Cubs' Bullpen Convalescence is a Huge Trade Deadline Opportunity

[Matthew Trueblood]

If their best relievers had stayed healthier throughout this season, the Cubs might be in position to act as buyers at the upcoming MLB trade deadline. That dream is long dead, but the way they're getting healthy just days before the deadline could still be a boon to the team's ongoing rebuild.

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For a while there, Craig Counsell was trying to hold together a bullpen on a team aimed at contention without the services of any of the four best pitchers in that bullpen, as of a year ago: Julian Merryweather, Adbert Alzolay, Mark Leiter Jr., and Drew Smyly. The team had to make do, for long stretches, without at least two or three of those four, plus lesser contributors for whom hopes had been high, like Daniel Palencia. Injuries to the starting rotation, too, weakened the pen, pulling pitchers like Javier Assad, Ben Brown, and Hayden Wesneski away from potential roles as key relievers.

Not all of those problems have been resolved, and sadly, they've become irrelevant. The 2024 Cubs aren't good enough to win anything worthwhile, and even a fully healthy and overachieving bullpen the rest of the way wouldn't change that. There's very good news, though, and here it is: the return of Merryweather, a couple of encouraging outings from Leiter, the expected rebound from Héctor Neris and the sustained excellence of Tyson Miller has created an opportunity for the team to get a bit aggressive at this trade deadline, even if they lack the self-awareness or risk appetite to trade players slotted into larger roles for multiple seasons.

First, let's establish the key premise here: Almost no relief pitcher has any value beyond the season in which they're having success. This is why, even when the season looked salvageable, the Cubs would have been foolish to trade the haul of talent Oakland will demand if they move Mason Miller this summer. It's also why the team happily traded Scott Effross for Wesneski two years ago. Service time is only a remote, secondary consideration for relievers, whose overall value has a low ceiling and who can experience huge variance from year to year in that value, even if they stay healthy--which is far from a sure thing, of course.

Therefore, it doesn't make any sense for the Cubs to hold onto Neris, Smyly, Merryweather, Leiter, or Miller. It's impractical and out of the question for all five of them to be traded in the next week, but the team should shop them all, and trade as many of them as have any trade value. It will be ancillary pieces. It might amount to nothing. Then again, they've gotten Wesneski, Brown, and Palencia in the last three years by being willing to trade lots of relievers when they were of no real use to them. It's possible none of those three are ever meaningful contributors to a good Cubs team, because of Wesneski's insufficient stuff, Palencia's insufficient control, and Brown's dubious health, but it's still possible one of them is a long-term helper. Brown, especially, has had a tantalizing 2024.

Ultimately, the Cubs won't escape their cycle of mediocrity until they make bigger changes, but the positive trends in their bullpen make it possible that they could add some valuable pieces to their organization even if they don't yet have the guts to do so--or if Tom Ricketts doesn't want Jed Hoyer to be the one to clean up the mess he's made. Trading any or all of these relievers is the kind of work Hoyer has proved very trustworthy on, and there's little to gain by holding onto them. This is an opportunity the team should seize with both hands.

 

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