With Shelves Clearing and Camp Opening, Cubs' Options Come Into Focus—and Risks Grow

[Matthew Trueblood]

On Wednesday, the remainder of MLB's 30 sets of pitchers and catchers officially report to camp, creating open roster spots galore. That's prompted a busy Tuesday league-wide, and the Cubs' position on the chess board is sharpening in a hurry.

Image courtesy of © Rick Scuteri-Imagn Images

In a flurry of moves throughout the league, several possible fits for minor roles with the Cubs—could-be backup center fielder Michael A. Taylor, could-be platoon first baseman Ty France, could-be relief reinforcement Kenley Jansen—agreed to deals Tuesday to join other clubs. Chicago has already opened their spring training camp, but the rest of baseball does so Wednesday, meaning that players poised to miss long stretches to begin the season due to injuries can be placed on the 60-day injured list. That could open anywhere from 25 to 35 spots on 40-man rosters throughout the league, which makes Tuesday an opportune time to strike deals like these.

For the Cubs, that means that some of the wide array of threads they've woven into a web of possibility over the last several weeks are about to be snipped in rapid succession. As a result, sources indicate that the team is pressing for an answer from Alex Bregman on the multi-year offer they've already made to him, within the next several days. President of baseball operations Jed Hoyer and company consider Bregman a top priority, if he can be had on terms that suit their needs and preferences, but they want to either get that deal done and move on to the necessary subsequent moves or gain clarity on where they can pivot.

One way or another, the team almost certainly isn't done, but signing Bregman is far from assured. At this point, the kind of deal Bregman and Scott Boras continue to prefer not only hasn't materialized, but is radically unlikely to.

Unlike in 2018, the Cubs aren't willing to go to six years at the last moment, as they did to snare Yu Darvish at the end of a long and ice-cold free-agent market. Bregman will have to get his long-term deal elsewhere, if at all. In practice, though, that deal probably isn't out there, and the Cubs have reached the point of being willing to bet that Bregman will be aware of the constraints on his market at this point and take their deal, which could stretch to four years but definitely comes with a higher annual average value than any six-year offer he'll find.

If Bregman and Boras elect not to go forward with them, the Cubs want time to turn their attention to free agents like Justin Turner, David Robertson, or Kyle Finnegan, the last of whom is experiencing a market slump that might bring him back into play. With or without Bregman, they might explore a trade of Nico Hoerner or a pursuit of Padres starter Dylan Cease, whom sources with other teams still expected San Diego to trade before Opening Day. How any of that would unfold, though, depends on Bregman's answer, and as Tuesday's moves attest, there's not much time left for the Cubs to wait on it. They need to make sure they can still get other things done, if that becomes urgent and necessary.

Waiting out markets has worked well for the Cubs in recent offseasons. They made big moves early this winter, most notably by signing Matthew Boyd and Carson Kelly and trading for Kyle Tucker, but also with supplemental moves to shore up their pitching depth. As a result, they've been able to wait and see whether a Cody Bellinger-style deal with Bregman was possible, and it does now seem so. The time for that patience is ending, though, and the team now has to be ready to move quickly. They could go into the season with the roster they have as on-paper NL Central favorites, but their cushion there is thin (and perhaps confined to that metaphorical paper) and they remain far behind the best teams in the league. They'd like to widen the local gap and narrow the national one, and that means making at least one more helpful move. Whether that move is small (but a perfect fit) or big (but potentially unwieldy) remains to be seen, but one way or another, it's coming over the horizon.

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[Bertz]

3 hours ago, Matthew Trueblood said:

With or without Bregman, they might explore a trade of Nico Hoerner