NEWS: Cubs Extend Colin Rea, Will Retain Key Depth Arm for 2026

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images

The Cubs and Colin Rea agreed to a one-year deal for 2026 with a club option for 2027 Thursday, a source confirmed to North Side Baseball. Steve Adams of MLB Trade Rumors was first to break the news. Rea, 35, will make at least $6.5 million in total, and can make up to $13 million if the Cubs exercise their option next winter.

The pact comes just hours before the decision point on the team's would-be 2026 option. included in the contract Rea signed last winter. That deal would have paid him $6 million this year, and the alternative would have been paying a $750,000 buyout. The Cubs ponied up an extra $500,000 to guarantee themselves a chance to bring Rea back on affordable terms in 2027, if they so choose.

For Rea, this deal offers shelter from a market that projects to be frigid. As has become their custom, the league's owners have tightened their purse strings as negotiations over the next collective bargaining agreement loom. One source indicated that the Cubs considered declining the option on Rea, and pressed for the extra year of team control in exchange for picking it up. At the same time, this structure benefits the Cubs. With the buyout on next winter's option expected to be slightly larger than the one they just circumvented, they'll pay fractionally less for Rea in 2026 than they otherwise would have, and they gain the flexibility that comes with that 2027 option.

Bringing Rea back in some form became something close to a no-brainer, though, once Shota Imanaga declined his team option for 2026. In fact, though they didn't have equal terms on which to make the decision, this sequence of moves suggests the front office has more faith in Rea for next year than they have in Imanaga.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the decision to decline Imanaga's three-year team option (and the fact that the team might yet decline to give Imanaga a qualifying offer) at Baseball Prospectus, through the lens of the new pitcher arsenal metrics on that site. Imanaga took an important step backward last year in his ability to get the ball down, and especially to bury his splitter; that became an increasingly lethal problem as the year wore on. Other pitchers might weather such a change better, but Imanaga's limited arsenal and difficulty with deceiving or surprising hitters made it hard for him to do so.

By contrast, Rea has worse raw stuff than Imanaga—more velocity, but from the right side instead of the left, and with less lively movement; no single secondary pitch with the swing-and-miss potential of Imanaga's splitter—but an exceptionally deep arsenal and a good idea of how to use it to maximum effect.

Hitters can accurately identify the pitch type early against Imanaga almost 82 percent of the time. That's both because he relies so heavily on his four-seamer and splitter, and because those two pitches have such disparate movement. Right away, the trajectory, spin and velocity of the offerings lets the hitter spot differences. 

Rea couldn't be more different. Hitters can accurately identify which pitch he's throwing just 55.5 percent of the time, which places him in the top decile of the league in disguising pitch type. Because he has so many offerings he trusts—four-seamer, sinker, cutter, curveball, slider, sweeper and changeup, the last of which he switched from a splitter to a kick-change this year—he can also use sequencing to surprise hitters better than most pitchers, and the breadth of movement and velocity bands within which he can work is huge. As he and I discussed in July, he made changes under the Cubs' guidance this year, moving the four-seamer to a place of greater primacy within his mix, but he still made great use of all his offerings.

Fascinatingly, his move from the third-base side of the rubber to the first-base side made each of his pitches work better with his four-seamer, and the concomitant switch from being sinker-heavy to letting the four-seamer lead thus led his stuff to play up nicely. Here are the stuff ratings (StuffPro, where 0 is average and negative is better; it's expressed in runs against average per 100 pitches thrown), the pitch type detectabilities (the percentage of the time the hitter was estimated to accurately identify the pitch) and the best tunnel pair for each of Rea's offerings, for 2024 and 2025.

Pitch Type	2024 SutffPro	2024 Pitch Type Prob.	2024 Tunnel Pair	2025 StuffPro	2025 Pitch Type Prob.	2025 Tunnel Pair
Four-Seamer	0.9	35.8	Sinker	0.6	69.4	Kick-Change
Sinker	0.1	63.2	Four-Seamer	-0.1	45.2	Four-Seamer
Cutter	0.3	42.8	Sweeper	0.2	55.8	Four-Seamer
Slider	-	-	-	-0.4	28.4	Four-Seamer
Sweeper	0	50.8	Cutter	-0.8	55.8	Slider
Curveball	0.1	49.4	Sweeper	-0.1	73.4	Kick-Change
Splitter	0.7	27.8	Sinker	-	-	-
Kick-Change	-	-	-	-0.3	47.9	Four-Seamer

It was actually a bit easier to identify Rea's pitches in 2025, on balance, because of his move on the rubber and the fact that he threw his four-seamer more than he had thrown even his more prominent sinker in 2024. However, the StuffPro columns show how impressively his stuff played up thanks to alterations to his angles and his mechanics. His mix also widened, with the addition of the slider, and as you can see in the tunnel pair columns, four of Rea's other six pitches looked like his fastball at least a substantial share of the time for hitters last year. On almost every pitch he threw, hitters read four-seam fastball, but they were wrong often enough to produce a fair number of whiffs and plenty of weak contact.

The drawback with Rea, as we discussed late in the 2025 season, is that he runs out of steam a bit near the end of most campaigns. On balance, though, he's a very useful arm. The Cubs will work hard to ensure he's not counted on for as many innings in 2026 as he was in 2025, but he's proved himself to be an average-plus big-league arm. Unlike Imanaga, he has ways to make up for it when his stuff or even his location is less than perfect; his arsenal depth and pitchability fill in the gaps.

For now, Rea can be penciled in as the Cubs' fourth starter, behind Cade Horton, Matthew Boyd, and Jameson Taillon. By the middle of next season, the team will hope to have Justin Steele back from his April Tommy John surgery and be nearly ready to promote starting prospect Jaxon Wiggins. They also have Javier Assad, Jordan Wicks and Ben Brown as depth options who could start or relieve for them. A long winter lies ahead, and one or more of those younger players might be traded before Opening Day. Injuries have to be taken into account, too. The Cubs will aim to add a high-profile arm to the front end of their rotation, pushing Rea down the depth chart, but in the meantime, they acted to secure some high-quality depth for the back end of their rotation and the long relief segment of their bullpen.

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