Priority No. 1 for Cubs Offseason: Extend Nico Hoerner

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images

Nico Hoerner's maturation as a hitter was one of the best stories of the Cubs' 2025 season. Hoerner, 28, made myriad adjustments in the penultimate season of the contract extension he signed in March 2023. Already an excellent contact hitter, he reduced his punchout rate to 7.6%, the best of his career. He improved at pulling the ball and more consistently squared it up, leading to a surge in his batting average on balls in play. He traded some fly balls, as the season went along, but hit more sharp line drives over the head of the third baseman and fewer balls right into the ground.

While there's always another set of difficult adjustments around the corner for good hitters—especially ones, like Hoerner, who lack power—Hoerner turned a corner in 2025. He was 13 runs better than average at the plate, according to Baseball Reference, a run more than he added in the previous two years, combined. According to DRC+, the holistic offensive value metric at Baseball Prospectus (which evaluates a player's real contribution in a slightly more process-focused way), he was measurably above average (a 105, where 100 is average and higher is better) for the first time in his career. He did all that, of course, while continuing to play stellar defense at second base and run the bases brilliantly.

He made $11.5 million in each of the last two seasons and will make $12 million in 2026, under the terms of the three-year extension on which he and the Cubs agreed in 2023. After that, though, he's due to become a free agent. As essential as he's become to the team, though, they should head into this offseason with the goal of avoiding that eventuality. Given how well 2025 went (for the team, as much as for Hoerner, individually), it's important to lock up the key cogs in the new winning machinery of the franchise.

It's not easy to find good comparable cases to Hoerner. Most players with as much overall value as he offers have skill sets that figure to age better than his will. Most players as good as he is who have this kind of skill set sign earlier, more team-friendly deals, and aren't in line for market-rate new deals as they head into their 30s. Two players stand out as reasonable comps for Hoerner, based on what he does well and where he is in his career as he seeks his next deal: José Ramírez and Jose Altuve.

Those are big names, and their games (at their peak, at least; Altuve is now well past that) are more complete than Hoerner's. Each has a good chance to be a future Hall of Famer; Hoerner would need to turn the level he just established into his norm for most of a decade to get into the same discussion. Altuve has an MVP award; Ramírez is a perennial top-five finisher for the award. Hoerner has yet to so much as make an All-Star Game. Thus, we'll want to study the deals each of them signed, but there'll still be some work left to do to equate them with Hoerner.

Altuve signed a five-year deal with the Astros last February, worth $125 million. That deal began this season, just before Altuve turned 35 years old. He's still a good and well-rounded player, but he's much more limited than he was at his best. His speed has faded, and so has his power. The Astros are trying to permanently move him to left field, because he's no longer a viable everyday second baseman. It's a bit of a legacy move, acknowledging the vital roles Altuve played in two World Series championships for Houston, but he's also a good player, even now.

Ramírez still had two years of team control remaining when he signed an extension with Cleveland in April 2022. It included $116 million in new money over five extra years of control—the first of which was 2024, when he was 31. He hasn't substantially declined at all yet, and made his fifth straight All-Star team in 2025. That deal, like Altuve's, reflects some degree of shared sentiment between player and team. Whereas Altuve's probably overvalues him in the name of honoring a franchise icon, though, Ramírez's comes closer to undervaluing him. It was the only way he was going to be able to stay with the Guardians for the long haul.

Hoerner's extension, should he sign one, will begin in 2027. That's his age-30 season. He's notably younger than both Ramírez and (especially) Altuve, but his skill set—with its heavy reliance on speed, defense and contact—isn't likely to age as well as theirs. Nor is he capable of the same high-end outcomes as those two. All of that virtually washes out. Here's a deal that could work for both sides.

• Signing bonus: $3 million
• 2027: $18 million
• 2028: $18 million
• 2029: $20 million
• 2030: $20 million
• 2031: $20 million
• 2032: $21 million club option, with a $6-million buyout

That would be a five-year, $105-million deal, with the chance to be worth $120 million over six seasons. It would keep Hoerner in a Cubs uniform through (at least) his age-34 season, but the Cubs' costs would also stay under control. A year ago, this would have been far too rich a deal to consider offering to a power-shy player already locked up until the end of his 20s. The success of both Hoerner and the team, though, has changed the calculus. It's time to lock one of the club's stars into place, to make it easier to plan their path forward as a contender in the National League.

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