Matthew Trueblood

For this particular Fall Classic, the Midwest truly will be flyover country, as the Yankees and Dodgers pull the attention of the baseball world back and forth across the breadth of the continent. For fans who can set aside their provincialism and the bitterness of their own seasons' ends, though, it's going to be a whale of a matchup. Image courtesy of © Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images Why does it affront so many fans when big-market teams succeed? That question is rhetorical, but not sneering, because once you think about it a bit, the reason is both obvious and reasonable: it makes us all feel small. Every baseball fan holds equal worth, and no team's worth and value depends solely on the size of their fan base, let alone some special merit that stretches past numbers. That's the truth, and it's fair and it's just, but the sharp-edged threat and snarl of it is this: there are more Yankees fans than there are Twins fans. There are more Dodgers fans than there are Twins fans. They aren't smarter, or more passionate, or more special, and neither the league nor its broadcast partners nor mainstream media intends to treat those fans as more valuable than Twins, Brewers, Cubs, or any other kinds of fans. But there are way, way more of them, and that raises the stakes of the whole affair when something like this World Series matchup happens. The league has a greater opportunity, and has a fiduciary duty—as much to Twins and Brewers and Cubs fans as to Yankees and Dodgers fans—to seize it. Their broadcast partners have a larger audience and the ability to justify more resources allocated toward serving it. The commentary media has a chance, especially in our polarized and friction-fueled social media world, to stir up some pride and some bile. They're all going to act accordingly, and it's hard to blame them—er, actually, it's very easy, fun, and wildly popular to blame them. But it's probably also wrong. Coverage of a series like Yankees-Dodgers tends to savor of triumphalism, which our Midwestern eyes tend to code as coastal elitism. In truth, though, it's just writers and marketers and TV producers working with what they have. We might fairly argue for a system that works harder to evenly distribute revenue throughout the league, but even if such a system went into effect today, it wou;dn't erase the last 125 years. Over that century and change, Yankee and Dodger triumphs pepper the landscape, and Yankees and Dodgers legends people the pages. Why is this Series exciting? Because these two teams are meeting in this context for the 12th time, more than anyone else has done it. When the Twins made the World Series, there were plenty of paeans to the value of Minnesotan baseball and its specific virtues. It's just been so long since the team made it that we tend to misremember those blandishments as smaller than the compliments paid to these teams. Certainly, when the Cubs were in the Series in 2016, a huge deal was made of it. Now, it's the Yankees' and Dodgers' turn. Have I convinced you to care about this fight between two evil corporate supervillains? If so, I hope you'll read on, especially if you're not yet a Caretaker. You can become one for just $6 on our monthly plan, which will get you my coverage throughout the Series and our Offseason Handbook right after it. After that, you can decide whether to stick around and continue enjoying the benefits of our premium content, along with extra perks. If not, hey, sign up anyway! Maybe I can sell you on it before the games run out. View full article

We've all been operating a little too confidently when it comes to the Cubs' status as a luxury-tax payer for 2024—unless you feel a whole lot of confidence about what the team's star outfielder is about to do. Image courtesy of © Kyle Ross-Imagn Images Whether or not the Cubs went over the first competitive-balance tax threshold by spending more than $237 million in annual average value salaries and benefits for 2024 matters. It matters quite a bit, for multiple reasons. Firstly, if they did go over that threshold, they did it by a very small amount, and that signals extraordinary incompetence. Jed Hoyer's comments on 670 The Score in August signaling that he expected the team to be tax payers was shocking to many fans, because the way Hoyer couched it, that had been a foregone conclusion for him ever since he chose to sign Cody Bellinger to the one-year deal (with two player options) to which those parties agreed in late February. If that were true, though, why didn't the team spend much more aggressively than that? Even after the Bellinger deal, there were good free agents available, and some good players were traded right in the shadow of Opening Day—partially because teams needed to move their salaries. In simplest terms, no team should ever spend just beyond a tax threshold. The way to do it is to spend right up to such a threshold, assembling as much talent as possible without crossing into a new bracket and suffering more severe penalties. Furthermore, it was obvious to a great many outside observers that the Cubs were not a complete championship contender after re-signing Bellinger. If Hoyer knew that, too, why wasn't he looking for a way to spend another $10 million after bringing back Bellinger? If he didn't, it's a discouraging statement about his perspicacity as an executive. After a close study of the invaluable resource that is Cot's Contracts, however, I think we need to have a slightly more nuanced conversation—because all may not be as it seems.; That site is powered by Baseball Prospectus (where, full disclosure, I am also a contributor), and specifically by Jeff Euston. After looking hard at the Cubs' salary breakdown for 2024, I emailed Euston with some follow-ups. Here's the thing: according to Cot's, the Cubs are only $277,157 over the line. That's based not on the specific salaries each player was paid in 2024, but on their contracts' annual average values, plus various dues and benefits that were negotiated as part of the tax threshold calculation when the union and the league hammered out this system over the course of multiple collective bargaining agreements. Crucially, though, Euston (and all the other people trying to do similar work at competing outlets) has to estimate some of the more nebulous expenses involved there. Could it be that the Cubs aren't actually over that line, despite what Hoyer said in August? In short: yes. "The Cubs could come in within a million or two of the threshold in either direction," Euston wrote in an email. "Inevitably there are things that are not public--credits, cash involved in trades, undisclosed bonuses, etc. I was convinced the Angels would exceed the threshold in 2023 and pay the tax, and somehow they came in under. I parsed the figures for every transaction of their season, and I'm still not sure how they did it. So I'm resigned to the uncertainty, providing the best possible projections I can, then adjusting as I get more information." That matches the attitude, approach, and knowledge level of the others doing the same work in public, and (difficult as this might be to believe) even some people whose job is to track this stuff for big-league teams. Every team has a down-to-the-dollar idea of their own tax situation, but even that reality can change a bit in various unexpected, last-second ways—and many teams are no more certain of their opponents' situations than we are. Wait, then, though. If the Cubs might come in under the tax after all—which would make much more sense than exceeding it by what works out to a rounding error for an organization this big—why did Hoyer come anywhere near saying the opposite this summer? It all comes back to Bellinger. Recall that, weeks after that now-infamous appearance on The Score, he opened his postseason press conference by talking as though Bellinger opting out of his deal was almost a foregone conclusion. Despite the outfielder's injury-marred, good-not-great season and the richness of the $50 million left on his deal over two more years, Hoyer seems very much convinced that the ex-MVP will test the market and try to capture a longer-term deal. Other sources are speculating the same outcome. If that does happen, most of the above is moot, because Bellinger's tax number changes by an amount that dwarfs the current margins around the threshold. While the player still holds his options, the contract is calculated based on the total amount guaranteed, divided by the number of years the player can choose to stick around if they wish. Thus, Bellinger's tax number is $26.7 million right now. If he opts out, after earning $27.5 million this year, he gets a $2.5-million buyout on his way out the door. His tax number for 2024 thus surges up to $30 million, and we're no longer near the line. Based on the information we have, I feel fairly confident in saying this: the Cubs know a little more than we do, and if Bellinger opts in, they'll stay under the tax threshold for 2024. However, they also expect him to opt out—and they're fine with that. My reading of the situation is that Hoyer is fine with being a tax-paying team this year, if it means having $30 million more to allocate as he sees fit this winter. He would rather have that flexibility than be under the line and have Bellinger back in a crowded offensive mix still needing an upgrade, and he expects things to break that way. I want to reiterate that I think it matters whether or not they're over the line, and I still think Hoyer mangled the decision set that led to this circumstance with regard to building next year's team and the hurdles he'll face along the way. If Bellinger does opt out, the Cubs will have money to spend, but I don't trust that they'll spend as much of it as they should, either way. Moreover, Hoyer accepted a situation in which if he signs a top-tier free agent with a qualifying offer attached to them, it will cost the Cubs materially more—some of it paid in non-renewable resources, i.e. a draft pick and some bonus allotments for spending on international free agents—than it would have cost them if they'd stayed under the line. Those penalties matter, even though the trifling sums the team figures to pay in taxes to the league don't. It would be fine to embrace those added costs if they'd been a baked-in sacrifice en route to building a juggernaut this past season, but the Cubs didn't come anywhere near doing that. Again: if Bellinger's deal really did commit the team to going over that line, they should have been several million dollars more aggressive about improving their roster after signing him. We'll see how things play out in the days and weeks ahead. I still believe Bellinger would do best for himself by opting in, and if he does, we'll have to listen carefully and see whether Hoyer changes his tune about the team's tax status. The league will also make official announcements about taxpayer status in November, terminating this mystery. If Bellinger does opt out, then the mystery won't even materialize—but we'll still be left with haunting questions, like why Hoyer thought the 83-win team he turned into another 83-win team was going to be so much better, and why ownership believes he can turn this 83-win team into something better in 2025. View full article

Add the 2023 World Series champions to the growing list of teams whose budgets are shrinking—and add another big name to the list of big bats the Chicago Cubs might try to bring in this winter. Image courtesy of © Jerome Miron-Imagn Images It's a bloodbath. That's the best way to describe the financial landscape for many MLB teams heading into this offseason. The owners are crying poor more ardently than they have in a long time, and while those cries are still hollow and false, they stand on a firmer foundation of fact than in the past. Simply put, the collapse of the local broadcast rights model has genuinely constricted the flow of revenue for most MLB teams, including the Cubs. However, it's hitting the teams who were tied to Bally Sports Network hardest, as that now-renamed family of channels was taken into bankruptcy by their parent company. Although the Rangers are still one of the richer and safer teams in the league, overall, they've been luxury tax payers for both 2023 and 2024, and their top priority this winter is avoiding the same fate in 2025. That, to be clear, is a foolish and self-defeating top priority for a big-market team, but it's a very real phenomenon. The Rangers intend to cut payroll and duck back under the tax threshold this winter. That will require offloading some bad contracts and/or making some very tough choices, because the team is locked into huge expenditures on (among other, lesser players) Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, and Jacob deGrom, so they expect to get creative. One way they could shed some salary and get some young talent at the same time: talk to the Cubs about trading outfielder Adolis García. The story in which Rangers beat writer Evan Grant explained the team's intentions specifically noted that they won't be looking to move García, but let's consider some essential facts: In Wyatt Langford, Evan Carter, and Leody Taveras, the team has three perfectly credible outfielders under cost control. Taveras is getting a bit more expensive via arbitration and has a low offensive ceiling, but the defensive greatness of this group is valuable, and Carter and Langford each profile best as corner outfielders—leaving limited room for García, unless he's performing at his best. García certainly didn't perform at his best last year. He was the breakout star of the 2023 postseason, but in 2024, he struggled to match the power and the plate discipline gains he made the previous season. From a 2023 regular-season line of .245/.328/.508, he plunged to an ugly .224/.284/.400 line. He'll turn 32 next March, and is due $9.25 million on the second half of a two-year deal to which he and the team agreed in February. At the time, it looked like a way for the team to keep his salary from exploding in arbitration in 2025, but now it looks almost like an overpay. Even though the deal the two parties signed only covers 2024 and 2025, García is still under team control for 2026, too. That would be the final year of his arbitration eligibility, and it would probably get even more expensive, so the team might do well to avoid heading into next winter with the prospect of a $20-million award hanging over them. The Rangers would rather trade Jon Gray, who has one year and $13 million left on the four-year deal to which they signed him prior to 2022. They would, surely, rather trade Tyler Mahle, on whom they rolled the dice while he was recovering from Tommy John surgery but who went back on the injured list shortly after a late-summer debut with the team and who is due over $16 million for 2025. Neither of those deals has any surplus value, though. In fact, if they wanted to shed Mahle's salary, they would have to attach a young player with some value to him and get almost nothing in return. That type of deal had a brief moment of popularity, especially where the Dodgers were concerned, a few years ago, but teams don't really like doing them. The Cubs, however, are in the market for both a front-end and a back-end starter this winter, and they should be willing to spend big. They could take both García and either Mahle or Gray, and still be willing to send back significant talent. This would be a minor blockbuster, and is only plausible if Cody Bellinger opts out. If he does, though, the Cubs could bring in a good defensive right fielder with the kind of titanic power their lineup has lacked since Kris Bryant, Javier Báez and Kyle Schwarber were at their peaks, pad the back end of their rotation with a too-expensive but usable veteran starter, and still have money to spend for an ace-caliber hurler like Corbin Burnes or Max Fried. To get García and, say, Mahle, the Cubs would surely have to give up one of their top-tier prospects, close to the big leagues. That means one of James Triantos, Moisés Ballesteros, Kevin Alcántara, or Owen Caissie on the offensive side, or one of Cade Horton and Brandon Birdsell on the pitching side. They might also need to throw in a player who already has a foothold in the big leagues, like Alexander Canario, Hayden Wesneski, or Keegan Thompson. If they could find a fit, though, García could make the cost worth it and then some. That's because, despite the massive decline in outcomes, he really wasn't as bad as he looked—and is still one of the most dangerous right-handed sluggers in the game. Here are his essential numbers for the last three seasons. Seasons PA Chase% ZSw-Chase InZoneWhiff% PHiA/SW 100+/Sw LandAng LaunchAng LowHit% MedHit% HighHit% Hit95+% Well Hit LA Sweet Spot EV BABIP Barrel% xWOBA wOBA wSSEV_AB 2022 657 37.0% 36.5% 26.5% 4.1% 10.1% -4.5 13.3 32.2% 34.6% 32.7% 47.8% 13.2 96.1 .309 24.0% .327 .324 91.6 2023 632 29.3% 42.0% 23.5% 4.1% 11.2% -3.1 15.7 30.1% 29.5% 40.4% 49.7% 16.4 96.5 .280 25.6% .365 .354 91.7 2024 637 33.3% 41.4% 24.9% 2.8% 9.2% -0.4 15 31.1% 30.3% 38.4% 48.3% 14.2 96.8 .273 23.8% .301 .294 90.4 To summarize the above: García did hit the ball slightly less hard and pull it less often in 2024, but only slightly. He regressed from the gains he made in controlling the zone and making contact in 2023, but not all the way back to the very rough-edged approach he had in 2022. He still elevates the ball and generates ample power. He is, in short, a still-lethal righty slugger who merely had a down year. His weighted sweet-spot exit velocity, a robust measurement and predictor of production, was down, but it still nestled right between Willy Adames and Teoscar Hernández on the 2024 leaderboard. Those two players will combine to make about $250 million this winter, so if the Cubs have to give up a young player to acquire García at a much lower cost and avoid a new, expensive long-term commitment, they should be open to it. A deal like this is unlikely, in that all specific trade ideas are unlikely to come from the broad universe of possibility down to the hard Earth of eventuality, but it's very plausible. The Cubs need to spend aggressively and aim for high-end power potential in their lineup, while bolstering their rotation at both ends. The Rangers need to get less expensive and more flexible, without selling off a viable chance to compete in 2025. The two clubs can meet each other's needs in a variety of possible ways. View full article

There will be an opening for the Cubs to snatch up a stud starter for a one-year engagement. All they have to do is be willing to relinquish some control. Image courtesy of © Denis Poroy-Imagn Images Most Cubs fans are acutely aware of the twists and turns of Dylan Cease's career. The former Cubs farmhand went to the White Sox organization in the José Quintana trade in 2017, and his successes and failures have been newsworthy on both sides of town ever since. In March, the White Sox dealt Cease to San Diego, where he enjoyed a fourth straight season with at least 32 starts and a third striaght with at least 177 innings pitched, leading the Padres to the NLDS. Cease has emerged as one of the league's best workhorses, even if that term feels oddly applied to someone who has never reached 200 innings pitched in a season. Even as he established himself in his new home, though, he was threatened for the status of staff ace by fellow trade acquisition Michael King. After coming over as part of the return for Juan Soto, King pitched 174 innings with a 2.95 ERA, striking out nearly 28% of opposing batters along the way. That Cease and King were so good is great news for the Padres and their fans. Alas, it's unlikely that both are back with the team in 2025. Even after Joe Musgrove underwent Tommy John surgery this month (deepening their need for rotation help next season), A.J. Preller will shop one of Cease and King, while trying to extend the other. Both players are headed into their final season of arbitration eligibility and will be free agents at the end of next season, barring an extension, and with the Padres still trying to adjust to shifting economic realities both within and around the team, neither extending both nor letting them walk via free agency is a palatable option. For the Cubs, either Cease or King would slot in atop their rotation. While Cease has sketchy control at times, he made some material improvements in his first year outside the talent drain that is the White Sox organization. King's deep pitch mix—four-seamer and sinker; slider and sweeper; changeup—is nasty. Each is a good bet to make 30 starts or more and soak up innings each time it's their turn. The indispensable arbitration salary projections at MLB Trade Rumors pegs Cease for a salary of $13.7 million in his walk year, while King is expected to get $7.9 million. Stylistically, each pitcher operates at an extreme. Cease is an overhand thrower for whom everything works vertically and toward the glove side. His fastball has unexpected cut and ride, based on his arm angle, because of the way his delivery works. When the Padres got ahold of Cease, they worked with him to deepen his arsenal, not by forcing him to work anything to the arm side, but by adding a sweeper to his fastball-slider-curve mix. He now has three distinct breaking ball shapes, and his sweeper is one of the weirdest pitches in baseball for an opposing hitter. Almost without exception, sweepers have less downward movement than this, but also sweep more to the arm side than this. It's something close to a typical pitcher's power curveball. Because of Cease's high arm slot and the purely vertical orientation of his movement on the other three pitches, though, the sweeper really seems to change lanes, even though it hardly does so. This was a neat way to unlock Cease further, and figures to be an innovation to which he holds on even if his stay in San Diego is short. King, too, made a significant change to his pitch mix upon coming to San Diego. Whereas Cease works so much up and down, King has always been more of a true three-quarter thrower and east-west worker. His four-seamer doesn't have unexpected carry at all, though it does stay out of the dead zone by cutting in a way the hitter doesn't anticipate. His sinker, by contrast, is a very heavy pitch that also has more run to the arm side than one would guess. The lack of raw vertical hop on King's fastball might tempt you to doubt its utility, but because he pounds the top of the zone—over 53% of his heaters were in the upper third or above this year—from a fairly low release point, it plays up. His key tweak, coming over from the sweeper-crazed Yankees, was the addition of a bullet-spin, tighter and much firmer slider. Of these two, King is the much better fit for what the Cubs like in pitchers. His release point, movement patterns, and approach are more in like with the way they do things. Since he's also so much cheaper, he would seem to be the natural choice. On the other hand, though, and just as importantly: Clearing the expected payroll associated with Cease would do much more to give the Padres flexibility, which would make the Padres more eager to part with him. It would cost much more to acquire King, for a pitcher who is only likely to be a little bit better. Meanwhile, Cease would be a more jarring change of pace for opponents (relative to other Cubs starters) than would King. Since he throws the way he does and has had to slowly build out a breaking ball-laden arsenal that suits his mechanics, he might also be able to help Ben Brown reach his full potential, if Brown can stay healthy. Because King would be more expensive to acquire, the Cubs should only do that if they think they can get a reasonable extension done with him, circumventing the free-agent market to leverage control over a late-blooming starter and sign a deal akin to the one the Dodgers gave to Tyler Glasnow as part of their trade for him last winter. If that's not an option, they should deal for Cease, instead. Who might be involved in such a deal? There's no need to get overly specific, since the Cubs have a deep farm system and there are many ways to skin a cat. It's worth noting, though, that Javier Assad won't even be arbitration-eligible this winter. With four years of team control left, could he anchor a trade package for one of the San Diego aces? He'd be a good candidate for the kind of developmental work the Padres love to do, but there's obviously a lower ceiling on him than on guys like Cease and King. As we kept noting, the Cubs have a lot of paths to the major improvements they need to make this winter. This is just one of those possible avenues, but since it would be a way to leverage their financial edge over a smaller-market (though still big-spending) team and get a better deal than they might find in free agency, it's worth serious consideration. Cease or King could both be frontline starters for this team, with transformative impact—especially if acquiring them were paired with the addition of a lower-wattage but steady veteran, like Tomoyuki Sugano. Depth is good, and depth as a complement to excellence is even better. 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Over the last three winters, the Cubs have twice made big investments in veteran stars from Nippon Professional Baseball. They'll have another chance to do so this fall, although for less money and with less upside. Image courtesy of © Kelvin Kuo-Imagn Images In an offseason that looks to be relatively rich with starting pitchers available in free agency, there will be less attention on aging Japanese righthander Tomoyuki Sugano than there might have been if he had come over two or three years ago. However, Sugano, 35, is likely to sign with an MLB team this year, after a decade and change as one of the top starters in NPB. Since he's waited so long to cross the Pacific Ocean this way, he will be free of the posting system and clear to sign with a team for nothing more than cash. Twitter user @bouno05, a top-flight Japanese sabermetrician, created an app that allows visitors to easily view summaries of pitchers' skill sets and specific data about their arsenals, using NPB data. It's a marvelous resource, and the only Japanese you need to decipher to use it is the name of the player in kanji characters. The rest is in English, although (blame George Washington) you'll still have to do a small step of translation to use it comfortably: all the velocity readings given are in kilometers per hour. This is a tremendous tool for us American fans hoping for insight on Japanese hurlers who might come over to the United States, for multiple reasons. Firstly, it's much easier to grasp how a pitcher's stuff might transfer between these two different leagues by studying their stuff directly, rather than going on imprecise scouting reports, video narrated in a language we don't understand, and surface-level stats compiled against very different hitters than the ones these guys will encounter Stateside. (In general, we should make a broader effort to learn Japanese and Spanish; those are as much the languages of baseball as English is. For now, though, my Spanish lags far behind my English, and my Japanese is much worse even than my Spanish, so it's immensely helpful to have a resource that meets me much more than halfway.) Secondly, though, it's instructive in the way it lets us see the changes a pitcher who has already come over from NPB to MLB made upon doing so. For instance, here's Shota Imanaga's readout from the app for his time in NPB in 2023: This dataset counts Imanaga's formidable splitter as a changeup, but otherwise, this is easy to read and understand—and it tells us some unexpected things about Imanaga, vis-a-vis his rookie campaign with the Cubs. When he started facing American hitters, Imanaga lived basically as a two-pitch pitcher for a long time, but this shows that he varied his pitch mix considerably more than that in NPB, as he began to do later in his first season with the Cubs. Imanaga threw his splitter much less against lefties in his last season in Japan than he did in 2024 for the Cubs. It's not surprising, per se, that he would use such an unusual offering more often against a new and unfamiliar set of opponents, but it affirms the feeling you got when watching: that he was adapting a great deal as he went, and that that was the source of both some of his struggles and much of his success. Having Imanaga's pitch mix details from Japan as a template (with a year of MLB data to help us contextualize and translate that information) makes it easier to evaluate Sugano, even though the latter is four years older than Imanaga was when he made his change of league and even though he throws right-handed. Here's Sugano's 2024 data. A bunch of things stand out right away. Sugano's fastball averages around 92 miles per hour, which is underwhelming, and it's pretty clear that it doesn't have the same special characteristics as Imanaga's—at least not the way he threw it this year. His Stuff+ grades are a bit less impressive than Imanaga's, on balance, because those grades compare pitchers only to their NPB cohort. As currently constituted, Sugano's fastball is far below an MLB standard, and the worry would be that it would be hit very, very hard. Look at all his other offerings, though. He's likely to streamline his arsenal a bit for each handedness of hitter as he moves to a new set of opponents, just as Imanaga did, and he has a wide selection of weapons from which to choose. Note, too, those little heat maps showing location on his stuff. These explain goergously how Sugano managed to walk 16 and allow only six home runs in 156 innings this year. Can he repeat that against MLB hitters? No. But his command is so good that he can almost certainly outpitch his raw stuff grades. Whichever team signs Sugano will also feel out the 35-year-old on some late-career changes of approach that could help his arsenal play up. Look at where he threw his fastballs to right-handed batters last year. It sets up his cutter and slider there nicely, but it's no wonder he gets bad Stuff+ returns and low whiff rates when trying to do the old 1990s thing, dotting the outside corner at the knees as many times as possible. If he's amenable to it, some MLB club will have him start pitching to the upper third of the zone with that heater, and his strikeout rate will tick up, even if he gives up a few homers in the process. Imanaga's success is just the latest in a string of veteran Japanese hurlers doing very well upon coming to the States, and it's proof that the control-over-power hurler can port their success to this side of the ocean. Sugano doesn't profile as an ace, and he figures to be in line for a shorter deal than the ones signed by Imanaga and Kodai Senga in recent years, but he has real upside as an undervalued mid-rotation starter. He looks, in fast, a lot like Javier Assad with an extra grade of command. That's a very, very good pitcher. With Seiya Suzuki and Imanaga already in the fold, the Cubs have another incentive to seriously consider signing Sugano, as long as his price tag remains reasonable. They won't surpass the Dodgers as the MLB team of the moment in Japan, but there's no reason they can't firmly and semi-permanently establish themselves as the secondary club of Japanese MLB fans across that country. If Imanaga and Sugano could start opposite Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani when the Cubs and Dodgers open next season in Tokyo, it could take what will already be an incredible moment for the league and its international fan base to a new level. In a perfect world, the Cubs might add two starters this winter: one who would slot in at or near the front of their rotation, and one who could slide into the back end. Sugano profiles better as the latter, but signing him might also make it easier to acquire the former. We can talk more about why that might be later this week. For now, the important takeaway is that specific data on Sugano's stuff paints a picture of him as a very good command artist, albeit without as clear a niche in MLB as Imanaga had. If he can adjust as well as Imanaga did this season, he could be hugely valuable—and a rare bargain. View full article

We all watched, in mixtures of horror and ecstasy, as elite closers folded under the accumulate workloads of their long seasons this October. As the Cubs try to get into that circumstance next year, they need to build a bullpen immune to that problem. Image courtesy of © Bob Kupbens-Imagn Images There are 162 games in a regular MLB season. As the playoffs expand, it has become possible for a team to play as many as 22 gmaes in the postseason. Add in the bloated but certainly necessary spring training schedule, and teams have to play more than 200 games to get from one end of a championship year to the other. It's a daunting proposition, especially in an era that has seen starting pitchers take on ever-smaller shares of the workload. Simply giving those innings back to the rotation is impractical, because of the stady rise in injury rates throughout the league over the last two decades. Going to a six-man rotation is a modification worth consideration, but as the schedule has been slightly lengthened to add more days off, it's become less necessary to consider that relatively extreme stratagem. Besides, in addition to needing to find six competent starters at a time when many teams in the league are scrambling to find four or five, that plan doesn't guarantee health. It's possible to end up needing to dip into your seventh, eighth, and ninth starters even when starting with six and pacing everyone carefully, and that usually means shorter starts—negating the hypothetical advantage conferred by giving everyone more rest. To make six starters work as a means of lightening the bullpen's load, you have to get an extra inning per start from each of those guys, and that notion directly contravenes the modern paradigm of the starter: get them out of there before undue damage can be done. Avoid having them face the opposing lineup a third time, at almost all costs. The only way to get through a season with an intact pitching staff capable of dominating enough to achieve the postseason, and then of maintaining their success throughout it, is to pursue unprecedented levels of depth. That's the lesson we should take from the teams who had success in this year's postseason, even as we survey the wreckage of the Mets and Guardians and note the thinness of the remaining staffs for the Yankees and Dodgers. New York already had Gerrit Cole and Nester Cortes (and remained very focused on a high-volume internal pipeline) when they went out and signed Carlos Rodón and Marcus Stroman as depth options in successive offseasons. They amassed lots of bullpen depth, often trading for and stockpiling pitchers who tended to get hurt, but who could be counted on for good innings whenever healthy. The Dodgers have gone the same route, and perhaps at an even greater extreme. They re-signed Clayton Kershaw, traded for Tyler Glasnow (and then extended him on a lavish deal), and signed Yoshinobu Yamamoto last winter, but they also signed James Paxton to a one-year deal, knowing full well it might create a logjam for their bevy of talented younger arms. When none of those hurlers could stay healthy and contribute much into the second half, the team traded for Jack Flaherty. In the meantime, they assiduously added veteran relievers, squeezing them in unapologetically: Daniel Hudson, Evan Phillips, Blake Treinen, Joe Kelly, and more. They targeted fireballer Michael Kopech as a midseason pickup, even though they knew he would be a bit of a project at the back end of the pen. That's the approach the Cubs need to take into the coming winter. They have Shota Imanaga, Justin Steele, Jameson Taillon, Javier Assad, and Jordan Wicks penciled in as starters for next year, with Brandon Birdsell and Cade Horton in the wings. Since neither Birdsell nor Horton has to be added to the 40-man roster yet, though, they have some flexibility to add starters at the big-league level, knowing they'll be able to use the injured list to make room for promotions next spring and summer if needed. Thus, Jed Hoyer should be plotting an addition along the lines of Rodón, Yamamoto, or Glasnow—someone in the Corbin Burnes-Max Fried bracket of free agency, or on a similar tier in trades—and one like Paxton, with some upside but enough question marks attached to keep their price tag reasonable and short-term. That's just on the starting side of things. When it comes to relievers, there's even heavier lifting to do, because the Cubs should be thinking creatively and trying something new. We've seen rotations of teams' best starting pitchers for six or seven decades now, but never has a team undertaken a serious, dedicated rotation of its relief aces. Few teams in any given season even have the reliever depth to consider that. If the Guardians had used Emmanuel Clasé, Cade Smith, and Hunter Gaddis on a three-day rotation all year, each of them would have thrown about 15 fewer innings over 15 or 20 fewer appearances. Given the relative weakness of Cleveland's lineup and starting rotation, they might not have won the AL Central under that usage pattern; they needed to lean on those three and on Tim Herrin in an extraordinarily heavy way. Once they got to the playoffs, though, that caught up to them. Gaddis and Clasé, especially, took their lumps, and it was the reason why a team good enough to win the pennant fell short. Part of it is a trickle-down effect from their understaffed starting rotation, but part of it is that their formula for winning fell apart under the pressure of the playoffs, due both to the better competition and the workloads that wore them down as the season progressed past its usual finish line. What if Porter Hodge and two other top-flight Cubs relievers worked on a three-day rotation in 2025? They'd pitch something like 55 or 60 regular-season innings, leaving more to be covered by second-tier relievers than most teams prefer. Working that way would probably augment their effectiveness, though. One of the principal difficulties of being a relief pitcher is the absence of routine or predictability. For a subset of Cubs relievers, that hurdle would be cleared under this system. Right now, the roster doesn't have a clear lieutenant to Hodge for the role. To pursue this course, the team would need to sign at least one stud reliever in free agency, which is often a fraught, risky thing. Hoyer has never preferred to operate that way, and he'd be stepping out of character by signing Tanner Scott or Jeff Hoffman to high-dollar deals. Trading for Clasé, Mason Miller, or some other elite, team-controlled relief ace would be fascinating, but no less expensive, except monetarily. One way or another, to do this, the Cubs would need to get a Scott-caliber pitcher to work in rotation with Hodge. The third rotated relief ace could emerge during spring training, though, from a large group of pitchers with obvious upside but less consistent track records. Tyson Miller pitched like that type of guy for most of 2024. If he can sustain it, he could earn a spot in the relief rotation for 2025. Nate Pearson and Luke Little have that kind of upside, but haven't yet demonstrated their durability or consistency to the required level. That could change in a hurry. Below that group is a much richer, wilder set of wild cards. Hayden Wesneski should be past any dreams of starting and ready to commit to the bullpen; he has a chance to be great there. Julian Merryweather's stuff absolutely cratered after his injury last year, but if he makes it through the winter on the 40-man, he should get a chance to show whether it has recovered next spring. Daniel Palencia, Jack Neely, and Gavin Hollowell all have plenty of upside to be worth keeping around. Those last three share a vital edge over others, too, because the Cubs will have to add a bunch of players via free agency, trades, and the protection process ahead of the Rule 5 Draft this winter, and that will cause a roster crunch—first on the 40-man, then on the active roster within the season. Palencia, Neely, Hollowell, Pearson, Little, and Hodge are all optionable, meaning they could be sent to the minors when needed next season. Whether the team uses five starters or six, if they do employ a three-man relief ace rotation, they'll need to be able to option pitchers fairly often, which means having more guys with that kind of flexibility. A relief ace rotation is wildly unorthodox, and it will draw fire the same way the Red Sox's 2003 closer by committee experiment did—that is, it will be torched in the media, if the team isn't great. In order to try something so unusual, they need the rest of the roster to be rock-solid. That's why their projects of upgrading the rotation and the lineup will be so important. If they can give themselves the breathing room to try it, though, a relief rotation might be the creative solution so many teams have needed for years, but never found. Using a relief ace rotation throughout the regular season wouldn't preclude Craig Counsell from ratcheting up the usage of his best hurlers if and when the team made the postseason. It would just keep them fresher when they got there. It would also eliminate the reliever familiarity effect, which has become headline news this fall and last, in any regular-season series shorter than four games, and maybe even soften it in the postseason. Massive depth. That has to be the goal of every team looking to win anything important in baseball's new, extremely long season. The Dodgers, Yankees, and Mets have it, though they each acquired it at huge cost. The Cubs will have to spend a lot of money and trade from their positional depth on the farm to get there, but they should be trying to build up that same level of depth. It should be an ambitious, massive project, and they should already be hard at work on its planning stages. View full article

As Chicago sets out to build a better full-season bullpen for 2025, they have a plethora of free-agent options before them. Plunging a hand into that bargain bin is a risk, though, so it's best to cast a discerning eye over the selection first. Image courtesy of © Brad Penner-Imagn Images As happens almost every year, the Cubs found their way to an effective mix of relief arms in the second half in 2024. By then, though, that unit had cost the team several games, and they were unable to make up the gap down the stretch. Next season, they'll try to carry a deeper, more stable bullpen from Opening Day through the end of the regular season--and on into October. That means amassing ample depth, which (in turn) means signing at least one or two highly qualified free agents this winter. Last winter, though, the team tried to do that very thing, and they failed. Trade acquisition Yency Almonte was thwarted by injury trouble, but free-agent signee Héctor Neris stayed healthy--only to fail miserably. He was a longtime big-leaguer with a fine track record, but the wheels came off for him almost at the moment he donned a Cubs uniform. For that matter, there were red flags even in 2023, when Neris's velocity and bat-missing abilities began to erode. As the Cubs look to bolster their relief corps in the same way this winter, they have to be more successful, which means being a bit more careful and a bit more willing to spend. There are several tiers of potentially valuable relievers on the market, and we'll explore them all over the next few weeks, but for now, let's zero in on some pitchers somewhat similar to Neris--but who stand apart from him in important ways. There are two truly vital skills to being a consistently successful reliever. They're very hard to find together, because the hurlers who possess them tend either not to make it to free agency; to be successful starters who never move to the pen; or both. However, at the very least, you want to seek out pitchers who do both at an average level. The skills are: Filling up the strike zone, rather than nibbling constantly or missing wildly and thus putting runners on base at an untenable rate; and Missing bats within the zone, so as not to be overly reliant on getting batters to expand the zone. These are far from the only important skills, of course, but a pitcher who can both consistently throw strikes and induce whiffs when they do has a big leg up on being effective even in high-leverage situations. Ideally, such a pitcher should also throw hard, because that both augments their ability to miss bats in the zone and makes it harder for hitters to square them up and hit for power. Here's a plot of all pitchers who faced at least 250 batters as relievers last year, on the axes of these two core competencies. I've highlighted some notable free-agent relievers who will hit the market a few days after the end of the World Series. It's far from being the full list of such pitchers, but this selection helps us visualize who's good at what, within the set. We won't talk about all of them today, though. In fact, let's hone in on the top left quadrant of the chart, which isn't quite where pitchers want to be. These are the guys who miss more bats than most of their cohort in the zone, but throw fewer strikes than most other arms. This is where Neris lived in 2023, but his numbers slumped badly even in the second half of that campaign, and he was a right-handed hurler who average just 93 miles per hour with his fastball. Neris's defining characteristic, from an arsenal perspective, is his splitter. It's the pitch with which he tries to keep hitters off his underwhelming fastball and so-so slider. It's also why he sometimes has walk problems, especially when he's not throwing his hardest: the pitch is rarely in the zone. Not coincidentally, the five pitchers we'll tackle right now also have great changeups or splitters. That's the pitch type that gets its greatest relative share of utility from deception, and therefore from being outside the zone. Well-executed changeups and splitters often aren't strikes. The name of the game for pitchers who rely on it is inducing chase with that pitch, and getting enough velocity or movement differential to generate whiffs when they do. As compensation for the risk of extra walks that comes from not filling up the zone, these pitchers offer some special utility: most of them have small platoon splits, or are significantly better against opposite-handed batters. That's part of what appealed to the Cubs about Neris, and it makes a team tougher on opposing offenses by giving the manager more ways to create advantageous matchups late in the game. So, let's take a closer look at the five guys with exceptional changeups or splitters who are hitting the market soon and could be sound targets for Jed Hoyer and company. Tommy Kahnle, RHP How good is Kahnle's changeup? He's thrown it 46 times in a row, and 81 times out of his last 85 pitches. Of the 116 pitches he's thrown in the postseason for the Yankees, 104 have been changeups. That shouldn't work, but he hasn't allowed a run all month. In this cadre of plausible targets, he is by far the most prone to wildness. However, when he does throw fastballs, they sit 94 and touch 97. He can sneak a slider past hitters who try to sit on his fastball and change. And taking all swings, rather than just those in the zone, he gets a higher whiff rate than anyone else on this list. Kahnle is 35 years old, and the walk rate has to give buyers some pause, but he's a remarkable pitcher who has carved out a long career already--and he might have the highest ceiling in this group. José Leclerc, RHP His numbers weren't especially pretty this year, and walks are an issue for Leclerc, too. However, when he's on, he's even nastier than Kahnle, thanks to a fastball that plays better at the top of the zone and a livelier set of alternative offerings. He became famous a few years ago for throwing the slambio, a hybrid of the slider and changeup that uses a high spin rate but an unreliable axis of movement. His change is more about run to the arm side than about massive depth, so it misses fewer bats than Kahnle's, but it's also capable of inducing a lot of weak contact on the ground. Crucially, Leclerc is also going to turn 31 this December. In a market awash in superannuated relievers, his relative youth will increase demand for him, but the Cubs should join the queue. He's a hard thrower with multiple ways to attack hitters of either handedness. Matt Moore, LHP Lefties need a good changeup worse than righties, on average, but most lefties who come up with a really good one stick as starters. Moore did so for a while, but he's now been a successful reliever for two seasons--and an unexpectedly, disastrously unsuccessful one for one, this season with the Angels. Moore has made plenty of money in a long career, and he's now in his late 30s. A forearm strain ended his season in August, and he might not want the labor and the risk of trying to come back from this latest setback, If he does, though, the Cubs should be one of the suitors. Most hurlers have either a lateral or a vertical change, but Moore's is a two-plane pitch, both fading and diving relative to his 93-MPH fastball from the left side. That makes it versatile and highly effective, when he's healthy enough to make the rest of his mix work. He's well worth what should be a flier, as opposed to the substantial price tags attached to pitchers like Kahnle. Ryne Stanek, RHP One thing the Cubs have consistently lacked in recent years is a reliable bully--a pitcher who can come in and threaten 100 miles per hour, without feeling like every outing is a tightrope walk. When they have tried to emphasize velocity, they've often done so by handing the ball to players who had no idea where it was going, or no idea how to throw anything other than straight heaters--guys like Daniel Palencia, Dillon Maples, and so on. Julian Merryweather was a briefly dominant exception, but his velocity didn't come back after his injury early in 2024. Stanek is heading into his mid-30s, but he still throws 98 miles per hour, touching higher. He also has a devastating splitter, and a slider with tight spin and significant depth. He misses bats with both of those offerings, and can do so with his heater when hitters try to sit on either offspeed pitch. He also throws more strikes than any of the other pitchers we're evaluating today. Despite some uneven surface-level numbers, he has the makings of a level-raising middle reliever. His career and 2024 playoff numbers both attest to his appetite for big moments. Kirby Yates, RHP Pushing 40 and the softest right-handed tosser on this list, Yates should be the least exciting of these options. Instead, he might be the most enticing. A late bloomer who made it back from a Tommy John surgery that begat some unexpected complications, Yates has now put in more than a decade in the big leagues, but he's only pitched a little over 400 career innings. It shouldn't be a compelling profile, but again, it is. He just keeps throwing a fastball that only comes in around 93 miles per hour, with a nasty splitter that could not come out of a more perfectly matched release point. It has about seven miles per hour of separation from the heater, and as much as a foot and a half of extra vertical depth, but both pitches come from the same slot and hold the same line, horizontally. It's viciously difficult to tell one pitch from the other, and hitters have been failing his stern test for years. For reasons we'll get into in another post, I think it's a near-imperative that the Cubs sign two solid, trustworthy, high-end relievers this winter. These are five candidates for the secondary signing in that set. Their profiles verge on being too similar to Neris's for comfort, but they're better than Neris was when the Cubs inked him, and some of them will be considerably cheaper than he was, leaving the team with more resources to allocate elsewhere. They all throw good enough offspeed pitches to permit Craig Counsell flexible usage. Somewhere in this group is a pitcher who can help Hoyer make good on his pledge to reconsider his method of bullpen-building. 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And don't say Juan Soto. Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-Imagn Images While the Cubs' offense might already be better than it looks based on raw numbers from 2024, everyone acknowledges the need for the team to get better and deeper for 2025. In a perfect world, the team would seriously and persistently vie for the services of Juan Soto, the generational, definitive hitter of the upcoming free-agent class. If it wasn't already gallingly apparent, his transcendent impact on a lineup shone through clearly in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series Friday night Saturday night, when he hit the game-winning three-run home run in the 10th inning of the Yankees' taut battle with the Guardians. In reality, though, the Cubs aren't going to sign Soto. Doing so would not match Jed Hoyer's well-established approach to free agency or Tom Ricketts's equally obvious budgetary vision, and the two New York teams are plainly ready to pony up for Soto. Cross him off your list. However, there will still be lots of intriguing free agents available this winter, and the team does have money to spend. One way to figure out which available hitters might be good fits is to look at two statistics that sketch their needs in profile. The first is zone swing rate minus chase rate (ZSw-Chase), which reflects the difference between a player's in- and out-of-zone swing rate. Few skills are more valuable than the ability to tell a ball from a strike, but it's especially helpful to be able to defend the zone against the latter, without going fishing for the former. This is already something the Cubs prioritize; they were fifth in MLB in ZSw-Chase last year, trailing the Dodgers, Rangers, Braves, and Mariners. Another key indicator, however, is the propensity to hit for pwoer, and especially to give yourself a chance to hit for power. To measure this, we can look at the percentage of swings that ended in hard-hit air balls (line drives and fly balls) to a batter's pull field (PHiA/Sw). The Cubs don't do this one well enough. They were just 20th in that skill last season, and as you can see, that not only left a gap between the other disciplined teams like them, but left them far from the most successful slugging offenses in baseball: the Diamondbacks, Orioles, and Yankees. It's great to be good at controlling the strike zone, but if you can't make opponents pay by driving the ball when they make a mistake, it becomes much less valuable. The Cubs need to climb the above chart vertically next year. Ideally, they'd do so without sliding to the left much. So, let's focus on free agents who do both of these things well. Only 21 hitters had both ZSw-Chase and PHiA/Sw values among the best quartile of the league last season. The bad news is that a bunch of them--Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Corey Seager, Fernando Tatis, Jr., Francisco Lindor, Ketel Marte, Ozzie Albies, Marcus Semien--are already signed to contracts that tether them to their teams for many more years. New York's Austin Wells doesn't have a long-term deal, but he's under team control for several seasons and isn't likely to be available. A few guys (Andrew Benintendi, MJ Melendez, Dylan Moore, Jake Bauers) make this list, but have such dubious other credentials that prying them away from their current teams might not be worth the trouble. Marcell Ozuna is on the list, but he's Marcell Ozuna, and is therefore not worth the trouble. A few more (Brandon Lowe, about whom I wrote yesterday, and two more whom we'll discuss in another post later this week) could be better trade targets, and one guy would be a really great target--except it's Michael Busch, whom the Cubs already have. That leaves three players, inhabiting the same neighborhood as so many of the stars listed above, who are free agents at the end of the World Series. Here they are, along with some thoughts about how they would fit with the Cubs. Willy Adames, IF It's been virtually undiscussed, but Adames is a fascinating potential target for a Cubs team whom so many fans specifically want to see add power. He hit 32 home runs and drove in 112 for the Brewers in his walk year, and while the temptation is to view that as a career year, the reality is that Adames has always had huge power for a middle infielder. He's averaged 28 homers and 31 doubles per season over the last four, with a .210 isolated power (ISO) mark. His selectivity has gotten markedly better over the last two seasons, too, and would fit in gorgeously with the Cubs. Positionally, of course, the fit is tougher, but Adames's defense took a big step backward at shortstop last year. Even in the short term, he's better cast as a third or second baseman, where he would be brilliant and more able to establish himself in a lasting way. Historically, it's a good bet that the best deal a shortstop will be offered in free agency will come from someone who views them as a shortstop. That might be changing, though. Carlos Correa nearly signed a deal to become the Mets' third baseman two winters ago. Marcus Semien signed on as a second baseman when he and Corey Seager landed with the Rangers in the same winter the previous year. Regular shortstops over age 30 are becoming almost unheard-of, and that trend figures to continue as the game leans ever more toward youth and athleticism. The Cubs could elect to be the high bidders on Adames, on a deal similar to the one to which they signed Dansby Swanson two winters ago, and move him to second base, anyway. He'd be an even better defender at that spot than Nico Hoerner, and a considerably better hitter with a skill set better matched to the team's needs. Max Kepler, RF This possibility hinges quite a bit on whether Cody Bellinger opts out of his deal after the conclusion of the World Series, because Kepler has no secondary position and Bellinger would slot in as the right fielder if he elects to stick around. Should Bellinger elect to test the waters again, though, Kepler would be one relatively modestly priced way for the team to replace him and seek some upside. Over a decade in Minnesota, Kepler established a reputation for frustratingly underachieving his expected batted-ball numbers and his talent, but when healthy, he can rake. The big hole in Adames's offensive game is the same as the one in most of the hitters who fit this group but aren't superstars: he whiffs a lot, even within the zone. Not Kepler. In fact, there is no glaring weakness in Kepler's offensive game, other than a certain propensity to hit some of his sharpest balls on the ground to the right side. Staying healthy has been an issue, and he's only had end-to-end strong seasons in 2019 and 2023, but Kepler could be a very good change-of-scenery candidate. He's also a marvelous defender in right field, and would complete arguably baseball's best defensive outfield on a deal that would leave the team plenty of money to attack their needs on the bench and the pitching staff. Ramón Laureano, OF We've gone in alphabetical order here, but as it happens, we've also stepped neatly down by tiers. Adames would be a high-dollar, winter-defining addition. Kepler would be a complementary move, but a meaningful one, and he'd come in expecting to play nearly every day. Laureano is not even a lock to become a free agent; he's just a near-lock to be non-tendered by Atlanta. He's been a toolsy, fascinating player throughout his career, but the stocky, strong-armed right-handed slugger has had three below-average seasons at the plate in the last five. MLB Trade Rumors projects him to make $6.1 million via arbitration, and given the fact that Atlanta also dealt for the hefty contract of Jorge Soler this summer, they're unlikely to retain him at that price. Laureano has never had even 500 plate appearances in a season, though part of the reason for that is the pandemic, and another part is a suspension for using PEDs in 2021. He'd come in to serve as a sometimes-DH and right fielder, spelling and platooning with players like Ian Happ and Owen Caissie, or even Bellinger. He thrived in his brief time with the Braves, though, proving the staying power of his impressive power when it's focused by a smart approach at the plate. The Cubs should enter this offseason looking to add more than one new bat, just as they should be looking to add more than one new arm. None of these three players would be exciting as the top move of the winter, but in various versions of the winter, each could fit the team's needs and capacities. They all bring a combination of selective aggressiveness and power to the table, and that makes them worth examining as targets for the Cubs when free agency opens and ramps up over the coming weeks. View full article

It's going to be a good winter to be a rich team willing to help poor teams solve their payroll problems. The Cubs should be aggressive in that vein, and one recent trade partner is the most obvious place to start. Image courtesy of © Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images I've said it several times already, and will continue to say it, even as we transition from the postseason to the offseason over the coming fortnight: The Cubs have a wide range of needs and problems, but an equally varied array of potentially strong solutions this winter. There is no dearth of available talent or creative opportunities. The team's constraints are the limits of Jed Hoyer's bold vision and Tom Ricketts's willingness to spend like a big-market owner should. Signing top-tier free agents is always difficult, and it requires a stronger stomach than Hoyer has typically shown during his tenure as the Cubs' top decision-maker. That doesn't mean the team won't make significant free-agent additions, but they'll probably need to supplement whatever shopping they do in that market with improvements via trade--and that might be where the most compelling opportunities lie, anyway. With every long-term deal to which the Tampa Bay Rays sign a player, it's fairly easy to spot the season in which they intend to trade that player. The deals are almost universally team-friendly contract extensions, and within those, there's nearly always a year in which the player's scheduled salary increases by 50 percent or more. Study the year-to-year dollars in the deal, spot that season when their earning spike, and you've found the time when the Rays will deal them away. That pattern will not abate this offseason. It was never going to, because it's a vital part of the team's paradigm for building consistent winners in a small market, an outdated and unreachable ballpark, and under ownership focused on maintaining both perennial competitiveness and a strong profit margin. Any doubt can be laid to rest, though, in light of the fact that the team's local TV deal is likely to lose value this year, alongside those of most of the league's non-premium tames--and of the fact that their in-person gameday revenue could crater after Tropicana Field was devastated by Hurricane Milton. It's tragic that something so huge and so profoundly painful for the region will also shape the direction of the club's offseason, but it's hard to imagine that that won't be the case. Besides, there are a handful of players who were likely to be on their trade block even if they hadn't suddenly been plunged into uncertainty about where they can play home games next year. These three, in particular, would be superb fits for the Cubs and should be high on Hoyer's list of guys about whom to inquire. Brandon Lowe, 2B/RF Club options for $10.5 million ($1 million buyout) and $11.5 million ($500,000 buyout) for 2025-26 Lowe will turn 31 next July. He was a superstar-caliber slugger in 2020 and 2021, but since then, he's been much more limited. Even so, he's been a clearly above-average hitter. He will strike out a lot, but also takes his walks, hits the ball hard, pulls and lifts it. When shielded from left-handed pitchers, he's especially effective. Defensively versatile early in his career, he's principally a second baseman now, but he has experience in both outfield corners and at first base. He would be a perfectly qualified DH option against righties and a backup to Michael Busch at first, but most importantly, he'd become an offense-first, left-handed complement to the defense-first, right-handed profile of Nico Hoerner. The Cubs don't have to trade Hoerner this winter to improve at second, if they're willing to spend eight figures on a player who can take some of the more unfavorable matchups from him and make him more available to spell Dansby Swanson at shortstop. Because he's earning a significant chunk of money on a team that figures to be looking not to spend it, Lowe shouldn't cost premium talent, but he'll certainly have a meaningful trade cost. The Cubs would have to be willing to part with one of their top seven or eight prospects and take the inevitable jokes after throwing in a second piece--probably a pitcher. Yandy Díaz, 1B/DH/3B Owed $10 million for 2025, with $12 million option for 2026; $1 million bonus paid by acquiring team if traded When you specify that the acquiring team has to pay the assignment bonus in a contract like this, it's a pretty sure sign that you intend to eventually trade that contract. Sure enough, Díaz made $14 million in total over the first two years of this deal, but will get into eight figures for each of the next two years if the option is picked up. This is the moment for the Rays to move him. Having turned 33 late this summer, Díaz is no spring chicken, and he slipped to a .706 OPS against right-handed pitchers in 2024. However, in all of baseball, there are few more reliable lefty-mashers, and even against righties, he has some valuable, stable skills. He hits the ball hard, but infamously, it's very often on the ground. He makes a ton of contact, but doesn't draw many walks. He'd need to be carefully deployed, in terms of shelter from some right-handed pitchers and placement within the batting order. He can only play third base in emergencies and is not even a good defender at the cold corner. He'd be a platoon partner for Busch and a DH option against most hurlers, and he should come at a fairly low acquisition cost. Jeffrey Springs, LHP Owed $10.5 million each in 2025-26, $15 million option with $750,000 buyout for 2027 The above salaries represent a doubling of the $5.25 million Springs made in 2024, and he's had little time to prove that he'll be worth that much of the team's money. He came up as a reliever with the Rangers, then the Red Sox, before the Rays converted him to a starter in 2022. In April 2023, he underwent Tommy John surgery. When he's right, though, Springs is a really good three-pitch lefty, with plenty of upside in a starting role. He only sits 90 and touches 93 with his four-seamer, but it's a pitch with two-plane ride and good life up in the zone. His slider keeps hitters honest, and his changeup is a bat-missing out pitch, with excellent depth and a big velocity differential relative to the heater. Springs has also tinkered with a cutter and a sweeper over the years. He and Shota Imanaga would have a lot to learn from each other, and each is an above-average starter when healthy--although Springs has to prove he can take the ball every fifth or sixth day. His recent injury history and relatively hefty contract should keep Springs's price tag reasonable, but he would certainly only be a target if the Cubs see the upside I do in him. Given how well they've instructed and developed similar pitchers recently. there's good cause for optimism there. Not every year is there such a cornucopia of options for teams who need to make major changes. Nor does every team in such a position have all the resources the Cubs should have at their disposal this winter. They don't necessarily need to acquire any of the players above, but they should be proactive and turn over their roster in a meaningful way--and these are three players who would check boxes they should have on their list. View full article

The Chicago Cubs can only sit at home and watch as the 2024 MLB postseason unfolds. While they're at it, though, they can learn plenty about how to build a juggernaut for 2025 and beyond. Image courtesy of © Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images It's not uncommon to hear, in vague terms, that superstars provide a team with extra value beyond their raw production. Often, those truisms are a bit oversold. The ideas, for instance, that an elite hitter or two changes the way an opponent approaches the whole lineup or that those hitters are more likely to come through in clutch situations tend not to hold up under objective scrutiny. After all, unlike in other sports, a team can't electively allocate their offensive opportunities to give their best hitters extra opportunities. In watching this postseason play out, though, there have been several cases in which the semi-hidden added value of those stars shines through. The hits they collect and the runs they create, in and of themselves, are obvious sources of value, but the very best hitters at the top end of the batting order do two other, subtler things: Stretch the game by getting on base, even if many of the rallies they start don't directly lead to scoring. Make it more dangerous and costly to opponents when they let the players in the bottom half of the lineup get on base. The Guardians clogged the bases, but were unable to score early in Game 2 of the ALCS against the Yankees. They threatened and strained Gerrit Cole, but didn't break through in the first four innings of that contest. By forcing him to face 18 batters in those four frames, though, the team put New York manager Aaron Boone in a dilemma: lift his ace with a three-run lead and 15 more outs to get, or ask said ace to pitch to the top of the Guardians batting order a third time. Boone left Cole in the game, and although the visitors weren't able to break through enough to tie things up, they did get to Cole, drawing the deficit down to a lone run. Much is made, every October, of the need for power, because it's so hard to string together enough hits and walks to post a crooked number against the best pitching staffs in baseball. No single or walk is wasted, though, because they each lengthen the game and provide an advantage. They cycle the decision point a skipper faces with the starter's third trip through the lineup forward by a frame, or--and this one is critical--assure that the top of the lineup will get a fifth turn in the late innings. That's the big way that a lethal top of the order, like Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts, makes everyone around them better. Every hit, walk, hit batsman, or would-be double play beaten out from the likes of Enrique Hernández, Gavin Lux, or Tommy Edman matters, because it makes it incrementally more likely that Ohtani, Betts, and Freddie Freeman come up an extra time--and those guys' excellence makes that extra flip of the lineup card more valuable than, say, Ian Happ, Seiya Suzuki, and Cody Bellinger do. There are teams with worse top thirds of the order than the one the Cubs have deployed the last year or two, but the spotlight here goes on how much better the likes of the Dodgers' and Yankees' are. Most teams do get the top of their batting order up to bat a fifth time in most games, but often, it's just that top segment that gets its turn. This season, the average team got at least one plate appearance the fifth time through the order within the first nine innings (not counting turns against position players acting as pitchers) in 122.5 games. However, they only averaged 2.6 plate appearances per game under those conditions, despite hitting .253/.328/.415 in those settings. In other words, most of the time, even if you do get your best hitters a fifth turn, they don't have many outs to work with at that point. The Cubs were fifth in MLB, with 128 contests in which they got to the fifth time through the order. However, they weren't as good at cashing in on those chances as some of their peers. The Dodgers batted .309/.405/.540 the fifth time through. The Diamondbacks, Brewers, and Phillies also excelled. Arizona drove in 92 late-game runs in those situations. The Dodgers drove in 81. The Cubs were at 61. If your lineup has stars, they'll often do half the work of giving themselves a fifth shot at the other team's pitching staff within a game. But they also deserve credit for the value they create when those fifth chances come; they make the little lineup-lengthening depth pieces more important than they could be on their own. As Arizona's presence in the conversation indicates, finding value this way doesn't require a team to have a 50-homer slugger like Ohtani or Judge. The Mets have come up with some season-altering rallies over the last month and change on the strength of singles and doubles by the likes of Francisco Lindor, Starling Marte, Mark Vientos, and Pete Alonso. Lengthening the game is important, but becomes more so when players with broad, high-level skill sets lurk at the end of the other team's quest for the 27th out. If Happ and Suzuki could just be the second- and third-best hitters in the top part of the Cubs lineup next season, rather than the best and second-best, it would alter the character of their offense. The number of players they could acquire this winter who would effect that much change is small, and they might not be able to do it. As the postseason has gone on without them, though, the team has gotten plenty of chances to see exactly why it would be worth doing. View full article

One of the first pet projects of the Ricketts family after assuming ownership of the Chicago Cubs was an academy in the Dominican Republic. It remains virtually the last concrete evidence of the team's commitment to mining an essential vein of talent in the modern game. Image courtesy of © MICHAEL CLUBB/SOUTH BEND TRIBUNE / USA TODAY NETWORK It would be unfair to suggest that the Cubs haven't gotten contributions from homegrown players signed as amateur international free agents over the last decade. Three such players amassed at least 2 wins above average for the team at age 27 or younger from 2010-24: Welington Castillo, Willson Contreras, and Javier Assad. Beyond them, there are players whom the team traded for key pieces of their various contending teams, from Starlin Castro to Gleyber Torres, Eloy Jiménez, Jeimer Candelario, and Isaac Paredes--two of whom have come back to the team later on in their careers. The Cubs front office has decided to trade a few of the successful prospects they've developed after signing them from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Mexico, rather than holding onto them and trying to realize that latent value by developing them into homegrown stars. Still, this is a bad track record. If we can slough some of the blame for players who were traded and then failed to live up to their ceilings off onto the organizations who acquired them, we also have to acknowledge that the Cubs haven't even turned the international prospects they've signed and kept into useful role players--let alone stars. Castillo and Contreras were both signed before the Ricketts family even bought the team, and Castillo never became a true star, even for a moment. Injuries derailed countless promising players, but so did systematic failures of scouting, acquisition, and development. We live in an era defined by Ronald Acuna Jr., Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Chourio, Elly De La Cruz, Rafael Devers, Yordan Alvarez, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., José Ramírez, Starling Marte, Julio Rodríguez, Ketel Marte, Sandy Alcántara, and Luis Castillo. That list isn't even close to exhaustive, but it exhaustively demonstrates the point. There is huge, often unmatchable value in finding and developing stars through this market. The Cubs are disastrously bad at it. Every year, a division rival seems to call up a new player who poses long-term problems for the Cubs. In 2023, it was De La Cruz. In 2024, it was Chourio. The team is lucky that the Cardinals misevaluated Adolis García and Randy Arozarena. Otherwise, they might already have fallen even further behind the curve. Oneil Cruz, though initially signed by the Dodgers, was traded to Pittsburgh when he was 18 and is now finding himself as a budding star for the Pirates. That Cruz and Alvarez were both signed first by the Dodgers--and that Jasson Dominguez is a member of the Yankees--reminds us that getting ahold of top talent doesn't have to be a priority only for smaller-market teams. The rules changes around signing international amateur free agents that took effect in 2012 did make it harder for big-market teams to compete for top talent, but they've kept finding it, and some of those teams are doing much better work than the Cubs when it comes to developing the players they acquire. Hype has not been in short supply. The team signed Cristian Hernandez to a high-dollar bonus in 2021; Jefferson Rojas to one in 2022; Derniche Valdez to yet another in 2023; and Fernando Cruz for $4 million earlier this year. It's too early to fully assess any of those players, but Hernandez and Rojas have given the team consecutive seasons of the same experience: Hot young prospect wows many over offseason, is talked about as potential superstar and breakout player. Hot young prospect gets aggressive assignment when minor-league season begins. Hot young prospect essentially flops, and their star dims going into next season. Development need not be linear; the team could help these guys turn things around and fully tap into their tools. Alas, in the modern game, it's not a good sign when it takes a while for young player to catch fire in the low minors. Chourio, Tatis, Rodríguez, and Acuna didn't need to survive sidetrack seasons; they were good big-leaguers by Hernandez's current age. Has the team's investment in the international market gone only press release-deep? Are they funneling almost all their bonus money to one high-profile prospect, to make news and generate some hype, without real hope of getting a return on that investment? Or do they view that as the best way to turn things around and find a homegrown star? Either way, the results suggest that a change in tack is needed. Since Theo Epstein took over the team after the 2011 season, the only unmitigated, wire-to-wire success--the only guy they identified and acquired as an amateur, helped along and extracted real production from, and then signed to a deal to keep around into the middle of their career--is Ian Happ, who cost the team a valuable, non-renewable resource: a top-10 first-round pick. This organization desperately needs a star they create out of almost nothing, and then retain as a difference-maker for 10 years, the way all the teams who found and developed the long list of superstars above had a chance to do. Until that happens, it's hard to take their stated ambition to be a perennial contender seriously. The lack of just that kind of player and cost confluence is what's holding them back from it. View full article

A stronger bench and platoon presence from the right side is a must for the 2025 Cubs. One avenue through which they could pursue that needed improvement is the trade market, where other teams' reluctance to spend money could benefit Chicago. Image courtesy of © Matt Krohn-Imagn Images As good as Michael Busch was in 2024, there are very, very few left-handed hitters in baseball who aren't good candidates for at least occasional relegation to the bench. For the season, Busch batted .246/.336/.452 against righties, but a relatively paltry .258/.330/.382 against lefties--and that counts as holding up exceptionally well against southpaws. Adjusting for park effects, Busch's numbers were 14 percent better than average for a left-handed batter against left-handed pitchers. That's how much most lefties struggle with southpaws. There is some evidence that keeping one or two left-handed hitters in the lineup against a left-handed starting pitcher is valuable, because it forces them to break up their rhythm and pitch mix more than if a team runs a lineup full of right-handed bats at them. Given that Busch hangs in there well, maybe you want him to start even against lefties, along with Pete Crow-Armstrong (whose value resides mostly in his glove, and is therefore less sensitive to offensive matchups on a day-to-day basis). It's important not to bat Busch as high in the order against lefties as you would against righties, though, and that means having a good right-handed complement to him--someone who can play first base or be the DH, and who might come off the bench to pinch-hit in a key situation against a lefty on the days when he doesn't start. That sounds like a small role, but it's easy for such a player to find 300-400 plate appearances in a season, once you bake in injuries all over the roster and some rest for regulars. Last year, the Cubs gave this job mostly to Patrick Wisdom, but unfortunately, Wisdom wasn't able to sustain the success he's occasionally found in starting roles when shifted into a less routine-oriented job. They need an upgrade. As with the three left-handed infield bats I identified as potential targets Monday, the following three hitters are arbitration-eligible, and their teams could easily choose to retain them. For various reasons, though, that seems unlikely, and they might be available at a discount--but they might also have a bunch of upside left. Andrew Vaughn, 1B, White Sox Two years of team control remaining, MLB Trade Rumors projected arbitration earnings for 2025: $6.4 million As underwhelming as his numbers have been throughout his big-league career, Vaughn has shown plenty of signs of being a competent slugger. He's been a victim, in part, of one of the worst organizations in baseball, into whom he was conscripted by the 2019 Draft. The White Sox have failed to develop him into a player of substantial value, but the parts of a legitimate hitter are here. Vuaghn makes high-quality contact. He ranked in the 83rd percentile among hitters in the percentage of his swings that resulted in contact with an exit velocity of at least 100 miles per hour last year, and for the first time in his career, he consistently lifted the ball. He's not the pull hitter who might theoretically profile best at Wrigley Field, but his approach permits him to generate hard contact at a high rate without striking out as often as most hitters who do so. Last season, he batted a deeply problematic .234/.287/.387 against right-handed pitchers, but against lefties, he went .281/.327/.445. He'd be perfect in a slightly reduced role, shielded from many right-handed pitchers but placed prominently against lefties. Because the woeful White Sox are looking to get cheaper instead of better next season, he's also bound to be near the top of their trade list, since he's due more than $6 million via arbitration. The Cubs could probably acquire him pretty cheaply, and by the end of next season, it could look like a steal. His floor as a lefty-mashing bench bat and platoon partner to Busch and (should he opt in) Cody Bellinger is sturdy, and his ceiling is higher than those who have only seen him play for a disastrous series of coaches and managers are likely to realize. Ty France, 1B/DH, Reds One year of team control left, est. 2025 salary: $8.6 million As I wrote yesterday with regard to Josh Rojas, Seattle was a poisoned hitting environment in 2024. Whether it was a sightline issue at T-Mobile Field, some kind of atmospheric phenomenon, calamitous coaching, or a cocktail of the lot, nothing worked for most of the season for the Mariners. France, 30, became the poster boy for that, after the team gave up and cut him outright after the trade deadline. He batted an anemic .223/.312/.350 for them, with eight home runs in 340 plate appearances. Claimed by the Reds, he promptly socked three homers in his first fortnight, and in his first 163 plate appearances with the team, he batted .287/.325/.433. A 2-for-29 slump to end the season torpedoed his small-sample stats in a Reds uniform, and the combination of a hefty expected arbitration price tag and the expected returns of Christian Encarnacion-Strand and Matt McLain next year will make him eminently expendable for them this winter. In fact, France is probably a non-tender candidate, but the Cubs could jump that line and avoid the risk of having some other team offer him a multi-year deal. Whereas Vaughn would cost something in trade, landing France would require them to surrender nothing of importance; Cincinnati is sure to want to shed the salary obligation. He's a lower-upside play, but a cheaper one, in terms of acquisition cost if not in terms of dollars. Ryan Mountcastle, 1B, Orioles Two years of team control remaining, est. 2025 salary: $6.6 million The Orioles might be the only team with more interesting, voluminous and varied arbitration decisions ahead of them than the Cubs this year. They've been a very inexpensive contending team over the last two seasons, but they'll have to scale up and become one of the top spenders in the game over the next two, or else lose their perch as a playoff-caliber powerhouse in the highly competitive AL East. Mountcastle is not quite superfluous, but the team will have to make hard choices somewhere on their roster, and he would be a logical piece to move to save some money and open some playing time for young players like Coby Mayo. He batted .271/.308/.425 in 2024, continuing a trend of showing a good nose for hard contact, a bit too little plate discipline to blossom into a real star, and the ill effects on power of hitting the ball toward the cavern in left field at Camden Yards. For his career, he's a lethal .285/.338/.503 hitter against left-handed pitching, making him a perfect fit for the Cubs' needs. Obviously, he'd also get some help from hitting at Wrigley Field, rather than in Walltimore. To justify the cost of trading for Mountcastle, the Cubs would probably want to carve a role involving roughly 500 plate appearances out for him. That's likely possible only if Cody Bellinger opts out, so this proposal is a bit dependent on that possibility, but if it comes to fruition, the team should make a call about the slugging righty bat. The Cubs need more reliable power production in the heart of the lineup against lefties, and they need better depth of power threats against righties. Adding one of these three hitters could accomplish both, by giving them the odd power jolt from the (say) seventh spot against a righty while pushing Busch down the order and beefing up the cleanup or fifth spot against a lefty. As long as that comes at a moderate overall cost, it's worth serious exploration. View full article