Matthew Trueblood

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images To hit for power in the major leagues, you have to be pretty strong. Baseball isn't a contact sport, but if you've ever faced competitive pitching, you know that it can feel like one in the batter's box. Making solid contact—let alone hard contact, which sounds like a synonym but really requires that solidity of contact to be combined with good bat speed, a hard thing to muster in the tiny amount of time a good pitch leaves you to accelerate—requires as fierce an explosive movement as getting by an offensive tackle or finishing through a foul at the rim. There's a baseline a hitter must clear to produce any meaningful pop, and it's higher than it looks on TV. However, once you're clear of that baseline, driving the ball comes down to some of the clever ways you can create more space or time to accelerate with the barrel. Not every hitter can top out at 80 miles an hour of swing speed, but each hitter can tweak their setup, timing mechanism and swing mechanics to pursue power by getting off their 'A' swing more often. Specifically, a hitter who wants to hit lots of homers but lacks elite bat speed can do two important things: Make sure to be working uphill at contact, as steeply as possible; and Catch the ball far out in front of their body. In fact, these two things are correlated to each other, anyway. Every swing starts with a hitter twisting their trunk and slashing their barrel down into the hitting zone, from its starting point behind their head. At some point, any big-league swing begins to work upward, instead of down, but that comes at a different point in every swing. The more steeply the hitter tilts their bat as they swing, the earlier the barrel starts to move uphill, and the faster their attack angle changes as they rotate. The greater your attack angle at the contact point, the more likely it is that the barrel is now well out in front of you. The further in front of you contact comes, the more awkwardly you would have to be waving at the ball not to be swinging upward. Pete Crow-Armstrong is a medium-height, slender lefty batter with good-not-great bat speed—although that number was closer to great from mid-May through the end of 2025 than it had been before that, so he's trending up. He hit 31 home runs last season, and was on pace for more like 40 before a late-summer slump. That caught the baseball world by surprise. It's not what you expect when you glance at Crow-Armstrong. He found all that power (not just the homers, but 37 doubles and four triples, to boot) by being extremely optimized for that outcome. He had a 15° average attack angle on swings in 2025, which put him in the 89th percentile of the league in that statistic. His contact point (a stat that captures both actual contact and the theoretical intercept point of the swing and the ball on swings that come up empty) was 35.6 inches in front of the center of his mass, a 95th-percentile number. He was in go-get-it mode, and when he got it, he was swinging upward steeply enough to produce clean, hard-hit, pulled fly balls. Only six qualifying hitters put a higher percentage of their batted balls in the air to the pull field than did Crow-Armstrong. He was a volume shooter, and it worked like a charm. As his disastrous late-season swoon proves, though, that kind of swing optimization includes some pretty hefty sacrifices. From the start of August through the end of the regular season, Crow-Armstrong hit just .188/.237/.295. The reason is pretty simple: when you swing with the dual goals of maximizing attack angle and catching the ball well in front of your frame, you're committing to everything early. To see what I mean, compare Crow-Armstrong's swing to that of Cardinals would-be slugger Nolan Gorman, another lefty who stands 6 feet tall and who has almost identical bat speed, average attack angles and swing tilt. Here are two visualizations of each of their swings at crucial moments. On the top, we have the moment at which each hitter's swing hits its nadir and starts to move upward. On the bottom, we have them each in the frame nearest their contact point. Crow-Armstrong is already a better hitter than Gorman, so don't think of this as an aspirational comparison for him. However, it highlights some of the extremes to which Crow-Armstrong pushes his approach, via his mechanics. Note how much farther Crow-Armstrong (again, the same height as Gorman) strides. Note, too, how his front shoulder and hip have rotated farther in both snapshots than Gorman's have at the same points. Gorman would be better if he could rotate a bit farther, to match Crow-Armstrong, but Crow-Armstrong's long stride and reaching swing mean he's committed to his swing extremely early. This swing optimization virtually forces Crow-Armstrong into the hyperaggressive approach that is often his undoing at the plate. It's why he had a low OBP (given his other numbers) even at his best, and why he was utterly lost at the plate once the good times ceased to roll. It's a double-edged sword. It makes him lethal in the box, when he gets things right, in a way that belies his frame and his reputation as a glove-first star. However, it also puts his barrel far from his body at the moment when he hopes to make contact. That means lots of whiffs, and even more importantly, it means deciding early and triggering the swing so as to get the barrel out there where he wants it. To tap into better consistent, overall production, Crow-Armstrong will have to rein in his reaching swing just a bit. Even if he and the Cubs were willing to tolerate the low OBP and embrace all that power, sustaining that production with such an aggressive approach and a contact point so far from his body is unlikely. He'll need to find ways to slightly modulate what he's doing, to make slightly more contact, chase slightly fewer bad pitches, and stay through the ball a bit longer. Crucially, though, he can't sacrifice all of that optimization. This is a tricky moment in the development of the could-be superstar. He enters 2026 looking to make an adjustment just big enough to unlock the next level of production and consistency—no bigger, but no smaller, either. View full article

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images Despite his failure to thrive as one in 2025, the Chicago Cubs still see Ben Brown as a starting pitcher heading into 2026. That was the most important insight offered by pitching coach Tommy Hottovy when he appeared Saturday on 670 The Score's "Inside the Clubhouse" and was asked about the 26-year-old righthander. "I mean, Ben Brown should be an established big-league starter," Hottovy said. "In my mind, he's got the stuff there to be able to do it." Brown has, indeed, flashed plus stuff in the 40 games and 162 innings he's pitched in the majors. Since the Cubs acquired him from the Phillies in exchange for David Robertson in 2022, he's flashed huge upside, powered by a fastball that reaches the upper 90s and a sharp breaking ball. He struck out 25.6% of opposing batters in 2025 and walked just 6.8%. However, Brown's heater flattens out and becomes exceptionally hittable any time it sags below 97 miles per hour, because of the combination of its shape and his high arm slot. Working as a starter, he's struggled to keep his velocity that high, and has thus been hit hard. He had a 5.92 ERA last year, despite the strong strikeout and walk numbers. For most of his career, he's also utterly lacked a functional third pitch. He has a reliever's arsenal, and a reliever's need for sheer velocity. Hottovy's optimism about him in a starting role stems in large part from what he's seeing in the club's efforts to help Brown expand that arsenal. "Our goal is to get him stretched out, continue to develop the changeup, working on a few other pitches, and continue to build out his repertoire and let him go be a dominant pitcher for us," he said Saturday. Therein lies the upside, if he's to stay in the rotation. Brown must tap into a changeup that works, and/or widen his arsenal to include a sinker or a slider with more lateral movement. His efforts to do that over the last two seasons have yielded mixed results, but late last year, there was a breakthrough. That pale green offering is a kick-change, the same pitch that unlocked things for Jameson Taillon last spring. It's a pitch with a better chance to be consistently effective for Brown than his old changeup had, because he's more likely to be able to command it—not in terms of location, but in terms of execution and movement. Whether hitters will ever chase the pitch out of the zone often enough for it to play as well as it grades is an open question, but one that probably hinges more on his command of his other two offerings than on that one. Though he's coming up on two years of service time, Brown still has one minor-league option year remaining. The Cubs could choose to stash him in Iowa this spring and keep him stretched out as an emergency starter. That, however, feels like a waste of a high-powered, high-upside arm. To get the most out of Brown, the team needs to either help him turn the corner and become a useful big-league starter now; convert him to a relief role, where he could be a stellar setup man; or trade him. Hottovy's faith in Brown is admirable, but he hasn't yet earned that faith. The talent is there, but it also has limits of which we should take note. The fastball shape is a constraint on his upside. So is the lack of a breaking ball with more side-to-side movement. Most of all, he needs a changeup he trusts, so he can force hitters (especially lefties) to respect that pitch more. As pitchers and catchers officially report to camp, Brown might be the most interesting Cub on site. He could be hugely helpful to the team this year, either as a trade chip or by directly contributing to their pursuit of a division title. If he doesn't take a big step forward this year, though, he's unlikely ever to do so. View full article

Image courtesy of © Dale Zanine-Imagn Images The Chicago Cubs and right-handed pitcher Kyle Wright are in agreement on a minor-league deal that includes an invitation to major-league spring training, a team source told North Side Baseball. Wright, 30, hasn't pitched in the majors since 2023. He missed the last two years after suffering a torn shoulder capsule that required a career-threatening surgery. After being a buzzy pitching prospect but then a modest disappointment early in his big-league career, Wright underwent a dramatic mechanical change in 2022 and broke out. That year, he pitched 180 1/3 innings over 30 starts and posted a 3.19 ERA, winning 21 games for a dominant Atlanta team. By going to a lower arm slot and emphasizing his sinker instead of his four-seam fastball, he tapped into an extremely effective five-pitch mix. In a handful of appearances in the Royals' farm system last season, Wright didn't show the same electric stuff. His fastball had pushed up to 95 miles per hour during his breakout campaign; it sat around 92 in 2025. Another year removed from the operation, though, he could well get some velocity back, and the pitch shapes that made him good four years ago appear to be intact. It's unlikely that Wright will reestablish himself as a big-league starter on this side of such a massive injury, but he comes to camp as another candidate to be a low-slot right-handed option out of the bullpen. He's out of minor-league options, but should he make the roster, he would be under team control through 2027. For the Cubs, it's yet another fine flier. For Wright, it's a chance to spend the spring with a highly respected pitching coach who knows what it takes to succeed from a low arm slot, in Tommy Hottovy. The Cubs will send a handful of pitchers out to pitch for their countries in the World Baseball Classic, so innings should be available in the early Cactus League games. Whereas some pitchers are likely to stick around and wait for the right chance with the Cubs even if they don't make the team, Wright will probably pursue the first big-league shot he gets. The Cubs have secured the privilege of being first to decide about him, but if he doesn't crack the roster, he'll leave, with no hard feelings. At this time of year, deals with injury cases like Wright are win-win moves for the parties involved. If he does get some velocity back on the fastball and sticks in the Opening Day bullpen, Wright will be a high-upside reclamation project. View full article

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images The Chicago Cubs had a good 2025 season, and they've built on that success this winter. On Tuesday, Baseball Prospectus rolled out their PECOTA projection system for 2026, complete with projected standings and playoff odds. The Cubs are the top dogs in the NL Central, and according to this model, they have no close competition. PECOTA predicts 90.5 wins for Chicago, which is technically fewer than the 92 they won last year—but which is a very strong number for any team to bring into spring training in projection systems, which are inherently conservative in that regard. It's not just the Cubs' forecasted win total that stands out, though. The Brewers are projected second-best in the division, and they're all the way back at 80.5 wins. Though we're still weeks away from a pitch being thrown toward this end, PECOTA already pegs the Cubs at 73.9% likely to win the Central and 87.7% likely to make the postseason. As the computer sees it, this will not just be the year the Cubs reclaim their primacy in the Central, but their easiest division win since 2016. Of course, they don't play the games inside the computers. It's not hard to see why the model likes the North Siders so much, though. It projects all six of their top starting pitchers (Cade Horton, Matthew Boyd, Edward Cabrera, Jameson Taillon, Shota Imanaga and Justin Steele) to be better than average, and thinks six of their key relievers to fall on the right side of that line, too. It forecasts above-average offense from six positions, and the only three where it sees them as below-average at the plate (catcher, shortstop and center field) are defense-first spots where they have solid defensive projections. FanGraphs published their own projected standings and playoff odds last week, and saw a muddier picture in the Central. They expect the Cubs to win 85.9 games, with the Pirates (82.8) and Brewers (82.0) much closer behind. That still leaves Chicago as a slight favorite, but with less than a coin flip's chance to win the division. In that model, they make the playoffs more like five times out of every eight simulations, instead of seven out of eight. It didn't hurt that the Brewers traded their starting third baseman Monday, in a move that bolstered their already considerable pitching depth but raises some big questions about their lineup. Still, based on sheer talent and projectable performance, the Cubs have ascended. They're the team to beat in the Central, for the first time since before the pandemic. With more than a month left before Opening Day, injuries could always shake up this picture—but so could further moves to reinforce the roster, to which the Cubs remain very much open. For now, they're in a very strong position. View full article

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images It's the rumor that will not die. At several points over the last two years, Nico Hoerner's name has become a hot one in trade discussions. In particular, since Alex Bregman signed a five-year deal with the team last month, the Cubs have received calls from several teams about Hoerner. Initially, they were more inclined to retain Hoerner and to trade Matt Shaw, who is under long-term team control and would net a similar return despite being a worse player than Hoerner. However, that might no longer be true. Early this winter, the Seattle Mariners pivoted away from previous pursuits of Hoerner and focused on the Cardinals' Brendan Donovan. The Mariners and Cubs did touch base about Hoerner after the Bregman deal, according to a source familiar with the conversation, but never came close to finding a match. The Giants were more persistently interested in Hoerner, and that interest picked up after the Bregman signing, but the Cubs refused to consider a deal in which they didn't receive top Giants infield prospect Josuar Gonzalez, so the talks fizzled. It seemed as though the market for Hoerner (along with that for Shaw) was beginning to disappear. On Monday, the Red Sox became the latest team who had reached out to Chicago about Hoerner to move on to Plan B, trading for the Brewers' Caleb Durbin instead. However, according to two league sources, there remain a couple of potential suitors for Hoerner, and the Cubs haven't shut down those talks. If they get the right offer, they'll trade the impending free agent, despite the fact that he's a fan favorite and a beloved piece of the clubhouse. That might send a shiver down the spine of some fans, but it's important to emphasize the condition in that conditional statement. The team is not desperately looking to offload salary. They're not eager to push Hoerner out of the way to give Shaw the second base job. They'll only trade Hoerner if they get the right offer. So, naturally, we must attempt to answer the question: What's the right offer? According to sources with knowledge of the team's demands in discussions with the three teams named above and two more, there are three key elements Jed Hoyer and Carter Hawkins view as essential in any deal that sees them part with their two-time Gold Glover. A useful big-league infielder, at an affordable price. This player would effectively replace Shaw as the backup at second, third and (ideally) shortstop, with Shaw taking over as the starting second baseman. In all likelihood, they'd be a fringe regular better suited to backup work, but with multiple years of team control remaining. A top prospect—probably a pitcher. The Cubs' farm system is thin right now, especially when it comes to hurlers. Adding an arm who can have a significant impact on the 2027-31 Cubs remains on the team's wish list as spring training gets underway. This would be one way to acquire that kind of pitcher, and although it would come with significant risk, they understand that they'll eventually have to take that kind of chance, anyway. Pitching help for 2026, in one form or another. If Chicago becomes more optimistic than they are right now about signing Zac Gallen, they might be more open to trading Hoerner for a package that focuses on the first two of the above elements. Spending another $15 million or more for 2026 might have to mean trading some salary, so in that scenario, Hoerner's $12 million could become the budgetary casualty that paves the way for a final pitching boost. Alternatively, though, the team could target an optionable or versatile pitcher on the trade partner's roster and achieve a similar, more direct upgrade to the pitching staff in the deal. That's a rich ransom, for a player who can become a free agent at the end of the 2026 World Series. So far, the Cubs haven't gotten a sufficiently appealing offer that checks each box. Most teams are willing to satisfy items 1 and 3, but reluctant to trade a player with big potential long-term value for one they might lose after one season. At this point, the likelihood of a trade is still low, especially because there are only a few interested teams left in the picture. Nonetheless, a move can't be ruled out. Looking at the roster through a wider lens, it's easy to see how a deal that checks each of those boxes could make sense for the Cubs. They've methodically converted long-term value into short-term value over the last few years, but that subpar farm system is a reminder that their shift into contention mode could leave them lurching back toward rebuilding by the end of the decade. To avoid that, they might need to reverse the flow and move a player under short-term control for someone who can be kept longer and cheaper. With Shaw on hand to replace him, Hoerner is a viable candidate for that treatment. The team needs pitching help for this season. and free-agent prices on the dwindling number of key arms are higher than they'd hoped. They certainly can't afford to get any weaker in right field or at DH, so a trade of Ian Happ or Seiya Suzuki is hard to fathom. Hoerner is the guy who can be moved without leaving an unfillable hole, and who could fetch enough to patch the holes that still exist. This would be Hoerner's seventh full season with Chicago. He's been ubiquitous for the post-COVID Cubs, and his blend of contact skills, speed and defensive aptitude have been key parts of the team's identity the last few years. They don't want to trade him. If a team gets desperate enough to check all three of their boxes, though, it could still happen. View full article

Image courtesy of © Bruce Kluckhohn-Imagn Images Reports repeatedly connected the Chicago Cubs to designated hitter/outfielder Miguel Andujar in the last fortnight, but Andujar signed with the San Diego Padres this week, for $4 million. That contract is proof that the Cubs didn't have a particularly serious interest in Andujar. San Diego offered a path to more playing time than the Cubs could, so if Andujar had his long-term earning potential in the front of his mind, he might have demanded considerably more from the Cubs than the Padres paid. In truth, though, the North Siders' interest was always contingent on the possibility of a second move, which didn't materialize. Andujar is a right-handed batter who mashes lefty pitching. That's a valuable complementary piece, even with little defensive value added thereto, but it's less valuable to the Cubs than to most other teams. Chicago wanted Andujar only in a scenario in which they moved Matt Shaw and opened a spot to add a left-hitting infielder to their bench. That hasn't happened, and looks increasingly unlikely, so Andujar didn't end up being a fit for the team. At catcher, the Cubs have two right-handed hitters. Among their six infielders (counting Tyler Austin, who'll back up and platoon with Michael Busch), they have five righty batters, in Shaw, Alex Bregman, Dansby Swanson, Nico Hoerner, and Austin. Busch is the only lefty batter out of those eight roster spots, so the Cubs need lots of left-handed at-bats from their outfield and DH spots. They'll get them, of course. Ian Happ is a switch-hitter, and Pete Crow-Armstrong bats left-handed. Moisés Ballesteros, in whom the team demonstrated their great faith by trading Owen Caissie earlier this winter, will soak up plenty of playing time at DH. Seiya Suzuki is locked in for at least 550 plate appearances, though, and bats right-handed. The team will choose from among Justin Dean, Kevin Alcántara, Chas McCormick and Dylan Carlson for the fourth outfielder job, and all four of those guys are de facto right-handed bats. (Carlson, technically, is a switch-hitter, but he's a disaster from the left side and would only find a real role as a backup and partial platoon partner for Crow-Armstrong.) We've accounted for all 13 position-player spots on the roster, but we haven't really accounted for all the available playing time. There are likely to be between 300 and 450 plate appearances available in that outfield and DH mix, accounting for injuries, the possibility of failure by Ballesteros, and the times when they won't need to carry any of the backup center field candidates. Those plate appearances should be given to a strong lefty batter, to make up for the right-leaning infield group and the fact that a team faces more righty pitchers than lefties. A few good trade candidates stand out. The team could try to pry underachieving but intriguing corner outfielder Trevor Larnach away from the Twins. (In fact, the Twins have several lefty bats who are short on positional or defensive value but can hit a bit.) They could pursue Lars Nootbaar, of the rebuilding Cardinals, or late-blooming former top pick Mickey Moniak from the Rockies. However, the easiest path forward is a simple, warm-feeling one: Re-sign ex-Cub Mike Tauchman. Tauchman, 35, doesn't come with worries about clubhouse fit or swing retooling. He doesn't need to play with a next contract in mind, like Andujar. He's a player with clear flaws whom everyone knows to be in decline, and he absolutely can't be placed in center field anymore. However, since the start of 2023, he's averaged almost exactly the number of plate appearances the Cubs need to fill, at the very positions where they need to fill them. He's batted .255/.359/.381, and his rates with the White Sox in 2025 weren't a step down from that. Tauchman still gets on base, and he can play a competent corner outfield spot. He'll also be exceptionally cheap. He's not likely to stay healthy all year or to be an impact player even while he's on the roster. As a complementary option in the outfield, though, Tauchman would give the Cubs lineup extra length. Because he spent two fruitful years reviving his career at Wrigley Field, he's a known commodity in the clubhouse. This is a simple solution to a simple problem. Unless something bigger comes together very, very soon, the Cubs should bring back the Palatine, Ill. native for a fourth consecutive hometown summer. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images If the Cubs want a pitcher with a chance to be a frontline starter throughout 2026, they still have two solid options in free agency: Zac Gallen and Framber Valdez. Not coincidentally, the team has been mentioned in connection with each hurler over the last fortnight, and North Side Baseball can confirm that they've had sustained interest in Gallen—though not, so far, at anywhere near the terms Scott Boras has demanded for the erstwhile Diamondbacks ace. Both Gallen and Valdez would cost the Cubs a draft pick, though, because each is attached to compensation via the qualifying offer. Gallen and Valdez turned down $22.025 million from their former clubs in November, guaranteeing those teams compensatory picks if they leave. More importantly, each has spent at least a half-decade as a full-time starter, with no meaningful experience in the bullpen. They would contribute to the logjam in the team's starting rotation, and it's unlikely that either (especially on the kinds of short-term deals to which the Cubs would be open to signing them) would be happy with any role that lessened their importance, the volume of innings they could pitch, or (therefore) their earning power. It might be easier to work with Chris Bassitt, Justin Verlander or Max Scherzer, who are all in the twilight of their careers but have been very good when available. They'd be easier to stash on the injured list for stretches when the entire rotation is healthy, and Bassitt showed that he can be a weapon out of the bullpen when Toronto moved him there last fall. However, it's harder to be sure that any of them (especially the quadragenarians, Verlander and Scherzer) would be available at all when the team needs them most, in the autumn. One player could suit the Cubs' needs perfectly, and would be another way for the team to strengthen its relationship with Boras, too. Nick Martinez had a superficially poor season with the Reds in 2025, with a 4.45 ERA in 40 appearances. However, he's arguably the game's best old-fashioned swingman. He made 26 starts and 14 relief appearances in 2025, and has 61 starts out of 192 games pitched since the start of 2022. He's been exceptionally durable in a role that often comes with added injury risk, and shows the ability to turn over lineup cards as well as being a matchup weapon in the right situations. Martinez's skill set is distinct from that of Colin Rea. He's more akin to Javier Assad, with a high arm slot and extremely kinetic delivery that yields a diverse pitch mix and masks underwhelming raw stuff. Assad can still be optioned to Triple-A Iowa, so Martinez could contribute as a starter when needed; give the bullpen a long man and a solid middle-relief buttress when the rotation is fully stocked; and add to the variety of looks Craig Counsell can offer opposing lineups. The step back in his raw numbers last season had some bad luck mixed into it. Martinez's stuff is not exceptional, but he throws a four-seamer, a sinker, a cutter, a gyro slider, a good curveball and an interesting changeup. He can get lefties out, and though he struggled against fellow righties last year, he's likely to rebound on that front in 2026. Best of all, he wouldn't cost a draft pick, and is likely to sign for less on an annual basis than any of the other five free agents named above. The Cubs could add him to their staff, feel supremely confident about their depth, and still have money to spend (be it now or at the trade deadline) to round out their roster. Once camp opens next Wednesday, the team can place Justin Steele on the 60-day injured list. That would sideline him until at least Memorial Day, but (despite Steele's protestations and the team's steady optimism) no responsible plan would put him back on a big-league mound before June, anyway. He's just as likely to run into a hiccup or two and return near the end of July. Martinez could sign next week, take the roster spot created by Steele's shift to the 60-day IL, and become Rea's partner at the fluid back end of a very strong, deep rotation. These same characteristics make Martinez appealing to many other clubs, too, and he's likely to wait until Gallen and/or Valdez sign to see where demand is greatest before signing his own deal. The Cubs can afford to wait. Unless the price craters completely on one of Gallen or Valdez, they should bide their time and sign Martinez, instead, once the dust settles from the final true sweepstakes of his hot stove season. View full article

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images As any veteran of the baseball industry will tell you, the hardest tool to scout is the feel to hit. There's so much reactivity, so fragile a balance in it, that it's hard to gauge what a hitter can do over just a few games. It's hard to project how a player who can dominate at one level might do at the next. It's hard, even, to tell when a player has established a skill, and when they're due for regression. It was easier to scout power and arm strength and speed and defensive ability even in the days before advanced technology captured players' movements in fine detail, but it's even truer now. While we now know on what percentage of swings a batter makes contact and how often they chase outside the zone, every hitter has different ideal contact and chase rates, and those numbers don't tell us about the quality of contact a player is making. We have bat speed and exit velocity and launch angle and pull rate, but those things more reliably help us measure power than hit tool. There remains a bit of magic in baseball, and it lives in the moment between the release of the pitch and the moment it reaches the plate. That's when a batter has to make incredibly rapid, subconscious decisions, adjust their finely tuned and extraordinarily fast swing, and find the center of the ball with the barrel of their bat. Of course, now, we also have a number for that. It's far from perfect, but it does give us some useful information. Today, let's consider Statcast's Squared Up rate, and the data (both signal and noise) it provides us for the purposes of projecting two key Cubs hitters for 2026. First, we need to define our terms. Statcast tags a batted ball as Squared Up if it leaves the bat with at least 80% of the possible exit velocity, given the speed of the swing and the incoming pitch. Physics gives us a knowable maximum exit velocity, once we have the speeds and approximate masses of bat and ball, so basically, Squared Up balls are just that: ones on which the batter successfully put lots of wood on the ball, so that they got as much out of their swing as they could. Generally speaking, the guys you'd expect to run high Squared Up rates do so. Luis Arraez has led the league in each of the last two seasons, with roughly 40% of his swings resulting not only in contact, but in meeting the ball squarely. That it's Arraez atop the list illustrates the drawback and the broader nature of this skill, though. Usually, guys trade some bat speed for the bat control that allows them to make such solid contact, which means that a squared-up ball can also be a relatively weakly hit or low-value one. It's undeniably good to run a high Squared Up rate, but that skill tends to belong to slow swingers, and compensates (with varying degrees of success) for a dearth of power. Specifically, the Cubs have two players for whom squaring the ball up is vital—whose games hinge on doing it consistently. Nico Hoerner is one of the best sheer contact hitters in baseball, but if he were prone to mishitting the ball, that wouldn't make him a good player. With new metrics, we can see more clearly than ever that he's an elite pure hitter, because he squared the ball up on roughly a third of his swings last year, ranking very near the top of the league. Hoerner lacks power, because his bat speed is well below average and he doesn't have an approach that lends itself well to pulling the ball in the air. As last year progressed, though, he proved that he can hit the ball squarely with enough consistency to be a plus-plus hitter, even without either a high walk rate or average pop. Alex Bregman brings even more to the party. He uses an extremely patient approach to inform and augment his own sky-high Squared Up rate, and his swing is geared to lift the ball to the pull field. He, too, has subpar bat speed, a concern I noted rather dourly earlier this winter. However, he makes some of the most efficient contact in baseball—even topping Hoerner. Because of the things they don't do well, Hoerner and Bregman have to show an elite feel for hitting. Happily, both of them do. The question is: Will that skill stick? To answer it (in part), I took all 211 hitters who had at least 500 swings in both 2024 and 2025, and compared the percentages of those swings that resulted in Squared Up balls in play for each player from year to year. Here's the resulting chart. The R² of this plot is 0.685, which implies a very strong correlation from year to year. In other words, for the limited data we have so far, squaring the ball up is an extremely sticky skill. We might well find that it gets less neat and tidy over time, and with more seasons of data, we could do a more robust study of aging curves, but intriguingly, this population of players got better, as a group, from 2024 to 2025. Their Squared Up rate went from an average of 22.5% to 23.6%. Bat speed tends to deteriorate as a player ages, so one explanation for the increase in squaring the ball up is hitters consciously trading the bat speed they can't hold onto for better bat control. It's probably more complicated than that. There's something to be said for the theory that the proliferation of these numbers in clubhouses and hitters' meetings has helped players train better for efficient contact, but it's also probably more complicated than that. All we can say for sure, at this moment, is that how you did last year does a fine job of predicting how you'll do this year, when it comes to squaring the ball up. That sounds like very good news for Bregman and Hoerner, and it probably is. However, there's another wrinkle we need to consider. Go back to the chart above, and notice that Bregman and Hoerner are further from the trend line than most of the rest of the league. They each improved significantly at meeting the ball squarely in 2025, even though they were above average even before making that leap. Hoerner will be 29 this year; Bregman will be 32. Most of the time, when hitters past the age of 26 or so go from good to elite at something, they're due for regression. That invites the real concern that they'll each come back to Earth in 2026, and square the ball up less often. This is why, for instance, all the advanced projection systems (PECOTA: .289; ZiPS: .293; Steamer: .304) expect Hoerner to run a lower BABIP than his career mark of .307, let alone the .313 he put up in his stellar 2025 campaign. It's hard to call anything about this luck, because we're so far down to the process aspect of hitting, studying how well a hitter's hand-eye coordination manages the task of getting lumber on leather. Still, there's variance and entropy at work, here. Pitchers will make adjustments, to both Hoerner and Bregman. It won't be easy for either to sustain the level of success they've had at squaring up the ball lately. To figure out which is more likely to retain their skills and have a successful 2026, we can approach this in a slightly different, better way. Kyle Bland of PitcherList created an app to display bat-tracking data back in 2024, and one of its features is a more continuous measurement of squared-up contact. Rather than creating a binary and tagging a ball as either squared up or not, his model tracks the specific percentage of the maximum possible exit velocity on each batted ball. Here's the distribution of Hoerner's batted balls by Squared Up%, for (most of) 2025. He's very, very good at hitting the ball squarely, and though he rarely gets all of a pitch—he's just ok at generating contact efficiency north of about 92%—he also rarely mishits one at all. That's a steady hitter. Bregman's distribution is a bit more impressive, and almost laughable: Bregman creates a whole lot of extremely efficient contact, though he's also considerably more likely to whiff altogether (Squared Up%: 0) than is Hoerner. Which of these two is more likely to sustain their success at squaring it up, going forward? Hoerner, being younger, gets a certain edge. Bregman's swing is flatter, too, and flat swings generally lead to lower Squared Up rates. However, Bregman has honed his approach so well that he's locked in to swing only at pitches he can consistently square up. Hoerner's is a more expansive, aggressive, all-fields approach. We should also consider what happens if each player's suite of swings gets a tiny bit less efficient, across the board. For Hoerner, he would slosh back much closer to league average. Bregman might see his strikeout rate spike a bit, because his swings getting less efficient would mean getting out of the top end of the league in overall contact rate, but he has that big bulge in the upper 80s and 90s for Squared Up% that would come down only to the low and middle 80s. In other words, he can stay efficient with his contact even if he loses some efficiency in his swing. Hoerner lacks that luxury. Bregman is a safer bet than Hoerner to hold onto this skill, but each of them did something at an elite level last year that tends to stay good once a hitter has shown they can do it. That makes it worth mentioning one more player of whom the same things are true: Michael Busch. He was much more prone to sub-80% contact efficiency than were Hoerner and Bregman last year, but he was also better than they were at getting the crosshairs on a ball and achieving perfect (or virtually perfect) Squared Up-itude. This is a slugger with great feel for contact, in profile. Note the dearth of swings that generated less than 70% contact efficiency. If he was going to be that wrong, he stayed committed to his 'A' swing and came up empty. When he got one right, though, he gave himself a chance to get it especially right. Bland's app also tracks rolling Squared Up% for hitters throughout the season, and Busch's timeline tells a great story. In early May, he simply locked in on the ball, and never ceased to be so. Like Hoerner and Bregman, Busch lacks elite bat speed, especially for a player who needs to produce more power than either of the others do. However, from May 15 through the end of the season, he slugged .539, and then he went on an October power binge, to boot. Much of that can be attributed to his ability to square the ball up, and he's another good candidate to do so again in 2026. We still have a lot to learn about hitting, but the data are making it a bit easier to say some things with confidence. If nothing else, these numbers prove that Hoerner, Busch and Bregman have plus hit tools, albeit in ways unique to each of them. They're the anchors of the Cubs lineup for the coming season, and by the end of the year, we'll know even more about how each of them do it—and therefore, more about how the thing is done by everyone. View full article

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images Earlier this week, we discussed the many, many candidates for not-so-many spots in the Cubs' Opening Day bullpen, focusing on the right-handed hurlers in the mix. Today, let's tackle the lefties vying for the few open spots, and the way the team will utilize those who don't make the cut. It's a different exercise than with the righties. In all likelihood, only two lefties will make the Opening Day bullpen, and if Caleb Thielbar and Hoby Milner are each healthy, they'll be the two. Each signed with the team as free agents this winter. Neither can be optioned to the minors. A third lefty could crack the group, but two things are working against that: The sheer volume of useful and intriguing right-handed arms they've collected, vying for spots; and The fact that the team has two left-handed starters (Matthew Boyd and Shota Imanaga) slated for the Opening Day rotation, with another (Justin Steele) likely to join the mix somewhere around the All-Star break, making matchup lefties out of the pen a bit less of a pressing need. We can approach the questions of who brings what and how each pitcher might be used (or disused) differently, then, when it comes to the lefties. Nonetheless, we can begin with the same graphic showing the arsenals and arm slots of the candidates. The six key southpaws in the bullpen mix are Thielbar, Milner, Jordan Wicks, Luke Little, Ryan Rolison, and Riley Martin. As indicated by the gold hues of the backgrounds on each of their profiles, Wicks, Little, Rolison and Martin can all be optioned to Triple-A Iowa, so tentatively, we can expect all of them to start the season there. Wicks, the club's first-round pick in the 2021 Draft, is also a candidate to start, though his star has dimmed over time. As is true of Ben Brown and Javier Assad from the right side, Wicks is likely to stay stretched out this spring (if he remains with the Cubs), but unlike those two, the team will be very reluctant to use Wicks as a starter in the majors. His path to helping the team is by staying capable of multi-inning stints in relief. As high as his upside seemed to be just a year or two ago, Little now looks like the first name on the chopping block the next time the Cubs need to open a 40-man roster spot. Unless he comes to camp with his velocity restored, he's not going to be able to help the Cubs. His fastball sat near 96 miles per hour and flirted with 100 as recently as 2024, but last year, it averaged just over 93. He needs to improve his control, too, but even at the best that his control is ever likely to be, he can't have a meaningful impact at that number. He lowered his arm slot last season, and his size, that angle and the nastiness of his breaking ball give him real upside. To realize it, though, he has to get the juice back in his arm, and right now, that seems like a long shot. The Cubs scooped Rolison off the waiver wire, as much because he can be optioned and stashed as because he's a potential weapon in any kind of high-leverage situation. He has the relative cut the Cubs like on a four-seam fastball, and throws it from a high three-quarters slot, so his stuff bears a sufficient resemblance to that of Thielbar to make him a fallback plan if the aging high-slot spin master gets hurt. It's nice to have multiple guys who offer a particular look to opposing batters, as long as one can be kept in the minors while the other is getting outs in the majors. Martin has a little bit of the same thing going on. He doesn't have any big-league time yet, so we can't precisely measure his arm angle, but it's similar to Rolison's. So is his arsenal, with a four-seamer and two breaking balls that work vertically, more than horizontally. The Cubs have a lot of eggs in the Milner basket right now, when it comes to getting out hitters who struggle with low-slot lefties and/or horizontal movement. That's why Little has significant potential value, if he shows up in Mesa looking revived. Failing that, though, the team would be wise to add one more lefty whose stuff is at least roughly akin to Milner's. That could be on a minor-league deal, but it should be someone optionable, if at all possible. Still, this is a much more settled battle than is the one on the right side. Milner and Thielbar are a competent, veteran pair of lefties who are terrific in the clubhouse, as well as being reliable on the mound. The four other southpaws with a chance to pitch out of Craig Counsell's pen are all on the 40-man roster, and can all be kept in the minors. The roles are easy to divine, and the redundancies are equally clear. If the season began today, the Cubs wouldn't be sweating about their left-handed relief corps. They have other boxes to check before Opening Day; this group could stay quite stable. View full article

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images Barring rainouts that are made up late in the season, the Chicago Cubs will play 113 regular-season games before the 2026 MLB trade deadline, which the league officially set this week for August 3. In a recent collective bargaining agreement, the league and the players union changed the rules around the deadline, allowing the commissioner's office to set the date of the deadline each year. Until the early 2000s, the deadline had been fixed at 11:59 PM on July 31. Then, for a while, it was still glued to that date, but the time moved up, so that deadline deals happened during drivetime and prime time. Now, it can be moved around by the commissioner, to avoid having it land on weekends or dates when many teams are playing night games that might be disrupted by last-minute roster changes. In this case, since July 31 is a Friday, the league has moved the deadline back to the following Monday. Half the league plays that day, but Rob Manfred and his staff are gambling that clubs will conduct the bulk of their business after the games of Sunday, Aug. 2 and on the morning of Aug. 3. It seems like a small change, but in truth, this is the latest in a series of steps pushing the trade deadline later and later in the season. That began with one huge change, but it's been followed by several small ones going in the same direction. Cubs fans of a certain age remember the famous Rick Sutcliffe trade, which so galvanized the 1984 team. It happened on June 15, because until the mid-1980s, that was the date of the trade deadline. This is why, for baseball traditionalists, Memorial Day is such an important landmark for teams in terms of self-evaluation. Once that holiday passed, clubs only had roughty another fortnight to set and pursue their direction. After the deadline moved back to July 31, it stayed there for decades—but Opening Day didn't stand still. It began creeping earlier in April around the time of the switch to the date of the deadline, and then in 2018, it jumped forward another week. For almost a decade, the league has been playing the first full series of most seasons in March. Here's the result—the number of games the Cubs had played by the time the trade deadline arrived in selected seasons, chosen for regular intervals and recency: 1984: 61 1994: 103 2004: 104 2014: 107 2024: 109 2025: 108 2026: 113* It almost looks like one big change, then stasis, but the creep is real. The nominal deadline has steadily moved deeper into the season calendar, making for less value delivered by players acquired at the deadline. On the other hand, it's important to note a force moving the 'real' deadline the opposite direction: the evolution of the waiver trade period. For decades, the deadline was fixed on June 15, but in practice, teams could and did make trades until the end of August. These tended to be smaller deals, but by an unspoken (or at least, spoken of only on backchannels, lest they get into trouble) agreement, teams wouldn't claim a player being waived by another club for the purpose of trading them. That allowed players to be dealt after the deadline. In the 1980s and early 1990s, though, some teams began to attempt greater brinksmanship with that strategy, trying to deal for very important players on the other side of the deadline. The trend came to a head in 1993, when Atlanta claimed Dennis Martinez on waivers to prevent the Giants from getting ahold of him as the two sides raced to the finish line in the NL West. Norms shifted quickly, and for the next 15 years, the waiver trade period existed—but it was curtailed. Teams could only trade players to the team who claimed them on revocable waivers, and only players with big contracts or some noteworthy warts would clear the waiver wire and become freely movable. Finally, ahead of the 2019 season, the league got rid of the waiver trade period altogether. In essence, then, the trade deadline spent a long time floating in the wide space between mid-June and the end of August; then got compressed into a sloshy space from the end of July to the end of August; then became, effectively, the end of July. Now, it's the end of July, period—except when the league decides it can slosh a few days into August, after all. Meanwhile, with Opening Day sliding around and the structure of the schedule (with regard to off days, scheduled doubleheaders and so on) changing often, the number of games played before the deadline (or "deadline," or deadlines, or whatever) hit has changed meaningfully over the years. It's fair to say, though, that we're now headed for the most restrictive deadline in baseball history. It's a hard stop on trades, and it comes with roughly 50 games left on the schedule for each team. That doesn't give anyone much incentive to trade top prospects for a player, unless it be someone under team control beyond this year. It does allow a fistful of extra games for a team or two to fall out of contention and decide to sell, but because prices are likely to be low, some clubs might simply hold onto their guys. Deadlines spur action, especially in high-information, competitive marketplaces. Teams know their own players and everyone else's too well to make a reckless trade because they happen to love a given player, and often, only the time pressure of the deadline can move two clubs off their intransigent positions in a negotiation. We should expect to see fewer and less exciting trades because of this change to the deadline's math. On the other hand, this is extra incentive to teams to be active before the season begins. Teams with guys who become free agents in the fall have to know that their trade values will tank by the end of July, when an acquiring team also won't be able to extend the player a qualifying offer. In the handful of weeks before the season begins, expect to see a few members of the prospective 2026-27 free-agent class dealt, because now is the time for those trades, especially given the way the schedule is working out this year. The Cubs still aren't likely to trade Nico Hoerner, Ian Happ or Seiya Suzuki. They could, however, be more likely to sign someone like Zac Gallen, who would give them unwieldy but excellent pitching depth. Rather than be a desperate team trying to pry loose a starter in mid-July when their club would rather wait for Aug. 2, teams can still sign free agents like Gallen, Framber Valdez or Chris Bassitt, so they don't end up needing to do much at what looks to be a quiet deadline. If you're likely to get two fewer starts from a pitcher now than you would have when trading for them at the deadline 15 years ago, you might as well sign someone in February, instead. The financial price of doing so will be lower than the prospect price you pay in late July, once you account for all the extra work you'll get from the player. There's something a bit boring and ickily corporate about the deadline becoming a floating thing. It feels like Manfred and his office choose the deadline out of no consideration but convenience each year, and baseball really isn't supposed to cater to the convenience of executives or players. It's also moving too deep into the season, where the impact of the summer trading period dwindles toward zero. That's bad for baseball, which has always gotten lots of juice out of sports-talk radio, taxi driver banter, and family arguments at the 4th of July over what the local nine needs to do to get better. Moving the deadline earlier would make more sense, but the league prefers to cater to convenience—and to the rationalistic economic minds of modern front offices. That's a shame, but it's only a small thing. More than anything else, it's a curiosity. View full article

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images After an active winter that saw several departures and just as many arrivals, the Cubs enter 2026 with good bullpen depth. However, there are a handful of unclaimed spots on their pitching staff, and spring training should yield a lively competition for them. To better understand that free-for-all, let's examine each of the candidates and the ways they might best mesh. We'll consider the right- and left-handed relievers separately, to make the project a bit more manageable. It would be hard to properly evaluate the candidacies of each player hoping to win a job in the bullpen without first mapping out what the end result of those evaluations should be, so let's start there. Most modern bullpens include eight pitchers, and for simplicity's sake, we'll assume that the 2026 Cubs will hew to that norm. They might well use a six-man rotation for some stretch of the season, which would shorten the pen to seven, but that variable can be saved for later. Of the eight in the pen, five or six are usually right-handed. It's great to have lefties who can neutralize dangerous pockets of opposing lineups that include multiple dangerous lefty sluggers, but with the three-batter minimum in place since 2020, it's hard to carry more than a couple of lefties without eventually being compelled to expose them to bad matchups. An especially split-neutral lefty can ameliorate that problem, but the Cubs don't have such a pitcher on their staff at the moment. Let's again use a simplifying assumption to clarify our discussion, and say that Caleb Thielbar and Hoby Milner will be the only lefties in the eight-man pen on Opening Day. That leaves six spots to fill with northpaws. Deciding who those six should be starts, of course, with considerations of quality. Before getting to the nuances and the nitty-gritty of roster-building, you can get a long way by focusing on the fact that good pitching staffs are made up of good pitchers. The Cubs' relief ace is Daniel Palencia, and they'll lean heavily on the two setup-quality righties they brought in this winter: Phil Maton and Hunter Harvey. When all three are healthy, those will probably be the top three righties on the relief depth chart. In fact, there are basically five righties who belong in this conversation and will absolutely be on the roster on Opening Day, unless they're hurt. In one case (Colin Rea), that doesn't necessarily mean the bullpen, but all five will be around when they're available. That group is Palencia, Maton, Harvey, Rea and Jacob Webb. Of the set, only Palencia has the ability to be optioned to the minors, and the Cubs won't want to do that, unless he has an unforeseeably disastrous spring. There are two key considerations, beyond pitcher quality, that constrain every discussion about the makeup of a bullpen: minor-league options and 40-man roster status. Teams adore players who can be optioned to the minors, because in theory, they give the roster greater fluidity and flexibility. They like to sign credible big-league pitchers to minor-league deals during the offseason, because by doing so, they save space on the 40-man roster. Once those guys are added to that reserve list, though, they have to be in the majors, and many of them come with opt-out clauses in their contracts that allow them to elect free agency if they're not added to the roster. Here are the 15 right-handed pitchers the Cubs will bring to camp with a shot to make their bullpen. I've highlighted in gold the ones who have options, and I've cast the ones not currently on the 40-man roster in gray. A lot of the information you need to project their Opening Day pen is right here. I put a blue fence around the five names we've already discussed, because they're not really part of the competition for space on the roster. For that matter, we don't know whether Rea will end up as part of this mix, even though we know he'll be on the team. If one of the team's incumbent starters gets hurt during camp, Rea would be first in line to step into the back end of the rotation. Let's assume that there are two more spots to assign to members of the cohort outside that blue box. Injuries could create a second slot fairly easily. That means that Javier Assad, Ben Brown, Porter Hodge, Gavin Hollowell, Jack Neely and Ethan Roberts are in the mix for spots, but the team can theoretically keep any of them by simply optioning them to the minors. Jeff Brigham, Corbin Martin, Collin Snider and Trent Thornton aren't on the 40-man roster, and if added, they wouldn't be eligible to be sent back to the minors. The flip side is that if they aren't added, they might not be long for the organization. From a roster-juggling perspective, those considerations can almost come out in the wash. Brown and Assad feel pretty safe, because they both have some big-league success under their belts; the ability to stretch out and work multiple innings at a time; and a bit of upside left in their profiles. They won't be traded (unless as part of a fairly significant deal) or designated for assignment. However, Hodge, Hollowell, Neely and Roberts need to have strong camps to hold onto their roster spots. It's nice that they can be sent to the minors, but if the team needs to open a roster spot for one of the four guys on minor-league deals, losing one of those four isn't going to keep the front office up at night. This is why, even in the era of big data and extremely refined player evaluation, spring training battles are very real. If you're Brigham, Martin, Snider or Thornton, you have to come to camp and be better than one of Hodge, Hollowell, Neely or Roberts—and not just better, but better by a wide enough margin that the team feels reasonably confident you'll stick on the roster for a couple of months, to make up for the roster flexibility lost by swapping out an optionable hurler for a roster-locked one. Finally, there's the more fun, on-field set of questions about building a bullpen. In the array above, I used snapshots from Baseball Savant to give a sense of both the arm slot and the pitch shapes of each hurler, so we can see how the team has accumulated diversity (and where redundancy exists). We've come full-circle, here, in that I need to stress that a team shouldn't cultivate diversity in shapes at the expense of quality; some pitch shapes are better than others. Where possible, though, it's good to have guys who throw from varying arm slots and have varying pitch mixes, so that the manager can manipulate matchups as well as possible. Referring back to that image, then, we can see one more reason why Assad is secure in his place on the roster: that high arm slot. He offers hitters a different look than just about any other Cubs righty, so he'll be a change of pace no matter when he pitches. One reason why Webb appealed to the Cubs and merited a big-league deal is the unique interplay of his fastball and changeup, with the latter running arm-side quite a bit but not having much depth. A wrinkle like that helps a pitcher stand out, and makes them more important to a team that doesn't have much of that particular trait. Palencia's velocity is another, related outlier trait, in what is otherwise a relatively soft-tossing pen. Hollowell, Roberts and Snider each offer some lesser variation on what Maton does, with low arm slots and a wide horizontal movement spread. However, the team probably doesn't need all four of those guys. Hollowell and Roberts combined to spend about 75% of their season in Iowa last year. If Snider comes to camp and shows as well as the Cubs expect, he's a good candidate to snare a roster spot, at the expense of one of those two pitchers. Martin's profile is similar to Harvey's, and because Harvey is often injured, the Cubs would probably prefer to keep both pitchers—but ideally, that would be either because Martin is willing to stick around in the minors or because Harvey is on the injured list when the campaign begins, leaving another spot open on the 26-man roster. If Martin has a great spring and the team wants to keep him, but Harvey is healthy, they'll have a bit of redundancy in profiles in middle relief. However, it wouldn't hurt them terribly to add him to the 40-man, because his profile is also somewhat similar to those of Neely and Hodge. Those, again, are pitchers the Cubs didn't trust for most of 2025, and Martin would give them much of what they'd lose by waiving either. If the Cubs landed Thornton without granting him an opt-out or upward mobility clause (which is plausible, because he's still recovering a bit from an Achilles injury last summer), he could be the most valuable pitcher in this set. As we discussed last week, he looks like a terrific candidate to add a kick-change to his arsenal, and if he develops one, he'll have a pitch mix much like those of Rea or Assad. He doesn't have quite as much capacity to pitch multiple innings as they do, but he's a nice piece to have as backup for either one. If he can leave at the end of spring, though, he's a much tougher fit, and might be destined to land elsewhere in a March trade. Finally, there's Brigham. His cutter is a unique pitch, but not an especially good one. It sits halfway between his rising four-seamer and a solid sweeper, but doesn't engender the confusion one might hope for. That makes him the wrong kind of redundancy; he doesn't really protect the team from injury. With a tweak or two, he could be similar to Hodge, but Hodge can be optioned to the minors. Brigham would have to embrace some significant changes in camp to merit a place on the 40-man roster, knowing he'd likely be last in the bullpen pecking order and would soon have to be replaced. This isn't even the exhaustive list of guys who could theoretically pitch for the team early in 2026. They'll also get looks at non-roster righty Zac Leigh, and they've signed Yacksel Rios as another non-roster invitee. These 15 will be the most interesting names to watch, though, and the way they fit together—who could replace whom, and who makes a nice complement to the rest of the group—will be the final determinant of the team's choices two months from now. View full article

Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-Imagn Images The hot stove is burning itself out in a blaze of glory. In the last week, a flurry of moves has drawn down the list of truly impactful free agents to just two or three names. Trades have sent frontline starters Freddy Peralta and MacKenzie Gore and talented outfielder Luis Robert Jr. to new clubs. What was fluid for a long time appears increasingly concrete. The contenders and the pretenders are separating themselves much more clearly. After their acquisitions of Edward Cabrera and Alex Bregman this month, the Cubs are very much on the contender side of the divide. However, they insist that they're not done tinkering with their roster, and indeed, we can survey the likely Opening Day corps and see places where upgrades are still possible. Here's how I'd rank the team's remaining needs, a few weeks out from the beginning of spring training. 1. A reliable left-handed batter, ideally with positional flexibility. That's a lot to ask for, in the endgame of the offseason. Worse, the Cubs are likely to ask such a player to accept a roving role that comes up short of everyday playing time, so it's very hard to imagine them both acquiring such a player and keeping them happy. If it were possible, though, it would be awfully nice. Michael Busch is the only left-handed hitter on the roster who has proved he can consistently hammer right-handed pitching. Ian Happ is a de facto second threat, as a switch-hitter, but the uncertainty around Pete Crow-Armstrong and Moisés Ballesteros makes bringing in one more solid lefty bat somewhat important. Don't expect that player to be Luis Arraez. He's still a free agent, but he has very little defensive utility and his game has become a caricature of itself at the plate. He never strikes out, but doesn't hit the ball hard very often, either. Switch-hitter Luis Rengifo could be in the right price range, coming off a disastrous walk year with the Angels after three good ones. He's always been a better hitter from the right side of the plate, though. A trade could unearth just the right player, like Luis García of the Nationals or Hyeseong Kim of the Dodgers, but it's easy to overpay when trying to fill a highly specific need in the trade market. Wary of that, Jed Hoyer and his team might elect to wait and see how urgent this need is come July, by which time enough progress from Ballesteros and/or Crow-Armstrong could obviate it. 2. One More Starter This has been discussed at length in all corners of Cubdom over the last two weeks, but even with an ostensible six-man rotation and Javier Assad, Ben Brown and Jordan Wicks able to start the season stretched out in Iowa, the team needs more quality depth in the rotation. That's why they're still interested in Zac Gallen, and will be only slightly less so in pitchers like Nick Martinez and Zack Littell if Gallen signs elsewhere. Injuries are coming for their incumbent starters. Filling this need via trade would be optimal, again, because it would allow them to target a controllable hurler who can be optioned to the minors. If they can find an opportunity to get better and more left-handed on the bench, trading Matt Shaw for a starter who can start the season in the minors would be in play. The team now has three players (Kevin Alcántara, Justin Dean and newly signed Chas McCormick, coming to camp on a minor-league deal) vying for the backup outfielder slot on the roster. Shaw's work in the outfield in Arizona this month is for show, to keep him mollified and to entice potential trade partners. 3. High-Octane Bullpen Help Though they're a bit roster-locked after signing four veterans to big-league deals and needing to stash Colin Rea in the pen for some stretches, the Cubs have depth and optionality in the bullpen. If they're going to make any further moves there, it should be for a no-doubt difference-maker, and it's not at all clear that such a player is available right now. The free-agent market for relievers has run dry, partially thanks to the Cubs. They have a bunch of optionable arms on the 40-man roster, and a bunch more interesting minor-league signees. Unless the Padres are desperate to clear some payroll and want to trade one of the electric arms in their bullpen, the Cubs should just roll into camp with what they have. These needs don't mesh all that well with the market. What's available is more along the lines of positionless right-handed hitters like Miguel Andujar. The fact that he's available is the best reason anyone can muster for why the Cubs have been tied to him. He's not a fit for them. Nor are most of the low-wattage starters left out there. The Twins would like to trade lefty-batting Trevor Larnach, but he can only play left field or DH, so the Cubs would have to be very confident in Shaw as a multi-tool off the bench to deal for Larnach. The Giants keep calling about Nico Hoerner, but their offers aren't getting any better. It's probably true that the Cubs will make one or two more moves before spring training begins. The smart money, though, says that they'll be inconsequential, and probably unsuccessful. Chicago has had a good offseason. They might be out of ways to reasonably improve for 2026, without destabilizing the rest of what they've assembled. View full article