Matthew Trueblood

It's become clear, over the last two days, that the Cubs' major focus is to complete a trade for Houston Astros right fielder Kyle Tucker. They have sidelined multiple negotiations with free agents for the time being, hoping to get a deal done and have more clarity about their roster before needing to add a new signee to that group and create a space by designating someone for assignment, at what could be an inopportune time. All their energy is going toward big swings in the trade market, and Tucker is the prize. However, they view it as important to trade Cody Bellinger first, since Houston does not value him highly enough to warrant his inclusion in a Tucker deal. Thus, the linchpin of the team's tactical approach to grabbing Tucker is sending Bellinger to one of the other interested teams. The most likely of those, by far, is the Yankees, where Bellinger could fit at multiple spots and would reduce the Bombers' uncertainty in the lineup, without foreclosing any of the other options they're pursuing. That makes the reports of progress between Chicago and New York Thursday evening important ones, and the inclusion of pitching prospect Will Warren in those discussions is especially compelling. Warren, 25, has been on the Cubs' radar for a while. He's primarily a sinker-sweeper guy, and his stuff is nasty. He struck out 28% of opposing batters, even in a season in which he posted an ERA just under 6.00 in Triple A and a mark over 10.00 in the majors. Warren doesn't overpower hitters with sheer velocity, but his location of both the sinker and the sweeper is superb, and the movement on the two pitches combined with that command makes for a devastating attack. He also has an average four-seamer, a changeup, and a cutter, making his arsenal deep enough and his swing-and-miss sufficient to slot into the middle of a starting rotation at his best. As you might expect from someone who works east-and-west the way he does, Warren has a fairly low arm slot. He also has a bit of crossfire to his delivery, with a closed stride that forces his body to sweep around his front leg. That puts a lot of pressure on his four-seamer, when it comes to getting lefties out. To his credit, after a very rocky start to the season in Triple A, Warren did figure that out, emphasizing the four-seamer more after Jun. 1. Because his changeup separates from his sinker only in velocity, and not in terms of movement, he needs that four-seamer to set it up to lefties. The sinker does a fine job of putting right-handed hitters into a fork as a partner to his sweeper, but as the season progressed, he even ratcheted up the usage of that four-seamer to righties. He also virtually scrapped the cutter mid-season. This is adding up to rather a lot of changes. Did they help him pitch better as the year went on? In short: yes, but it still looks a bit messy. His season breaks down thusly: Through 5/31 (AAA): 205 batters faced, 44 1/3 innings, 48 strikeouts, 19 walks, 13 home runs allowed, 8.53 ERA, .918 opponent OPS Jun. 1-Jul. 25 (AAA): 220 BF, 51 1/3 IP, 67 SO, 16 BB, 5 HR, 4.03 ERA, .656 opp. OPS Jul. 30-Aug. 31 (MLB): 104 BF, 21 2/3 IP, 26 SO, 9 BB, 4 HR, 9.55 ERA, .985 opp. OPS Sep. 6-18 (AAA): 61 BF, 14 IP, 21 SO, 4 BB, 1 HR, 4.50 ERA, .662 opp. OPS After all that, he did make one more forgettable and meaningless appearance in the big leagues to finish the season, but it's not worth further muddying that water. Suffice it to say this: Once Warren tweaked his pitch mix, while he was in the minors, he had a ton of success. However, he's prone to the home run, and hasn't yet solved some of the more complex problems posed by high-level hitters. At least one scouting report also indicated that Warren's sweeper is a pitch uniquely ill-suited to the automated strike zone used for much of the season in Triple A, so he might have been even better than these numbers look once he sorted things out in the minors. Obviously, Warren is an intriguing arm, with plenty of potential bullpen utility if the starting thing doesn't work out. Predictably, he has significant platoon splits. He would slot somewhere in with Javier Assad, Brandon Birdsell, Ben Brown, Cade Horton, Hayden Wesneski, and Jordan Wicks, the Cubs' gratifyingly deep stable of back-end rotation arms with upside either in the middle of a rotation or the bully portion of a bullpen. Where he fits is a matter of scouting preferences and other considerations, but he'd increase the team's ability to trade from that sector of their roster, which might come in handy, be it in Tucker negotiations with Houston or in pursuit of Dylan Cease from San Diego. The Cubs hope not to have to eat more than $5 million in the Bellinger trade, to give themselves as much financial flexibility as possible when they turn their attention to other necessary moves. If they succeed in getting the Yankees to take on nearly all the money, Warren would probably be the only piece they get back. That's fine. He has clear flaws, just as the other pitchers in the mix he would join do. However, he'd be a strong return in a trade primarily motivated by the need to free up other options.

It's not time to break up the Padres just yet. They have a championship-caliber core, and they intend to continue leveraging it, chasing and pressuring the Dodgers. There's a problem, though: they don't have Dodger money, and right now, they have nearly Dodger-level financial commitments on the books. With Joe Musgrove out for the coming season following Tommy John surgery, San Diego needs another starting pitcher. They also need a starting catcher and a left fielder. How much do they have to spend in the pursuit of those needed pieces? How does -$3 million sound? From that situation has come a torrent of rumors about how the Padres can solve problems via the trade market, rather than signing players to fill all of the roles listed above. Two names have been mentioned most often, because each is under team control for just one more season and each is likely to make more than $14 million via arbitration: Luis Arraez and Dylan Cease. Trading Arraez would clear some money for San Diego, but that amount isn't enough to make up for the new hole it would open in their lineup—because Arraez's skill set and lack of defensive value don't leave him with much trade value. In other words, while a team might take on his money for 2025, finding a suitor who would give up one or more useful players or prospects in exchange for him is likely to prove impossible. The Padres need to find enough excess value in a deal to allow themselves to make a second trade, or some younger players they can insert directly into their lineup, as well as clearing money to spend on one key free agent or expensive trade target. Thus, Cease is drawing more attention, and is more likely to be dealt. He's set to make as much as $15 million in his final season before hitting free agency, after a first season with the Padres in which he was (for the fourth year in a row) a high-strikeout workhorse starter. He bounced back from a quietly weak 2023 with a terrific 2024 campaign, fueled by a much-needed tweak to his slider and the introduction of a sweeper that got him out of his traditionally vertical pitch shape profile. He's as durable as any starter in baseball, and he's learning to pitch more intelligently as he matures. His fastball also hums in at just under 100 miles per hour, even as he nears 30. Any trade for Cease would involve shedding his salary, but also getting San Diego multiple controllable pieces. The Cubs are perfectly positioned to be that kind of trade partner, depending on what happens with the Kyle Tucker trade rumors still percolating as of Thursday morning. They could send San Diego a big-league-ready bat like Owen Caissie for Cease, or they could gorgeously fill the Padres' need for a left fielder by trading them Seiya Suzuki, solving their own problem of player satisfaction and roles in the process. There are a couple of problems with each potential deal, though. Firstly, with the Suzuki version, the Cubs would want more back than Cease in exchange for Suzuki, who has two years of team control left instead of one. Suzuki is also going to be more expensive than Cease, so that trade would fill one spot while vacating another, but it wouldn't save San Diego money the way they would want. If San Diego added Wandy Peralta to the deal (rounding out the Cubs' bullpen with a fairly inexpensive and accomplished lefty) and the Cubs agreed to send a bit of money with Suzuki so that the net money in the trade was a savings, would it work for both sides? It's hard to say. In the other version of the trade, sending the ex-Padres farmhand Caissie back to San Diego in exchange for the ex-Cubs farmhand Cease, the issue would be whether San Diego views Caissie as sufficient compensation for Cease. They probably wouldn't. The Cubs could throw in a controllable, low-cost hurler (Javier Assad? Ben Brown? Jordan Wicks?), but would that tilt the balance too far the other way? It's probably a fair deal if the Cubs give up Assad and Caissie for Cease, but it applies a lot of pressure on the front office. Such a deal would dramatically raise the stakes of winning in 2025, for a team for whom those already feel very high. Pairing a Cease acquisition with a Tucker deal would be the most appealing way to justify each trade, since both of them feel like they could require slight overpays. The concept is, you let a little extra value go because you're adding these two superstars to the roster for a pivotal season. You're pushing all-in. It's a maneuver as difficult to pull off as it is risky, though, so if the Cubs even consider it, they should also consider simply widening their budget and bulking up via free agency.

The Cubs found a market inefficiency, here. Ever since the players union got its butt kicked in the negotiation of a new collective bargaining agreement for the 2007 season and eligibility for the Rule 5 Draft was pushed back a year for all players, it's been virtually impossible to find honest-to-God toolsheds worth taking in that annual ritual. Anyone with major upside, especially on the positional side, gets added to their organization's 40-man roster before they become eligible. But the Cubs found a workaround, by being willing to pick a player who is an extremely unusual level of messy. Gage Workman was the Tigers' fourth-round pick in the truncated 2020 MLB Draft, out of college. Like many players taken that year, his development was disrupted before it even really began. Unlike many players, that played a special kind of havoc for Worman, because he had fascinating tools but a whole lot of adjustments to make in order to become a viable high-level hitter. Unfortunately, he never found his way to those adjustments. Workman played third base in college but has mostly been a shortstop in pro ball, even though he stands 6-foot-4 and is solidly built. He's rangy and athletic, and there's some measure of raw power in his frame and his swing, especially from the left side. He entered the pros as a switch-hitter, but his right-handed swing was so hopeless that he now bats solely left-handed. Workman's hit tool has never come together. Without it, his value is extremely limited, which is why he was available to the Cubs in this draft. He struck out a discouraging 27.5% of the time in Double A this season, and that was after a half-season at that level (with a truly calamitous 38.8% punchout percentage) in 2023. He did also accept his walks, though, and he showed burgeoning power. For the year, against right-handed pitchers, he batted .290/.380/.509. His approach is emerging, and with it comes some mitigation of his major swing-and-miss issues. Still, Workman is a thoroughly weird prospect. He's a superb defender all around the infield, and a lefty bat, which makes him superficially appealing as a bench piece. In those ways, he's a bit like Nick Madrigal or Miles Mastrobuoni. Yet, he'll run a strikeout rate that looks like Patrick Wisdom's, and that's the size of the body here, too. Wisdom was a similarly scrapheap type of pickup for the Cubs, and he worked out gorgeously, really. Even he had demonstrated a much greater capacity to hit for power and attack high-level pitching than Workman has, though. This feels like a roll of the dice on a player who found some developmental momentum in the second half of this season. He batted .317/.398/.550 after Jul. 1 this summer. When something like that happens, especially for a player with an acknowledged baseline of impressive athleticism, there's always a chance it's highly auspicious. If that turns out to have been a toolsy player turning a corner, the Cubs will look like geniuses. If (as sure feels more likely) it was just a good stretch for a flawed prospect going past 600 plate appearances at one level, they'll probably return Workman to the Tigers org in the middle of spring training. All it costs to find out, for now, is a spot on a 40-man roster that has plenty of chaff to cut away, so it's worth a shot. This is a high-ceiling shot in a low-ceiling market. For that very reason, though, it has only very remote chances of working out.

Firstly, and this is not an estimate the team has put out publicly but I've talked to several people and am comfortable giving this general range: the Cubs intend to spend between $220 million and $235 million on their total payroll for 2025. They also want to stay below the competitive-balance tax threshold, but in this case, that won't be the main focus. The high end of their budgetary range is a bit south of the $241 million that marks the first threshold for the tax anyway, so they'll expect to come in below it. That's important to know. Here's the next key fact, in sequence: As things stand right now, including projected arbitration salaries and the Matthew Boyd deal from last month but not including the as-yet-unconfirmed Carson Kelly deal, the Cubs project to have a payroll right around $175 million. It's probably safer to call that $180 million, but that's the range. In other words, they can comfortably add anywhere from $40 million to $50 million more in 2025 payroll from here. If we assume they do get a deal done with Kelly and that he'll make somewhere just south of $10 million, we can say they have a solid $40 million with which to work, but probably no more. To get from here to where they want to be on $40 million isn't quite as easy as it sounds, though. Public remarks by Jed Hoyer and Carter Hawkins have made it fairly clear that the team still wants to add a starting pitcher and at least one solid reliever. We also know they are aware of the need to upgrade the offense, partially because Seiya Suzuki might not be willing to act as a regular DH. Those are high-dollar menu items, and obviously, they do not intend to just throw cash at the problem. Let's sketch out what they might do, though. We know they're in heavy on Kyle Tucker, should that trade actually materialize. While the possibility of that remains slim (and while visions of Brian Roberts and Jake Peavy should dance in your head today, as a prophylactic against premature excitement), it's a real possibility. That would be a coup, not least because it would end up being something like cash-neutral. The team would send out either Cody Bellinger or Suzuki in the process, and even if they gave up both Suzuki and Isaac Paredes and took back Ryan Pressly along with Tucker, that would add very little to their total payroll. It would cost them a lot in young talent, of course, but it would still be a game-changer, because it would leave that $40 million untouched. It could then be directed toward the aforementioned starter and reliever. Imagine, even, that the Cubs end up spending an eight-figure sum on Kyle Finnegan, as we're roughly guessing they will with Kelly. That would still leave them positioned to absorb as much as $25 million in order to bring on board a starting pitcher to complete their depth chart. There are any number of ways to do that, and they'd probably like to do it cheaper, but that amount of money would give them endless paths forward. A deal that nets them Luis Castillo of the Mariners would still be on the table in such a scenario, for instance. Assuming the Tucker deal remains just a nice dream, the needle needs some more careful threading. Any alternative move would come with some amount of added cost, and would mark a smaller upgrade to the positional corps. In such a case, though, they could turn all their attention and their expendable prospect capital toward acquiring Garrett Crochet, after all. He's cheap enough monetarily to have the same liberating effect on the rest of their key to-do list items as landing Tucker would have, but in a different way. The only substantial risk here is that, of the huge web of possibilities the team has cultivated over the last few weeks, they fail to bring any of the big things to fruition. The hurdle there isn't money; that's the good news. While the Ricketts family could and should spend much more money on the team each year, this offseason will be defined by what the front office does next. As this review should tell you, they won't be held back from anything they're seriously interested in by finances. Instead, they'll succeed or fail based on their ability to convert the possible into the actual, rather than letting these cool rumors turn into the next round of excruciating and (eventually) boring hypotheticals.

The third-ever MLB Draft Lottery was held Tuesday afternoon in Dallas, and the Cubs got no help, again. For the third year in a row, they were in the mix to slide up and claim a lottery pick, but instead, they'll end up drafting 17th, after picking 13th in 2023 and 14th in 2024. Meanwhile, after the Reds caught a huge break and landed the second overall pick via the lottery last year (despite similar odds to do so to the Cubs'), the archrival Cardinals landed the fifth pick this time around, despite identical odds to the Cubs'. In short, three years in, this system has done nothing to change the Cubs' expected fortunes, except sliding them back a slot or two each year. Meanwhile, two divisional foes have gotten access to elite talent. It's a bummer, even if it's ludicrous to imagine that the process is somehow fixed or unfair. It's bad luck, but that bad luck sure feels cruel. Don't feel bad for the Cubs, though. This is their own fault—not only because they haven't built a team good enough to reach the postseason since 2018, but because they keep proving that they're capable of doing so, but don't take a sufficient interest in doing so until after the season gets going. In 2022, the Cubs hit the halfway point on pace for 66 wins. They won 74. In 2023, they were on pace for 76 halfway into the campaign, but ended up winning 83, and this season, they got to the same final number from an 81-game pace for 74. It's a good thing when your team wins games, and we shouldn't be in the business of chiding the team for winning more in the second halves of those campaigns, but doing so cost them draft position. It's not as clear—it's not guaranteed, like it used to be—but the team's odds to get high picks would have been far better if they hadn't played winning baseball in all those second halves. They've probably cost themselves about $2 million in spending power over the last three years by coming on strong after sluggish, sloppy starts that betray poor offseason roster construction—all of which might be tolerable, except that in none of those seasons have they ultimately been good enough to reach the postseason. The lesson Jed Hoyer and company should take from that is simple: they need to get aggressive, right now, rather than wait around and rebuild their bullpen on the fly next Memorial Day weekend. They need to enter the season with a 90-win projection, the way Craig Counsell demanded that they do, rather than hedge and hope. And if they don't do so, but rather flop out of the gate and seem headed for another 90-loss season at the midpoint of 2025, Hoyer should be fired, and the team should sell aggressively at the trade deadline, the better to avoid repeating the pattern of self-defeating victories late in lost seasons. There's a little bit of random chance in the distribution of wins throughout a season, of course. Even so, it's clear that the Cubs are spending too much of the first half of each season figuring out how best to align and adjust their roster in order to field a winner. They need to do that work now, in December and January, even though trying to do so comes with some added risks. Otherwise, they might end up attending another lottery next December, with similarly lousy odds to acquire game-changing talent.

We got some newfound clarity about the options box the Cubs are trying to unpack this winter on Tuesday—but all we learned was that they enjoy no real clarity or simplicity at all. Seiya Suzuki's agent, Joel Wolfe of Wasserman, spoke to reporters and revealed that the team has already approached Suzuki with a list of teams, trying to ascertain to which of them he would accept a trade. The impetus for this bizarre exploration process, it turns out, is that Suzuki does not want to be an everyday designated hitter, which is the role in which he finished 2024 and for which he would project most neatly on the 2025 Cubs right now. To accommodate Suzuki without trading away a big bat, the team would have to put him back in right field and turn Cody Bellinger into a full-time DH, which would hurt the defense and could dampen the team's offensive production, as well. That, we can now see, is why the team has seemed so focused on trading Bellinger all winter, and why the last week has brought reports that they're considering parting with Suzuki instead. They aren't delusional. They know they need to improve their offense, not weaken it by trading away one of their best bats without adding someone in exchange. But the challenge of executing this difficult maneuver—of either trading Bellinger for positive value and acquiring a DH who can outhit him, or dealing Suzuki and finding anyone to deliver value commensurate with his superb bat, all without exceeding a budget that provides flexibility but is far from limitless—seems to have paralyzed them. They're pursuing huge ideas, like acquiring Houston's Kyle Tucker. They might also have their eyes on other targets, too, like Angels outfielder Taylor Ward (rumored to be part of a deal that didn't get completed Tuesday but might still be in progress) or one of the Rays' increasingly highly-paid veteran infielders, Brandon Lowe and Yandy Díaz. The problem is, these big ideas and the complicated series of options they need to evaluate are costing them time—and a sudden abundance of moves throughout the rest of the league is making that time costly. Max Fried signed with the Yankees Tuesday evening, for a price the Cubs were never going to match. Later, though, Nathan Eovaldi agreed to a three-year deal with the Rangers that the Cubs (once mentioned as a possible destination for Eovaldi) might have found much more palatable. The Guardians traded second baseman Andrés Giménez to Toronto, alleviating payroll pressure that would have made it easier to strike a deal with them for first baseman Josh Naylor. The Marlins swapped right-handed slugger Jake Burger to Texas, removing one option the Cubs might have pursued to assure themselves of sufficient power on the infield corners and platoon with Michael Busch. In most cases, you can't afford to kick yourself over every move made without you. The Cubs, as they so often have under Hoyer, are being excruciatingly patient, trying to work the right move and resisting any sense of panic about their ability to work one at all. Right now, though, understanding the pickle they landed in when Bellinger opted in for 2025 and Suzuki adopted this stance about his position and usage, the team needs to find a decisive strike, and soon. As alternative paths to the improvement they need in all four departments of the roster—starting lineup, bench, starting rotation, and bullpen—are foreclosed by other teams and players making their committal choices, the difficulty of doing enough to avoid another season of maddening averageness climbs. Wednesday will be pivotal for the Cubs. If the action slows down again league-wide, they can afford to take a deep breath and continue surveying options. They need to keep some suboptimal but appealing choices ready, though, because if a certain sequence of things unfolds on the final day of the Winter Meetings, they might soon be fighting their way out of a tough corner.

If we're being honest, it didn't make that much sense for the Cubs to take an interest in trading Cody Bellinger this winter. Sure, you could squint and see it, if they really wanted a major shakeup of their positional corps and/or if they believe they need a major infusion of pitching talent but need to stay budget-neutral. On balance, though, it's a confusing reality to which we've all been reconciling ourselves since Bellinger opted in to his deal after the World Series. It seems like Bellinger playing right field, with Seiya Suzuki at DH, Pete Crow-Armstrong in center and Ian Happ in left, was a really nice configuration. We even saw Suzuki find a gorgeous rhythm as the everyday DH down the stretch in 2024, batting .326/.433/.500 in 37 games and 171 plate appearances to finish the season after moving into that role. It's harder than a casual baseball fan might guess to find guys who can thrive as the DH. Suzuki, who was a disastrously bad right fielder beginning in early 2023, made the transition seamlessly, and it seemed like all parties should be fairly comfortable with keeping that good thing going. Now, we can all understand what was happening, and why the team has seemed so unsure of what to do for the last month. Ohhh. If Suzuki didn't like being a DH, it's a lot easier to see why some alternative arrangements would need to be explored. If it was difficult to grasp why the Cubs would want to trade Bellinger under our old understanding of the situation, their recently reported openness to trading Suzuki (and specifically, the idea that they were dead-set on trading one or the other) was downright inscrutable. If one tossed out the idea that they were just being extraordinarily cheap, it was inexplicable. Now, it's extremely explicable. A situation in which Suzuki is unwilling to be the everyday DH is a totally different set of problems than we thought Jed Hoyer was trying to solve. His bat was more than good enough, for the bulk of last season, to write him in at that spot and bring him back, shopping only for the player who might allow him to be clearly second-best in the lineup, rather than its anchor. However, if he feels he has to play the outfield (and, although his agent does not explicitly suggest this to be the case in the above, if he wants out unless he can be given that chance), then the Cubs have to do something big. Trading Bellinger is one solution, because then, Suzuki goes back to right field. Clearing the money owed to Bellinger gets important in a hurry if you think the Cubs have to replace his bat with a DH like Pete Alonso, Anthony Santander, or J.D. Martinez, in addition to spending young talent on further help for the starting rotation. Before that could happen, though, you'd think the Cubs would want some concrete reason to believe that he'll be better there than he was for the last year and a half he spent in that position. Moving Suzuki to left is not an option. Ian Happ has a no-trade clause he's much less likely to waive, and too much of his value comes from his superb defense to obliterate that value by sliding him to DH, all the while risking a big downgrade if the sun of right field turns out not to have been Suzuki's problem. That leaves the possibility of trading Suzuki himself. In light of this new information about his preferences (which sure sound strong), that feels much more plausible than it did a few days ago. Certainly, the team can't keep both Bellinger and Suzuki if the latter is unwilling to be the regular DH from here on out. Suzuki would have more trade value, of course, because he's a better hitter and is on a less expensive, less player-friendly contract. However, he'd also leave a bigger hole in the lineup and force you to do something bigger to replace him. It's a big dilemma, and now, we can well understand why the team has proceeded cautiously all along. This is bad news, I think, because the best version of the 2025 Cubs I foresaw before learning this had Suzuki as the DH almost all the time. Now, it seems like multiple major moves need to be made to get to a version that matches or betters that one. Still, it's enlightening, and thus something of a relief. Why have the Cubs acted a little weird all winter? This is why. And this could explain some of the really exciting possibilities being floated through the rumor mill, as neatly as it explains the more maddening notes.

My big problem with Kyle Finnegan is this: dude throws his splitter for strikes too much. It's a strange-sounding complaint, when it first hits your ear (or your eyes, here), but it's legitimate. Last season, almost no one in baseball gave up more hard contact than Finnegan did, and the reason was simple: his splitter (a pitch that must dive and invite chases and rack up whiffs to be maximally effective) just hangs in the zone too much. Only three pitchers who threw at least 100 splitters this season had a higher Called Strike Probability on the pitch, on average, and all three of them were at least able to consistently induce grounders with theirs. Finnegan throws a lot of hittable, in-zone splitters, and while the pitch misses a tolerable number of bats per swing, it also gets hit hard when batters guess right—often, with some air under it. He makes up for this deficiency, principally, with a fastball that sits 97 and touches 99. That pitch can bully hitters and limit hard contact, such that he doesn't give up home runs at a truly calamitous rate. Because the splitter doesn't fool hitters enough or get out of the zone often enough, though, he throws a lot of heat. That limits his upside, because it keeps him to a below-average strikeout rate. Having (functionally) just two pitches and throwing them in this proportion is a recipe for giving up too much contact to be a closer, which is why Finnegan was non-tendered by the Nationals last month. He doesn't have the elite batted-ball profile or the elite command you'd need to see to expect dominance from a pitcher with subpar punchout percentages, and if a guy can't dominate, he shouldn't be a high-leverage reliever. Why, then, am I smiling at the idea of the Cubs signing him? I wasn't, as recently as a few hours ago! What's changed? In short: I looked harder at his slider. Here are Finnegan's pitch movement plots for the last two seasons. His splitter command was pretty shaky in 2024, which surely didn't help with the problem of insufficient whiffs. The more important data, though, are the yellow dots on the left here. Those depict Finnegan's slider, which underwent a huge change last season. In 2023, it was basically a cutter, humming in just under 90 miles per hour with some lift but little glove-side movement. This year, he cut four miles per hour off of it and reshaped it into a true gyro slider, with much greater depth. This pitch is miles better than the former version of itself. Finnegan's slider went from a 95 Stuff+ to a 112 when he made this tweak. His StuffPro and PitchPro numbers on the pitch at Baseball Prospectus (which reclassified the new slider as a sweeper) made a similar leap from 2023 to 2024, almost into elite territory. His breaking ball is a legitimate weapon, now. He just didn't throw it like he knew that. Finnegan commanded the pitch fine and executed it as or more consistently, relative to his splitter. Yet, he didn't ramp up his usage of the slider. I'm not sure why, and the Cubs should get an answer to that question before they commit to him. If he's open to busting out that pitch about three times as often in 2025, though, he could become one of the best relievers in the game, and the team should be all over him, even on a multi-year deal.

One year ago, the Yankees traded for Juan Soto, giving up a handsome package in exchange for a single season of the services of one of the best hitters of his generation. It was a less daunting deal than it could have been, though, for the simple reason that there was just that one year of control to be had. Soto was, as everyone knew, headed for a highly lucrative free agency, and he and Scott Boras were not going to be dissuaded from that path. That dampened the trade market slightly. For instance, it chased the Cubs away from any serious effort to sign him, before they even considered one. As cautiously as Jed Hoyer approaches huge outlays for top-tier free agents, he's even more reluctant to splurge in the less renewable currency of young talent, by trading top prospects for players over whom he'll have only short-term control. Some players come at a discount because they won't be around long, and such players can hold some appeal for Hoyer and the Cubs, but they're not looking to deal for players at steep prices if they stand to lose them in short order. As the Dodgers eventually did, the team would surely have sought an extension with Tyler Glasnow as a condition of the trade, had they been the ones to pry him away from the Rays last winter. All of that is to say this: If Kyle Tucker of the Astros is not open to an extension this winter in lieu of hitting free agency next fall, then the Cubs are wildly unlikely to acquire him. Reports from the Houston beat at the Winter Meetings indicate that the Astros are lacking clear marching orders from ownership in terms of their 2025 payroll (wonder what that's like, sounds terrible), and that they're open to moving one of Tucker and fellow impending free agent, left-handed starter Framber Valdez. Both players are due significant salaries in their final year of team control, anyway, so moving them would give the team at least a modicum of financial flexibility, but the Astros also have one of the league's worst farm systems, and a blockbuster deal involving either Tucker or Valdez could help them replenish it, This is not, in other words, a Mookie Betts-type situation, where clearing salary will be the sole motivator in a trade and it might be possible to acquire a superstar at a deep discount. Tucker, should be traded, will command a top prospect or two in exchange. Still, it's possible to imagine the Cubs jumping into that fray. Tucker is not a Boras client; he's represented by Excel Sports Management. Quietly, that group can also be tough to hammer out pre-free agency extensions with. They've taken clients like Dansby Swanson, Jason Heyward, George Springer, and Andrew Benintendi all the way to free agency recently. Then again: Dansby Swanson, Jason Heyward. Another couple of Excel clients: Jameson Taillon, Joc Pederson. The Cubs have a solid relationship with that group. Plus, there are counterexamples to the above. Paul Goldschmidt and Pablo López are Excel clients who recently signed extensions with teams shortly after being acquired by those clubs in trades. So, let's imagine Tucker is open to an extension if traded to a team willing to spend big enough to keep him. What would such a deal look like—the trade, and then the contract attached to it? The Astros have a tall, slugging left-handed right fielder who will turn 28 in January; who has made the All-Star team in each of the last three seasons; who owns a Gold Glove Award and a Silver Slugger Award; and who has batted .280/.362/.527 over the last four seasons, with 112 home runs and 80 steals in 91 attempts. He's not Soto, but he's a better player than anyone on the Cubs. In fact, he's better than anyone the Cubs have had since the peaks of Kris Bryant and Javier Báez—but he's younger than Bryant was at that stage of his career, and has a much more well-rounded skill set than Báez did. In short, Tucker will cost whoever trades for him a hefty return. The Cubs' only refuge from the high expected cost is that they might be able to cover part of the value by swapping him out for a similar (though clearly inferior) player. Cody Bellinger has already been linked with the Astros in trade rumors, and while Houston's uncertain payroll situation makes it impossible that they would take on the bulk of Bellinger's contract, the Cubs could offer them a square deal: Bellinger and $15 million, such that they effectively take Tucker at the price of Bellinger and give Houston Bellinger at the price of Tucker. Then, they can add value from there to compensate Houston both for the difference between the projected production of the two players and the risk Houston will assume of Bellinger opting into his 2026 salary. That extra cost wouldn't be small. We're still talking about one player from the top four of the Cubs' top prospects list, and another from the third tier of the system. Houston could get more than that, maybe, from the right buyer without an onerous contract swap to include, and there's always a risk that they would prefer the cleaner deal. The theory here, though, is that Houston would pounce on this structure, because they're not looking to reload, retool, or take a step back in 2025. They want to continue their dominance of the AL West and push toward another World Series; they just acknowledge that they might need to trade one of their soon-to-be-free-agent stars to ensure the staying power of their hegemony. Bellinger is a better player for 2025 than they'd be likely to get from any other suitor in a Tucker trade. There is a clear difference favoring Tucker in terms of projections for 2025. Here are Steamer's forecasts for each: Bellinger: 582 PA, .258/.320/.430, 109 wRC+ Tucker: 669 PA, .276/.366/.510, 148 wRC+ Tucker is also the better defensive right fielder, even if Bellinger is probably the player you'd rather have if forced to use them in center field or at first base. Tucker is the better baserunner, too. There's a substantial gap here. Still, you wouldn't want to give up (say) Matt Shaw and Brandon Birdsell for one year's worth of that upgrade, especially given that you'd take on the heavier financial burden in that one season. Houston could get good talent elsewhere, though, so to get them engaged on a deal that clears Bellinger's money for 2026 and gets you the bump from Bellinger to Tucker in 2025, you'd have to offer a deal at that painfully high level. To justify that, naturally, you'd need to have Tucker not just for one year, but for the long run. Getting Tucker to eschew free agency would be an extremely expensive business. He has just one good comparator In the recent past, as a left-hitting outfielder playing at such a high level from ages 24-27: Christian Yelich, who signed a nine-year deal worth $215 million with the Brewers in early 2020. Yelich, though, was two more years from free agency than was Tucker, thanks to a previous extension signed with the Marlins before he was traded to Milwaukee. We can loosely peg the deal the Cubs might cobble together to the one Yelich signed almost five years ago, but it would have to be scaled up significantly. In all likelihood, a deal that would keep Tucker in Cubbie blue beyond 2025 would end up running 10 years and $340 million. He'd get roughly $16 million in 2025, then $35 million per year for nine more seasons, followed by a mutual option with a bulky buyout to push a little extra money out to the end of the deal. Yelich's contract included deferrals, but Tucker is in a strong position to resist those. The Cubs would have to be willing to go far beyond what they've done for any player in the past. Tucker and his representatives would have to be willing to forego the possibility that the Yankees would give him closer to $450 million one year later. If this all sounds wildly unlikely, you're getting the right idea. Tucker and the Cubs make a smart fit, but an improbable one. The tendencies of the Chicago front office, the fog of uncertainty under which Houston is working, and the multiple player evaluations the two sides would have to match up on make the logistics of a deal difficult. The Yankees might just trade for Tucker, instead, the same way they dealt for Soto last winter. They're not as fussy about keeping control when the opportunity to land a superstar arises as the Cubs are. Still, unless and until moves that preclude this one take place, it'll be worth keeping an eye on the Astros and the Cubs. They make strange but potentially fruitful bedfellows this winter.

Though (as I laid out in my first post of the day) they did have a few options, the Cubs' best and dearest hope coming into Day One of the Winter Meetings was to get a deal done with free-agent backstop Carson Kelly. Now, they're on that precipice. Kelly, 30, hit .238/.313/.374 in 91 games and 313 plate appearances in 2024, which he began with the Tigers but finished with the Rangers after being traded in July. That batting line was about 5 percent worse than the league average, adjusting for park effects, and marks him out as a better hitter than most complementary catchers. With the Cubs, should this deal be completed, he'll settle into a fairly equitable time share with Miguel Amaya, and give the team solid defense to pair with that stick. I laid out a comparison of Kelly with Amaya, trade candidate Christian Vázquez, and already-signed free agents Danny Jansen and Kyle Higashioka in the piece linked above, showing that Kelly was the best of them in 2024, overall. He owed much of that value to his superbly accurate arm behind the plate, but he's also coming into his own as a hitter. Jansen was the best hitter in the bunch as recently as early this season, but he slumped badly in the second half and Kelly showed far more consistency with the bat. His swing speed distribution compares interestingly with Jansen's; note how he gets up into the zone where a hitter becomes truly dangerous (around 75 miles per hour) more often. Jansen is better at pulling fly balls, but Kelly makes hard contact more often and whiffs much, much less. His 17.6% strikeout rate was one feature that attracted the Cubs' interest; he'll be a catcher capable of handing the stick and keeping the line moving from the bottom of the order. Kelly also owns an .812 career OPS against left-handed pitchers, and has been over .800 each of the last two years. He'll probably draw most lefty assignments, while Miguel Amaya (career .701 OPS vs. RHP, .559 vs. LHP) will sit those days. Kelly will take on some right-handed starters, too, though, as the Cubs figure to try to balance their catching workload fairly evenly. The new rules (less time between pitches, which means more prolonged squatting; more frequent steal attempts) make catching a more demanding and grueling job than ever, and having someone the team can trust to take about half the playing time in reliably advantageous matchups would be huge for Chicago.

Other than players like Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto, it's a little silly to fixate on any one free agent, from a fan perspective. The likelihood of landing that particular player is quite low, because (after all) the players in question are free to choose the team they prefer. For reasons financial, geographic, competitive or personal, plenty of players end up going somewhere else, even though they seemed like a great fit for the team. Getting upset each time that happens is a recipe for perpetual hot stove misery, and the point of the hot stove season is fun, not misery. Eventually, though, a team does have to find the best player and value they can, and act on it. Sit and watch too long, and good lanes close up for you. The good solutions to obvious problems grow thin, and the few still available become more costly, because the agents or team executives involved begin to sense that they can apply leverage in negotiations. After a flurry of moves this weekend, the Cubs might be approaching that territory—though it would be too much to suggest that they're there already. The Mets signed Clay Holmes to a three-year, $38-million contract Friday night. That was a tough break for the Cubs, and a good example of the phenomenon above, because the Mets intend to move Holmes to the starting rotation. That would have made it practically impossible for the Cubs to rationally match New York's offer, because Holmes (while a fine candidate for that increasingly popular conversion) was not a great fit for the Cubs' projected starting rotation. They couldn't do much to prevent missing out on Holmes. Nonetheless, it was a bitter pill to swallow, because Holmes was one of the best candidates for the bullpen upgrade the team clearly needs this winter. Losing out on him unavoidably reduces the number of good options available to the team, in one area in which that list was already a bit short. There are rumors that they're interested in Kirby Yates, who could be a great short-term fix, but if Holmes hadn't gotten a big offer to switch roles, he could have shored up the back of the Cubs pen through 2027. On Sunday, the market gave the Cubs another 1-2 punch to the proverbial gut, as Tyler O'Neill and Michael Conforto each signed reasonably-priced deals. O'Neill will make just under $50 million over the next three years with the Orioles, while Conforto—one of my favorite targets for the team should they trade Cody Bellinger, after he had a season in which his superficial stats failed to keep up with good batted-ball data and especially impressive bat-tracking numbers—landed with the dynastic Dodgers on a one-year deal that didn't even reach $20 million. That's this winter's answer to last year's Teoscar Hernández signing for Los Angeles, and another painful miss for the Cubs. Realistically, the team almost certainly felt like they couldn't sign a player like Conforto or O'Neill before trading Bellinger. Again, that would have put them in a tough position to deal with either teams or free agents, because the whole industry is aware of the self-defeating limits being placed on the team's spending by ownership and acquiesced to by their insufficiently assertive front office. Still, the missed opportunities are real. There are still plenty of ways the team can try to improve themselves, overall, even if and when they trade Bellinger. The number of viable options dwindled this weekend, though, and whereas it might have been easy to shrug off misses on players like Willy Adames or Shane Bieber due to their cost and fit on the roster, a few players who went elsewhere most recently cut deeper. Jed Hoyer faces a stern test, and Conforto, especially, would have gone a good distance toward helping him pass it. Instead, he'll have to thread the needle from a different angle.

Many Cubs fans had set their sights on catchers Danny Jansen or Kyle Higashioka this winter. Those fans were bitterly disappointed this week, when the Rangers signed Higashioka to a two-year deal and Jansen secured $8.5 million from the Rays on a one-year pact. Nowhere on most fans' radars was Gary Sánchez, but he could also have been a fit, so when he agreed to a one-year deal at the same value as Jansen's on Saturday night, it narrowed the path to upgrading behind the plate even further. The Cubs, of course, have the temporary and minor luxury of getting to decide just how badly they want that kind of upgrade. They also missed out on Travis d'Arnaud, after the erstwhile Atlanta catcher had his team option declined and ended up signing for two years with the Angels. On that very occasion, though, they were able to scoop up Angels castoff Matt Thaiss, a reclamation project and a refugee from one of the league's worst player-development and -instruction outfits. Thaiss, who could improve rapidly with some tweaks to his pitch framing, signed a split contract and is out of options. That means that the Cubs can feel fairly confident about retaining him even if they initially have to pass him through waivers at the end of spring training, because unless another team wants to claim him and make him their backup, he'll be more incentivized to stick around and keep the pay associated with the minor-league aspect of his deal. The first option facing the team, then, is simply to keep Thaiss, wait for Moises Ballesteros, and hope the combination of those two is sufficient support for what they hope will be a full season of the much-improved Miguel Amaya they saw in the second half of 2024. That's appealing, because from here, it's functionally free. The team can spend all of its available resources of money and young, expendable talent elsewhere on their roster. The downside is equally obvious: Thaiss (bat) and Ballesteros (glove) face major questions about their viability as even complementary MLB catchers. Most teams are struggling to find catching right now, but that doesn't mean any team should be complacent with one not-even-proven backstop atop their depth chart. When it comes to realistic external options, though, there are just two apparent remaining ones. The first is Twins catcher Christian Vázquez, whom I first flagged as a potential target in this trade speculation piece two months ago. Vázquez is the defensive specialist—not only among the players remaining available this winter, but arguably, among all of those who ever were or looked poised to be so. Rank all 56 catchers who were behind the plate for at least 300 innings last year, and Vázquez came in ninth in 2024 in Defensive Runs Prevented, according to Baseball Prospectus. He's one of the game's best pitch framers, and is deeply respected as a manager of the pitching staff and a partner in their daily preparation. Two winters ago, the Cubs vied to sign Vázquez, but the Twins were willing to offer a third guaranteed year, so they landed Vázquez. After consecutive poor seasons at the plate, his trade value is in the red, but that only means that the Cubs could acquire him for almost no talent and still pay him less than the Rays and Orioles will pay Jansen and Sánchez, respectively. The final option, though, is the most intriguing. Carson Kelly, the former Cardinals farmhand and potential Yadier Molina successor, was instead traded to Arizona in the Paul Goldschmidt trade several years ago. He's bounced around even more since then, including splitting 2024 between the Tigers and the Rangers, but Kelly, 30, had a very strong campaign in 2024. In fact, he's probably the player more fans tended to hope Jansen or Higashioka could be. Player Framing Runs Blocking Runs Throwing Runs Batting Runs Total M. Amaya -2.7 1.5 -1.5 -4.4 -7.1 D. Jansen -1.9 1 -1 2.1 0.2 C. Kelly -0.8 0.6 2 2.3 4.1 C. Vázquez 7.2 0.5 -0.2 -10.4 -2.9 K. Higashioka 4.3 -0.9 -0.4 0.5 3.5 If the Cubs believe in the swing transformation and the defensive improvements Amaya made in the second half of 2024, they might believe him to be the best of this set of players. Any way you slice the data, though, Kelly looks like one of the best. He's only a few months older than Jansen, and each of them are at a few years younger than Vázquez or Higashioka. Kelly might be looking for a multi-year deal, whereas Jansen chose a one-year prove-it opportunity over the chance of such a payday, but there are good reasons to prefer Kelly. His arm really stands out; Kelly is the only player in this set who was better than average at slowing the running game. (Thaiss, for what it's worth, was one of the very worst catchers in baseball at that this year.) He did it with just an average exchange time—that is, he got rid of the ball after catching it in only a roughly average fraction of a second. He also had a below-average arm, in terms of sheer throwing speed. Yet, he caught four more runners attempting to steal than expected, based on the lead distance and speed of the runners he was throwing against, according to Statcast. How? I'm glad I asked. Updated Catcher Throwing metrics at Baseball Savant break down the contributions of each aspect of a steal attempt to its success or failure. The runner's speed and position are included. So are the catcher's exchange time and throw strength, plus a teamwork element—things like great (or lousy) tags by the infielder, perhaps; it's really just anything other than the catcher's contributions. But among those contributions, there's one more delineated category: Accuracy. On 12 different throws, Kelly's throw accuracy added at least 20% to the chances of a caught stealing, relative to the expected accuracy from an average catcher. On only five throws did he lose at least that much value with an inaccurate throw, relative to the average expectation. Here's that trait in action. Kelly on the Money.mp4 Almost any big-league catcher can do that once, but Kelly does it consistently. Let's take a look at another one, and treat ourselves to a Javier Báez tag, for old times' sake. Kelly Nails Him.mp4 [DJ Khaled voice] Another one. Kelly Dime.mp4 Seriously, he makes throws like these a lot. These are two important things: Effective; and Beautiful. In a world in which runners are freshly emboldened by rules preventing pitchers from messing with their timing as much or throwing over repeatedly to keep them close; the bases into which they're sliding are bigger; and fielders can no longer halfway cheat by cutting off access to the base while they await a throw, there's no surer way to give your team a chance to record outs on steal attempts than dropping the ball into that imaginary bucket, about shin-high and just to the first-base side of the keystone. Kelly does it as well as anyone. It's wonderful that we have stats to capture this now, because accuracy might well turn out to be the biggest key to catcher throwing efficacy, but we don't even need the stats to grasp this. Just watch those videos, and know there are more like them. It's dazzling. Kelly has a near-elite ability to thwart the running game, at a time when that's rising in importance. Kelly's bat-tracking and batted-ball data were also better than Jansen's this year. Overall, I would rather have him than Jansen, so as long as he remains available, the Cubs have a path to a clear (if, perhaps, costly) upgrade at catcher. They could probably sign Kelly for two years and less than $20 million, but not much less. If they're not willing to spend that much on what would probably be just half a position's worth of playing time—even an obviously vital and fairly scarce one—then they'll have to either accept the all-glove, no-stick option of Vázquez or make do with Thaiss. Each option is viable, but requires a different set of other moves to work. The option that puts the least pressure on other moves would seem to be signing Kelly, but since free agents are just that, Kelly could elect to go elsewhere, as Jansen and others did. That's why having at least snared Thaiss and signed him to a deal that secures him as a floor for the secondary catching job was an important early step this winter.

On Thursday afternoon, all hell broke loose for a bit on what is left of Cubs Twitter. Most of the good baseball talk these days is happening at Bluesky, but because Jeff Passan hasn't yet defected, those of us who want to instantly catch important news when it breaks are forced to spend some time on Twitter. And if you're one of those people, you surely encountered at least one of several reports that spilled out on Thursday afternoon and evening about a discussion between the Cubs, White Sox, and Mariners, on what would be a three-way trade involving Garrett Crochet coming to the Cubs and Nico Hoerner going to Seattle. Our own Jacob Zanolla was one of the first to report what he was hearing. Others chimed in with similar scraps, and pretty quickly, a speculative deal came into focus for the lovers of tea leaves and intrigue hovering around the hot stove. Because it was out in the social media atmosphere, the rumor took on a tangibility that made it feel very real and urgent for a lot of people. Alas, within a few more hours, there were multiple reports that the "deal" was "dead." Ok, let's unpack all that a little bit. Firstly, let me say: Jacob was not making things up, and I have no particular reason to think anyone else who tweeted seemingly corroborating reports was, either. I can confirm that those talks took place, not merely Thursday or late Wednesday night but in pieces over the last few weeks, and that the three teams were circling toward a potential deal by Thursday afternoon. It would, indeed, have involved Crochet and (most likely) Hoerner, with one headline prospect going from the Cubs to the White Sox, another going from Seattle to Chicago, and a few ancillary pieces changing hands along the way to balance things out. That much is true. If you follow me on Twitter or on Bluesky, you'll note that I neither tweeted nor skeeted on the subject. However, we did do some background work on it in the North Side Baseball Slack channel. For me, the available information did not rise to the level of reportability, but something was close enough that we started getting ducks in a row. Crucially, I think, fans should understand that it's not especially uncommon for a deal like this to get this close. When I say the rumor didn't quite feel reportable, I don't mean that there was any uncertainty about the existence of the discussions. I just didn't have something that met my own standard for newsworthiness, because trade talks get as far as I believe this one to have gotten happen all over the league, every week. Some of them never even escape the biome of the teams involved, but plenty of them do, and at that point, the external holders of the information have to decide what merits public mention. This is not a criticism of Jacob. I want to make that very clear. He and I don't consult on these subjects anyway, and while his contributions are highly valued and welcome, we would not lay claim to a report by Jacob the same way (say) The Athletic would claim and back one by Ken Rosenthal. He is free to speak with his own voice on Twitter and make his own calls about newsworthiness, as long as he's reporting accurate information. I believe he did just fine here. I just want to start by highlighting the fact that this trade was not especially close. The Cubs, alone, have been closer to another notable deal this winter than they were to completing this one. As far as I know, no one ever publicly reported even the possibility of that trade. Some of our perceptions about trade possibility and activity are distorted, if we ever assume we're hearing about everything—or even that there's a reliable difference between what is reported and what isn't, in terms of how real it got before fizzling out. Now, let's talk about how the deal "died," beginning with whether or not it actually did. As the headline probably tells you, that's not how I would characterize the situation, though my quibble is as much with our language for such situations as with the particulars of this one. Once you understand that this trade was never more advanced than a dozen others that will not-quite happen over the next week, you can see part of my nitpick easily enough. Did it really "live," exactly? Or was it just a gleam in someone's eye, noticed from across a room by an unrelated third party? (Let's, er, abort this metaphor right here. But you get my point.) My second issue is the larger one. Is the deal "dead," as some said? I wouldn't put it that way. Obviously, nothing has happened—no players have changed teams in some other fashion, for instance—to preclude the teams resuming talks. When discussions like these collapse, they tend to be hard to pick back up, because someone has shut something down and it might be a (literal) dealbreaker for someone else. But minds can change, and so can circumstances. I regard it as highly unlikely that the semi-reported deal goes on to get done, but it's not fully scuppered. I would say, instead, that it's been thwarted for now, by two separate problems: Getting the Mariners involved was meant to fix a stall reached by the Cubs and White Sox, rooted in the fact that the Cubs were unwilling to give up any combination of two top prospects the White Sox found satisfactory. They had already talked to Seattle about Hoerner, and folded them into the discussion with the idea of sending Hoerner there and having Seattle supply a second piece the White Sox would accept. Two problems sprang up in the attempt to make that work. Firstly, of the three or four names discussed as that second piece, the Sox and Mariners never came to an agreement on one. I won't divulge the names of any of those young players, but I think each side was being reasonable there. Secondly, the Cubs didn't want to send much in other value (either a supplemental, lower-tier prospect to the Sox, or money to the M's, or both) beyond Hoerner and one top prospect to satisfy the other two teams. As we have often discussed here, the Cubs front office does not like paying transaction costs. They would have had to step up in a significant way to bridge the gaps that existed. The Cubs are also distracted, in a way. Yesterday, we discussed how trading for Eli Morgan and signing Matthew Boyd has started to sharpen the positions on Hoyer's winter chess board. In truth, though, he still has multiple potential strategies available, and this move would have committed the Cubs to one path a bit too soon—at least in one reading of the facts. As was also reported Thursday, the team has plenty of irons in lower-tier free-agent fires, and they're juggling discussions about a possible Cody Bellinger trade (though no, it doesn't seem like Bellinger being part of this trade was much of an option; he would land in Seattle only under a totally different set of scenarios) as well as the pursuit of a high-ceiling player like Crochet. The World Chess Championship is happening right now, in Singapore. World Champion Ding Liren and challenger Gukesh Dommeraju have faced off in nine games, so far, of a possible 14, and I've watched a good amount of their match via various streaming platforms. Each has put some creative and dangerous ideas on the board over the last several games, but they've drawn each of the last six. In that entire run of play, there have only been two or three moments when one of them could have taken decisive control and found a win. They've missed them, even then, not because they weren't good enough at chess, but because they had to consider a wealth of options and remain cognizant of the risk of counterplay, all under the tick and tock of a clock. That's a bit like the situation the Cubs are in right now. As frustrating as the last two seasons have been, any baseball fan (and even some chess fans) can see that the Cubs entered this winter in a strong position. Hoyer has to find the move that can be decisive, at some point, or else his team won't get over the hump and back into the postseason next year. The clock is ticking on him, too. Right now, though, he can see multiple paths to victory, and his opponent—the rest of the league, basically—has some turns yet to play. The timing of this deal wasn't right, or at least, it didn't seem so yet to the parties involved. I wouldn't say it's dead, although it can certainly die in the coming days. Juan Soto will soon sign somewhere; that's a big turn for the other pieces on the board. There will be more, too. It's still possible for the board to rearrange itself a few moves down the road in such a way that these three teams face the same options under more conducive circumstances, or that their appetites for risk have risen. In any game of chess or MLB offseason, though, that circling back is unlikely. Thus, the Cubs have to look for other ways to seize the same kind of initiative, be it through direct negotiations with the White Sox on Crochet (giving up that richer prospect package, and hoping to make up the losses via a separate Hoerner trade) or with the Mariners and others on Bellinger (giving them access to more of the free-agent market again). In the meantime, keep taking reports from anyone but Passan with a grain of salt—not because everyone doing the reporting is a huckster (they're not!), but because a high standard for reporting rumors like these might be the only thing keeping any of us sane. If you really want to put yourself in Hoyer's shoes for a while, grab a chess board and a friend, and keep notifications turned on for Passan until he starts skeeting.