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After non-tendering Mike Tauchman, Patrick Wisdom, and Nick Madrigal and trading Cody Bellinger and Isaac Paredes, the Cubs were left with a highly fluid bench—which is a nice way of saying that it was a bit of a mess. In one fell swoop Sunday, the team jettisoned a player who was overdue for an exit from their 40-man roster and acquired one who gives them a bit more positional clarity.
By no means is Vidal Bruján a panacea for the Cubs bench. He's an out-of-options spare part who posted a .622 OPS in 2024 and doesn't hit the ball especially hard or run especially well. However, he brings a modicum of plate discipline and a wealth of positional versatility. He can play either middle infield position, third base, or anywhere in the outfield, which gives the team security they were missing in the event of injuries to Dansby Swanson or Pete Crow-Armstrong and a switch-hitting complement to Nico Hoerner and Matt Shaw.
It's unlikely that both Bruján and Rule 5 draftee Gage Workman will make the roster. It's not even clear how Bruján and Miles Mastrobuoni would fit without being redundant. This is a small-scale move, then, and might come to virtually nothing at all. Since Matt Mervis was already an unneeded piece, though, the move incrementally improves the team's menu of options as they look toward spring training. Bruján's upside is still somewhat better than those of Mastrobuoni or Luis Vázquez, and he's much more likely to pan out as a usable backup infielder than are Vázquez or Workman. His experience in the outfield is especially important.
As currently constructed, the Cubs would need to turn to Kevin Alcántara in the even of any meaningful injury to Crow-Armstrong. That overlooks Alexander Canario, but while the righty slugger does have plenty of experience in center field, he's not going to work there as more than an emergency stopgap in the big leagues. Bruján would give the team a better short-term option if Crow-Armstrong were to get banged up and need a few days off, though they'd still call up Alcántara if he ever needed a few weeks instead.
Bruján swings a lot, but he makes pretty good swing decisions—that is, he swings a ton within the zone, but doesn't chase all that much. That suggests that he has offensive upside into which the Marlins were unable to help him tap, which is no surprise: that team might be the worst in baseball at developing hitters. He's not likely to blossom into a regular, but he does have the potential to get on base at a better clip than Mastrobuoni or Vázquez, because he makes contact more often.
The Cubs must aim higher than this for any but the last position-player spot on their roster, but Mervis had no role to play at all in their future, so this is just a better way to spend a 40-man roster spot and a roll of the dice on a multi-talented player who might have suffered from the Marlins' woeful player development over the last two years. If the team does end up carrying both Bruján and either Mastrobuoni or Workman, it will mark a failure of creativity and resource allocation over the balance of this offseason, but it doesn't seem likely to come to that.
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