To Understand Why Eli Morgan and Matt Thaiss Are Vital Additions to Cubs, Look to the Venezuelan Winter League

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Cubs made two more additions to the edges of their big-league roster Wednesday, as part of a week of enforced roster churn. The moves seem small, but when you widen the lens, their place in the grand scheme of team-building becomes much more clear.

Image courtesy of © David Richard-Imagn Images

At first blush, it's easy to wonder why the Cubs would want former Guardians righthander Eli Morgan badly enough to trade a raw but toolsy outfield prospect for him, and losing another righty reliever (Trey Wingenter) in the process. Morgan (since the start of 2023, minors and majors together, 126 innings, a 23.3% strikeout rate, an 8.0% walk rate and a 3.14 ERA) is better than Wingenter (95 innings, 31.1% strikeouts, 11.3% walks, 5.00 ERA), but is it really by enough to justify giving up Alfonsin Rosario?

Likewise, in the sequence of moves they made Wednesday, the Cubs paid cash to the Angels (likely a nominal fee only slightly higher than the $50,000 waiver fee paid when a team claims a player) to acquire the previously DFAd Matt Thaiss, but had to designate Patrick Wisdom for assignment to make room on the roster. (Wisdom's departure was actually, technically in conjunction with the Morgan move, and Wingenter with the Thaiss one, but it will help us think through this more clearly to match pitcher to pitcher and hitter to hitter.) In a vacuum, Wisdom is probably a better player than Thaiss. He's been one of the Cubs' few relatively consistent sources of power over the last four years, especially from the right side of the plate. He can, believe it or not, still be optioned to the minors, and Thaiss can't. So, what gives?

To understand these moves, it's important to keep your eyes on the prize. Eventually, the Cubs' goal is to get back to consistent winning. In fact, it's their goal to become a team that wins every year for a decade or more, for the first time in over a century. To do so, they obviously need help at the top of their roster, and these moves do virtually nothing to provide it. At most, they give the team about $1.5 million in new money to reallocate (the difference between the projected arbitration salaries of Wisdom and Wingenter and those of Morgan and Thaiss, less a loose estimate of the amount paid to the Angels in this process) and replace two players at the bottom end of the roster with two new ones.

But.

The baseball season is long. The calendar is well and truly stuffed, and it now stretches from mid-February through the beginning of November. That's underselling it, too, because for many players, the season doesn't end when the season ends. Take top Cubs catching prospect Moises Ballesteros, whom the team sent to the Arizona Fall League and who performed so admirably there that his already-high stock continues to rise. Ballesteros played 124 regular-season games, then 19 more in the AFL. His official total for plate appearances on the season was over 600, while primarily playing catcher, all at age 20. That doesn't include his spring training action (four games on the big-league side, several more than that on the minor-league side), All-Star appearances (he was selected to the Futures Game in Texas, and took part in the skills showcase there, too), or winter ball—yes, winter ball, which Ballesteros said he wanted to do near the end of the AFL slate. Ballesteros is a native of Venezuela, of course, and it's very common for players to want to go home and play in their country's primary league during the MLB offseason.

The Cubs reportedly refused to give permission for Ballesteros to play for the Leones de Caracas last week, forcing him to rest and to have a few months' worth of offseason. That's the only responsible course of action they could have taken. He only turned 21 on Nov. 8. The workload he's already borne this year is hefty. Anything more would have been dangerous. Slowly, though, teams are likely to lose their ability to stop players from playing winter ball, at least without hurt feelings and fights. Ronald Acuna Jr. famously takes enormous pride in playing in the Venezuelan Winter League, where he had 48 plate appearances in 2022 and 104 in 2023. Acuna also always wants to be in the lineup for the Atlanta Braves, but twice in the last four years, he's torn his ACL. As games pile up, injury risk increases.

This is not a baseball-only problem, by a long shot. There are, increasingly, huge demands falling on top players in all sports to keep playing, close to year-round. The NFL's schedule seems hilariously overlong at 17 games, with the four-round playoffs after that, but the league is already itching to expand to 18 contests. In soccer, the problem is perhaps even worse. In one calendar year, starting last fall and ending late this summer, Manchester City and Spain midfielder Rodri played 63 matches, and his offseason ended up lasting about three weeks. He fumed about it in the press in September, as fans and analysts questioned the latest round of expansion in the UEFA Champions League and the looming Club World Cup, which will further burden top teams with extra games. Then, early in the English Premier League season, Rodri tore his own ACL. He'll miss the rest of the season.

As Rodri's and Acuna's cases exemplify, players are often aware of the risks associated with heavy use, and they harbor some resentment of them. Yet, they'll keep playing as long as their teams will have them, both because that's how one becomes unimaginably rich and because some of the games that are theoretically optional (winter ball for baseball players; international competition for soccer players) don't seem so to them. Acuna wants just as badly to thrive in the LVBP as in MLB, though he knows which of the two pays him a salary that will guarantee his grandchildren grow up spoiled, and therefore accedes at times when the team asks him not to overdo it. Ballesteros doesn't yet have the kind of power Acuna does, and when the Cubs didn't grant permission to play this winter, he was stuck. The very fact that the team turned him down is a reminder of how long his season already was, though. You can mentally add just a little bit of expected injury risk to Ballesteros heading into 2025, given his age, the mileage he just put on, and the position he plays.

The Cubs weren't as stringent with two pitchers on their 40-man roster, Michael Arias and Daniel Palencia. Arias was a halfway-surprising addition to the roster to shelter him from the Rule 5 Draft last year, and he didn't have a strong 2024, so he's trying to make up some lost ground as his roster spot hangs in the balance. Palencia, by contrast, finished very strong this year. Yet, he, too, is pitching winter ball. Arias is in the Dominican Republic; Palencia is in Venezuela.

Because Palencia was shelved twice with a scratchy shoulder this season, it makes sense that he and the team want to make up a few innings' worth of the missed time. However, in a highly optimistic projection of the Cubs' bullpen next season, Palencia would feature very prominently. You don't really want a player you might thus depend on down in winter ball, spending bullets—especially a guy who throws 100-plus miles per hour. It slightly increases the chances that Palencia has more arm trouble in 2025.

This is where Thaiss and Morgan figure in so pivotally. Before Wednesday, the Cubs simply didn't have a viable backup catcher in their organization. Now they do. This will allow them to have Ballesteros start slow and catch less often in spring training, saving some of his energy and shielding his health for what they hope will be a second-half debut. That Thaiss, like Ballesteros, bats left-handed gives him matchup value and lets Craig Counsell seek small advantages. That's what the team brought him in for.

It's valuable to rest other people, too, and in theory, Wisdom could have been part of that plan. In practice, though, that proved to be a role to which he was ill-suited. He needs regular at-bats to find his rhythm and produce according to his talent, and that's fine, but his talent isn't sufficient for the Cubs to try to carve out a regular role for him again. Wisdom must go somewhere in need of a slugger and without the slowly rising expectations the Cubs face. He couldn't help them manage the workloads of their infielders anymore, and once the team added Ben Cowles to the 40-man roster on Tuesday, they knew they would have a zero-friction option for the tail end of the bench if needed. Thaiss protects Ballesteros and answers a key roster question in a way Wisdom didn't.

The same is somewhat true of Morgan. If Palencia ends up injured again early in 2025, or if the team needs to be proactive with him and keep him in the minors early to manage his workload, Morgan is a more credible stand-in for that job (albeit with radically different stuff effecting a different shape of value) than Wingenter would have been. He's more consistent, more durable, and he can be sent to the minor leagues. That means that, if and when Palencia is ready, the team need not sweat sending out Morgan, whereas keeping Wingenter to do the same placeholding would have meant losing a player altogether when bringing up Palencia.

Matt Shaw is in Asia right now, playing in the Premier 12 tournament for Team USA. In 2026, there will be another World Baseball Classic. All these offseason attractions and opportunities are wonderful for the sport, but they put pressure on teams to amass more depth than they would otherwise need, and they sometimes put players in a tough spot. Checking off a positional area of need, even if it be in underwhelming and impermanent fashion, is one way to extract value in small, early winter moves. So is upgrading the relief corps while simultaneously getting more nimble, roster-wise.

It all sounds silly, because baseball isn't as taxing on any given day as soccer, football, or basketball, but then, baseball plays so much more often. In the early years of the new playoff format, we have seen series after series become a war of attrition, with two teams who cleared 90 wins during the regular season suddenly casting about for parts and pieces because of injuries or fatigue-driven underperformance. Any team aspiring to win in the long run has to be cognizant of that looming risk, and ready to meet it. The Cubs' moves Wednesday made them incrementally more so. 

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