Widening the Lens to Understand Cubs Deadline Moves Better

At first blush, my thought about the trade that sent Mark Leiter Jr. to the Yankees in exchange for Jack Neely and Ben Cowles was that the Cubs might have been better off just skipping it. As I wrote on deadline day, it's relatively easy to discern why most of the league doesn't value Leiter and the things he does well as highly as the Cubs do. That explains why their return for Leiter was so light, but doesn't tell us why the team still felt the move was worth making.

In a vacuum, that's still true, and it's fair to criticize the trade itself as selling too low. Leiter could have been under team control two more seasons, if the Cubs had chosen to go that route, so there wasn't an impetus urgent enough to make trading him for so little a wise move on its own. However, when we widen the lens to examine the whole organizational depth chart and the entirely of their deadline activity, the potential wisdom of the move comes into view.

Here's one way to look at this: In the Nate Pearson trade, the Cubs gave up Josh Rivera and Yohendrick Pinango. Those two combined for nearly 500 plate appearances for the Double-A Tennessee affiliate this year, with Pinango in the outfield and Rivera playing a lot on the infield. Pinango is a slightly better prospect; Rivera doesn't look like he'll hit enough to play regularly in the big leagues. Still, the team needed to replace Rivera, because he was a polished player from a top college program and a mature presence on an infield full of prospects.

The next day, of course, the team included both Hunter Bigge and Ty Johnson in the Christopher Morel-for-Isaac Paredes trade. Bigge had already pitched a few innings for the big-league bullpen this year. Paredes directly replaced Morel, and dramatically improved the team in the process, but the organization needed a replacement for Bigge, too.

Obviously, there's no real urgency to replace either Rivera or Bigge, but it's pretty clear that the front office took seriously a self-incepted mandate: Do not degrade the 2025 Cubs in the process of trying to improve that team, or the few after it. How is trading Leiter not anathema to that? Well, it depends on how much they believe in their ability to create another Leiter--and how they balanced his value against the combined value of the two roles they backfilled by moving him.

On Baseball America's ranking of the roughly 90 prospects traded in July, Bigge and Neely were right next to each other, at Nos. 36 and 37. That's how neatly their future values match, and because Neely doesn't need to be added to the 40-man roster until November, the team also bought itself a roster spot in that swap, if only for a matter of days or weeks. Bigge might be a hair more advanced, but based purely on their fastball and slider shapes and the fact that his size makes it easier to generate the same velocity, it's easy to end up higher on Neely. Either way, the replacement is a perfect one.

Cowles didn't have the pedigree coming out of college that Rivera did, but he's been a better hitter during his time at Double-A than Rivera has. He's old for the level; that's one problem. He's also due to be added to the 40-man roster or exposed to the Rule 5 Draft this fall; that's another problem. Just before the trade, though, he was injured on a hit-by-pitch, and it sounds perfectly possible that he won't play again this season. 

Therein lies the key to this. Cowles has had a solid season, but given the age-versus-level concerns and this injury that will deny everyone six or eight more weeks of looks, there's no way--there's no way--Cowles will be taken in the Rule 5, after which he would need to be kept on the active MLB roster all season. The utility of this kind of player lies almost solely in their being optionable depth, just like the last hurler in the bullpen. So, really, the Cubs bought a small upgrade from Rivera to Cowles, and won't have to use a roster spot on him this winter. He'll go into next year in something like the role Luis Vázquez has had this year at Triple-A Iowa, whether or not Vázquez is back in the same role.

If we cancel things out that way, we're left with the following as a holistic deadline accounting for the Cubs:

• IN: Isaac Paredes, Nate Pearson
• OUT: Christopher Morel, Mark Leiter Jr., Yohendrick Pinango, Ty Johnson

The heavy implication here is that the Cubs are higher on the future of Pearson than on that of Leiter--or at least that they're roughly even. The numbers each has compiled the last couple of years don't really support that stance, but these are relief pitchers, and numbers over any given sample rarely provide a reliable prediction of numbers over the ensuing sample. Pearson's ability to throw 102 miles per hour gives him a higher ceiling, and the Cubs believe they can fix his command enough to come closer to reaching it.

Again, the upgrade from Morel to Paredes is huge, for the 2025-27 Cubs. Morel is under one more year of control after that, and he could improve from where he is now more than Paredes is likely to. In the window the Cubs hope will open next spring, though, Paredes will be a reliably better player. To get from Morel to him, the Cubs effectively gave up Pinango and Johnson, and that's a pretty low price for a fine item--even before you give them a discount for getting fractionally more roster flexibility in the transaction set.

It's impossible to fully evaluate this deadline right now, but not because we need to wait and see how all the players involved perform. Whether the Cubs can fix Pearson matters. Whether Paredes can sustain his excellence in such a different environment matters, too. What makes it imperative that we wait a while to assess things, though, is the looming offseason. Add these moves together, and there's more flexibility and upside flowing through the organization for the next few years. That will only matter if the moves turn out to have empowered the front office, rather than paralyzing them.