Cubs Sign Hurler Jordan Goldmann Out of Tread Athletic Pro Day

[Matthew Trueblood]

After the Cubs hired Tread Athletic's Tyler Zombro as a pitching guru early this offseason, you had to figure they would take special interest in some of the clients of that development facility this winter. Tread is a competitor to Driveline, more or less—a place pitchers can go to revive and reinvent their careers, and Zombro played a prominent role in that endeavor before joining the Cubs front office.

Sure enough, after Tread held a public Pro Day to showcase some of their pro-caliber clients, the Cubs were one of the first teams to snap up a promising arm.

This kind of deal will absolutely be a minor-league one, and probably not even with an initial invite to big-league spring training. Goldmann's progress and the arsenal described above are awfully impressive, though, so he'll be a project worth monitoring as he tries to find a foothold in pro ball with the Cubs in 2025. Zombro was hired for the expertise he can directly provide, but if the organization also becomes a bit more appealing to some Tread alumni in the short term, so much the better.

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[imb]

your move, dodgers

[Bertz]

The Zombro/Tread stuff is a really interesting sub-plot to this offseason.  Because he is so public-facing, there is real opportunity to tie his fingerprints back to specific transactions. 

For instance, Greg Z was able to tie back the Cody Poteet acquisition to a video Zombro posted shortly after:

https://baseballtribune.substack.com/p/cody-poteet-a-gold-mine

There's enough digital ink spilled from Zombro that when Ben Brown adds a new changeup or whatever we're going to know exactly how to assign that credit.  It'll be interesting to look back a year from now.