a hurdle to bringing up any player who isn't on the 40-man roster, but it's a smaller one for teams when the player in question is a top prospect (or any young player) whom they hope will be part of the team for another half-decade or more. It's a trickier thing when it's someone like Bote, on the wrong side of 30 and with little time left on his contract.

Perhaps more importantly, the team also knows they could lose Bote altogether if they bring him back and then need to outright him again--hardly a difficult scenario to imagine, given the way his last couple of seasons in the big leagues panned out. One thing front offices desperately try to avoid is having a player who couldn't succeed for them thrive elsewhere, on their dime. Bote is guaranteed $5.5 million this year, and that was one reason why he didn't get a call last season, even as he hit fairly well and the team went through a similar churn of options to round out their infield mix. This season, since this is the last year of the deal and we're already in June, it's less of a concern. That helped him finally get the call.

Furthermore, though, they clearly just did not believe in Bote, and after his last couple years of big-league performance, that's understandable. Yet, he did hit .259/.356/.476 since the start of 2023, with a very playable strikeout rate and a great walk rate. In addition to concerns about the gap in talent and opponent quality between Triple-A and the majors, we might note the specific issue of the technology-driven, minuscule Triple-A strike zone, which would tend to juice the numbers for a player like Bote--especially with regard to those walks. His swing was always a grooved one, too, which meant that a smaller zone made it easier for him to cover everything a pitcher could really throw at him.

He didn't post elite batted-ball data, especially for a player of his age and previous experience. He still hits a good number of pop-ups and ground balls. He does hit it fairly hard, though, and at this point, the combination of his ability to do that and his defensive versatility made it impossible to justify continuing to try to make Madrigal work instead of him.

Whether Bote can recapture the magic he had in 2018 remains to be seen, but it certainly seems unlikely. Happily, this time around, he's a purely complementary piece, and he's spent the last year-plus in Iowa, becoming a better leader and getting comfortable with his non-priority place in the organizational hierarchy. He's as well-positioned to succeed now as ever, even if success will be defined in a smaller way than in the past.

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