Matthew Trueblood

The Cubs need to add a potent bat to their lineup, a frontline starter to their rotation, and better depth to their bullpen this offseason. That's partially because of the failure of these three players to develop into anything useful. Brennen Davis, OF By every account, Davis is a great guy, a hard worker, and a very talented ballplayer. Sometimes, when it comes to trying to win baseball games, none of that ends up mattering. Injuries have stolen all the promise from Davis, and while there might still lurk some spark of hope for a resurgent season or two and a modest big-league career, he's little more than a phantom on the Cubs roster now. He's a long-levered, tragic reminder that Kevin Alcantara is no sure thing. That Davis was rated so highly as a prospect just a couple of years ago is a cautionary tale, but not because he was fool's gold. He just failed the last, sternest, cruelest test a player has to pass, in order to become a success in MLB: he's not lucky. That sounds silly, and ephemeral. It sounds like waiting things out will fix it. Alas, that's not how this particular kind of baseball luck works. The gods just didn't dip enough of his body parts into the River Styx. The Cubs need to trade or cut Davis and spend that 40-man spot on a player who will deliver real value in 2024. Caleb Kilian, RHP The natural contrast with Davis is unkind to Kilian, because he hasn't been thwarted by injury. He's just not able to translate his raw talent into actionable big-league talent. Since he was a prospect in the Giants system, there have been doubts about his ability to flesh out a repertoire that misses bats in MLB, not least because of the wanting shape on his fastball(s). He's tinkered relentlessly and occasionally looked to be on the brink of figuring things out, only to have everything go back to seed. The block might be mental. It might be mechanical. It might, after all, be physical, and he could be pitching right through stuff that might shelve a less determined soul. At this point, as is the case with Davis, it just doesn't matter. If anyone will make an offer for Kilian, the Cubs should take it, but he's not worth much even as a throw-in at this stage, and getting him off the roster will almost assuredly make room for a more useful pitcher--even if it be at a higher price for the Ricketts family. Michael Rucker, RHP A rubber-armed up-and-down guy is not without some value. David Ross wasn't great at extracting that value from Rucker, but he did explore various methods, and Rucker tried valiantly to make meaningful adjustments. It just isn't there. He's never going to be more than the seventh or eighth arm in a team's bullpen. If the Cubs had a clear and durable top pitcher or two in their bullpen hierarchy, they might be able to benefit from that kind of presence, the way Craig Counsell has benefited from having so many seemingly fungible arms float around at the edges of his bullpen in the recent past. To get to that kind of pen, though, the team needs to clear more roster space and chase some upside. Rucker has none of it. Would you stand up to defend holding onto any of this trio? Are there other members of the current 40-man roster you think the Cubs need to get shot of, in order to take the next step toward contention? Weigh in below.

For the purposes of this exercise, we'll focus solely on internal options. This isn't a prediction that the team won't sign any free agents or make any trades; it's just a glimpse at what the team will look like without them. Starting Lineup Mike Tauchman, CF Nico Hoerner, 2B Ian Happ, LF Seiya Suzuki, RF Dansby Swanson, SS Matt Mervis, 1B Christopher Morel, DH Yan Gomes, C Nick Madrigal, 3B The glaring omission here, of course, is Pete Crow-Armstrong. A contract extension could solidify Crow-Armstrong's place with the team on Opening Day, and it's still possible he could win the job without one, but he's not the favorite at this moment. Having only taken 158 plate appearances at Triple A and with some clear work to do offensively, Crow-Armstrong could return to Iowa to open the season and try to sand off the rough edges. To reclaim an extra year of service time, the Cubs would need to wait until roughly the beginning of May to call him up. If he doesn't assert himself in the Cactus League, though, that feels like the short end of the timeline, anyway. Bench Miguel Amaya, C Patrick Wisdom, 3B/1B Alexander Canario, OF Miles Mastrobuoni, IF This unit, and this specific set of players, is the reason why Craig Counsell was such an important acquisition back in November. David Ross got nothing much out of Amaya, using him far too sparingly and doing a lousy job of developing him at the big-league level. Ditto for Canario. These are guys with ample tactical value, if instilled with confidence and used in the right matchups and situations. Counsell will tap into that. Starting Rotation Justin Steele Jameson Taillon Kyle Hendricks Javier Assad Jordan Wicks Plainly, this can't be the group come Opening Day. So far, this exercise has only underscored that the Cubs' most urgent and pressing need is for a frontline starting pitcher. Steele is unlikely to ever have a season as good as his 2023 again. Taillon figures to be somewhat better than he was last season, and if he's a third starter, you probably have a pretty sturdy rotation. If he's second, though, that's a problem. Hendricks's resurgent season was a delightful thing, but it came with some warning signs that the end is only getting nearer, not further away. Wicks is the only hurler here who provides upside beyond the role into which he's slotted. Bullpen Adbert Alzolay Julian Merryweather Drew Smyly Hayden Wesneski Daniel Palencia Mark Leiter, Jr. Jose Cuas Luke Little The top six names here are all relatively recent converts from starting roles. All eight have meaningful upside, and at least three of them have the chance to be a legitimate relief ace. However, none is a proven one, and none have shown the consistency or the durability to do that over a full season. Nor is the team's relief depth overwhelmingly impressive, unless you consider the likes of Assad or Ben Brown to be part of that equation. The Cubs need reinforcement in this area, too. By now, it should be pretty clear why the Cubs are 22nd in the current projected 2024 standings at FanGraphs. Understandably, fans are growing impatient. There are still a number of avenues available for the Cubs to markedly improve, but there's no question that they need to do so, and that will require a much bolder second half of the offseason. What do you think of this roster projection? Where did I err, and who should be on the list instead? Join the conversation below.

The Chicago Cubs are testing their fans' patience and threatening some of their sanity. In the latest episode of This is Not a Rebuild, the guys try to make sense of the team's approach to free agency, take turns ranting on subjects ranging from Eric Hosmer to the sustainability of any sector of our economy, and then close with a Random Cub of the Week! Here's the full episode, on Spotify: It's also available on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe, rate, and review the show on your favorite platform. This offseason hasn't been much fun so far, but the show continues to be.

The Tampa Bay Rays and Los Angeles Dodgers agreed to a deal Thursday to send Tyler Glasnow to Los Angeles, along with outfielder Manuel Margot. The Rays will get young, controllable starting pitcher Ryan Pepiot and outfield prospect Jonny DeLuca in return. As of early Friday morning, though, the deal isn't official, because it's contingent on Glasnow and the Dodgers agreeing on a contract extension to keep him around beyond his scheduled free agency at the end of 2024. For a long time this offseason, fans grew more anxious, but little actually changed. Although the Cubs haven't addressed their fairly dire need for help at the front end of their rotation, they also hadn't missed out on many of their realistic options to make that upgrade. Now, though, the music seems to have stopped, and chairs are filling up. The team needs to find one soon, and Glasnow marks a very oft-mentioned target taken off the board. While his lack of durability is an important mark against Glasnow, the other argument not to acquire him was that he'd only be around for one year. That the Dodgers are getting him to sign an extension to make this deal work makes this feel like more of a miss for the Cubs. Soon, another important miss will also become official. Yoshinobu Yamamoto's lucrative free-agent sweepstakes continues, but the Cubs seem not to be a serious player in it. One by one, the pitchers who could materially change the look and feel of the Chicago rotation are finding their new homes, and none (so far) are on the North Side of Chicago. Three good options do stand out, though. It's not too late to flip the script. Let's break down the situation with each hurler. Shota Imanaga Of the remaining pitching targets, the most intriguing is Imanaga. It's pretty clear, by now, that his market will reach the $20-million annual average value range, and it's likely to be a five-year deal. That's a big payout to a 30-year-old, but as I've written before, Imanaga has a ton of upside. If the Cubs can land him, they'll have the swing-and-miss element that has been missing from their rotation the last several years. Imanaga's strikeout-to-walk ratio of 188:24 in NPB this year is like something out of a video game, especially given that he did it while facing only 637 batters. Against MLB hitters, he'll need to make some adjustments, and both of those rates are likely to move in the less desirable direction. They have plenty of room to do so without posing a problem, though. Imanaga's sheer stuff supports the numbers and suggests he could keep them up, to some extent. As we've discussed recently, it doesn't seem like the Cubs are willing to go far enough to sign top-end superstars in free agency, but Imanaga fits into the range to which they do seem willing to stretch. Shane Bieber The Cubs and Guardians have had substantial trade talks around a number of names and involving a lot of potential combinations of young Cubs talent, but one player who stays right in the center of the conversation is Bieber. He's not a Glasnow-like swing-and-miss maven, at this point in his career, but he does several things well and has a deep repertoire. He's the kind of starting pitcher the Cubs have tended to value more highly than most of the rest of the league. With the precedent set anew by the Glasnow deal, it wouldn't be shocking to see the Cubs try to secure an extension with Bieber before completing a trade. In 2024, the hope is that he would be a No. 2 starter, but for the handful of years after that, he would project as more of a mid-rotation option. An extension that ensured he would be a long-term replacement for Kyle Hendricks (who needs to slide to the back of the rotation mix in 2024 and is likely to leave thereafter) would make a trade for Bieber more exciting. Jordan Montgomery If any free agent smoothly blends the reliability and control of Bieber with the upside of Imanaga, it's probably Montgomery. I discussed why he's a good fit for the Cubs, from a pitching philosophy perspective, earlier this offseason. The market for Montgomery is yet to gain full heat, but that figures to change as Glasnow and Yamamoto come off the board, and it could move quickly at that point. He doesn't miss bats the way you'd like your front-end starter to do so. That's the knock on Montgomery. His durability is superb, though, and he fills up the strike zone. He also does things with seam-shifted wake and the unique release point on his high, over-the-top deliver that make him tough to read and tough to hit. It's unlikely that the Cubs can afford both Imanaga and Montgomery, and if they do want to sign Montgomery, they might prefer not to extend Bieber, so as not to overcommit to mid-rotation hurlers for the long term. Still, it might be that the Rangers' co-ace for the stretch run is the right guy to prioritize. Which of these three hurlers strike you as most likely (or most desirable) for the Cubs? Who else is still on your radar? Let's talk about raising the ceiling in the rotation, even if it can't be with Glasnow or Yamamoto.

I've said this in a couple of places recently, but in my opinion, the Cubs' goal this winter ought not to be to project for a certain number of wins or to be obvious favorites in the NL Central. Rather, the goal should be to add at least two players who project to be comfortably above-average, for multiple seasons. In fact, that should be the goal most winters. Flexibility is good, and Jed Hoyer is good at maintaining it, but a team can't gain the kind of traction the Cubs need to gain without committing to (and securing a commitment from, unless they're under team control anyway) good players for the medium or long term. In fact, that's what Hoyer has been trying to do over the last couple winters, anyway. Two years ago, around the lockout, he signed both Marcus Stroman and Seiya Suzuki. Just last year, it was Dansby Swanson and Jameson Taillon. That's on top of moves like the extensions the team signed with Nico Hoerner and Ian Happ in the spring. They're building this roster out by committing to these guys for long enough to truly build around them, instead of having to replace them just when they start to get their feet under them. That brings us around to Cody Bellinger, because he, too, signed with the Cubs last winter, but it wasn't the same kind of deal. He delivered real value, but it was on a one-year deal, so now that value has burned itself out. Now, after the Cubs missed out (however voluntarily, or not) on Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto and with their hopes of acquiring Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Tyler Glasnow looking very dim, rumors of Bellinger and the Cubs reuniting are starting to percolate. It's hard, emotionally, not to think of that possibility as an unsatisfying status quo kind of move. We've well established the risk of regression for Bellinger, based on his underlying performance indicators. Soto and Ohtani each would have represented major upgrades, and Yamamoto would be a level of impact player above what Bellinger has been in any season save his MVP campaign in 2019. After not landing any of them, bringing back Bellinger would feel like a lateral move at the worst time--at least narratively. Instead, try to imagine that Bellinger is an equally young, equally versatile, equally graceful left-handed power hitter. Imagine him as a free agent without draft pick compensation attached, since by re-signing him, the Cubs would lose only the opportunity to gain an extra pick if he signed elsewhere instead. Whereas Bellinger was just in Chicago on a pillow deal in 2023, if he comes back now, it would be on a contract lasting at least six or seven years. It would be a long-term commitment between the two sides, and even if that makes fans a bit nervous, it should also excite them. Bellinger, were he to return now, would be a fixture at first base for the team for the foreseeable future. He'd be the first Cub to officially be on the books into the next decade. It's unlikely that a move will come together unless Bellinger's asking price falls down to $25 million or so in annual average value, which means that (especially in five years or so) it needn't be the top salary on the roster. There really wouldn't be inordinate pressure on Bellinger to rejuvenate himself further, or to recapture that 2019 form. He'd just need to approximate what we just saw from him in 2023, and he would be able to do it with the security and fan affection that comes with that kind of long-term deal. Slot Bellinger in that way, and a little of the pressure on the team's scouting and player-development systems also abates. The team's capacity to trade from their depth on the farm system, especially with regard to position players, would increase just a bit. Bellinger would still be a good fit with the Cubs, if his market doesn't take off the way he and Scott Boras have hoped. It would help the team establish its long-term core. I'm not sure who either of the Cubs' long-term, above-average acquisitions this winter will be. They're likely to be active in the trade market, and they have plenty of money to spend. There are other free agents in whom they might have active interest, beyond Bellinger, like Jordan Montgomery or Matt Chapman. If they do end up reupping with their best player from the season just past, though, they'll have done something bigger than they did by bringing him in the first time, and we shouldn't lose sight of that fact.

It's a dispositional thing, with Jed Hoyer. He spent almost a decade as Theo Epstein's top lieutenant and an occasional public mouthpiece, and he's been the man in charge for the Cubs since late 2020, and it's time to stop thinking he's been hiding the ball that whole time. Hoyer doesn't have the iron stomach needed to win bidding wars at the top end of the free-agent market. Heck, he doesn't even have an interest in trying it. By Hoyer's reckoning, superstars don't win championships. He prefers the steady, serious, tireless work of building a great organization from top to bottom, with depth on the roster and excellent processes throughout baseball operations. It's an axiom for him. Even though he can recognize the need for high-end talent and will pursue it when the opportunity comes, he insists upon it being on terms friendly to his paradigm. No one who thinks that way is ever going to end up with a Shohei Ohtani-caliber player again, except by the extraordinary and unforeseeable good luck of developing such a player. If we didn't understand that clearly enough when the Cubs bowed out of the negotiations for Ohtani himself, Sahadev Sharma of The Athletic underscored it on MLB Network by reporting that the Cubs have largely fallen out of the mix for Yoshinobu Yamamoto, too. Ohtani's contract was one thing. Whatever number you prefer to assign to it, its practical impact exceeds half a billion dollars, and although Ohtani has been one of the greatest players in baseball history for the last three years, there's risk the size of Lake Michigan in throwing that much money at him just as he begins the process of rehabbing from what amounts to a second Tommy John surgery on his elbow. He's also almost 30 years old, so even though he didn't elect a contract as long as those signed by Trea Turner and Xander Bogaerts last winter, he'll be nearly 40 when the deal wraps up. None of that is true of Yamamoto. He's not a unicorn, and he's racked up heavier workloads than any MLB team would allow a pitcher to incur by the age of 25, but then again, he's only 25. He's one of the world's most accomplished starting pitchers, and signing him will come at a purely financial cost--no draft picks will be taken away. nor international free-agent spending ability curtailed, for whichever team signs him. If the Cubs won't venture past $300 million for him, for whom will they do so? The answer should be obvious by now: it's no one. That's just not going to happen under Hoyer's leadership. Maybe that's ok. Epstein and Hoyer's second half-decade at the helm of the organization saw too much slippage in the good foundations they had laid during the first few years. They were betrayed and undermined by ownership, but they also failed. They were supposed to come to Chicago and turn an inconsistent franchise into a perennial contender, for the first time since before World War II. They didn't do it. Hoyer is trying to get that heavy lift right this time, and perhaps that's laudable. It's possible to win without high-priced superstars. It might even be the wiser course in many cases, and especially so for the Cubs. They face the same stiff penalties other big-market teams do when they exceed the luxury tax thresholds, and they don't receive any of the little benefits that help small-market teams compete, but unlike every other big-market team in baseball (unless you count the White Sox as one), the Cubs are competing exclusively against small-market teams. They would take on a lot of risk by building around superstars, given the head start on sustainability the current rules give to the Reds, Brewers, Pirates, and even Cardinals. Still, Cubs fans are within their rights to be frustrated by this way of doing things. Hoyer hasn't yet proved good enough at his more conservative way of building a team to be one of those teams who wins without stars, and it's not fun to root for a team who has such an overabundance of resources--many of them extracted directly from fans, via high prices on absolutely everything--and harbors them so jealously, when they don't even offer the solace of consistent playoff appearances. The essential question is this: Is Hoyer's conservatism the only thing stopping the team from playing for Yamamoto-like boondoggles? If so, then fans can console themselves with the knowledge that they'll soon see either a turn in the team's fortunes or a change of its course. If it's just that Hoyer doesn't like putting too many eggs in one basket, then (if the team doesn't win something big, and soon) he'll be replaced by an executive who's more disposed to do so. Eventually, if it's just Hoyer between the Cubs and a Yamamoto, an Ohtani, or a Juan Soto, then either his plan will work, or it won't, and the next person will land the team's first true megadeal. Alas, that's just one possibility, and the other is more pernicious. Hoyer probably isn't even asking Tom Ricketts for the right to truly swing with the Dodgers, Yankees, Mets, Phillies, and Padres on contracts like the ones the highest-profile free agents have signed over the last few winters. The nightmare scenario is one in which the Cubs can't get over the hump (without star power) in 2024 or 2025, Hoyer is dismissed, and a new executive tries to bring in the kind of generational player Hoyer neglected--only to be told that the owner was never going to permit that kind of major move, anyway. The biggest drawback to Hoyer's conservatism is that it prevents us from updating our information on Ricketts's willingness to do what it takes to win. If the team keeps making good progress in its scouting and player development, maybe it will never matter that much. If the team turns Pete Crow-Armstrong and Cade Horton into the next Corbin Carroll and Gerrit Cole, they won't need to shell out $300 million to keep them. They'll have a chance to get aggressive and sign them long-term for half that much, or less. If not, though, we need to know whether Ricketts is even open to paying the irrational price the market sets on elite talent. We can't get that answer while Hoyer stands in the way.

After a couple days spent finalizing the details and clearing the necessary roster spots for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Shohei Ohtani's megadeal became official Monday. In the process, reporters laid out the particulars of the deferral structure that was alluded to in less exact terms on Saturday, upon the first reports of the deal. Ohtani will only be paid $2 million per year for the 10-year life of the contract. Then, for the following 10 years, he'll receive a staggering $68 million per year. As a result of that extreme structure, Ohtani's deal has an annual average value of just over $46 million, for luxury-tax purposes. That set of a torrent of outrage on Twitter, wherein the Dodgers were accused of all manner of manipulation of the tax. Many wailed that the MLB Players Association has been derelict in allowing this to become a legal deal, and that the loophole it represents is sure to cause greater friction in the next round of negotiations for a collective bargaining agreement. The general feeling seems to be that, whether legal or not, ethical or not, the Dodgers got away with something here. It's just not true, and it's tiresome that people are so insistent that this is a problem. We can explain the confusion, easily enough. Since the deal was initially reported as $700 million over 10 years (and after some sloppy initial reporting by a few people who specialize in the math around these types of deals), it's causing the weirdest case of reverse sticker shock in human history as fans come to grips with the fact that the Dodgers will only face that $46 million in annual weight on their competitive-balance tax payroll. All the trouble there is in your head, though. Even as the deal was first announced, every major reporter stressed that there were major deferrals involved. This is the most extreme deferral structure in modern baseball history, but it's just a slight exaggeration of the terms everyone should have envisioned in the wake of the initial news. The contract was never going to be worth $700 million in real, present value. We knew the deferrals were going to be the majority of Ohtani's salary, which meant that the actual deal was falling right in the range everyone expected before the eye-popping 7s hit our eyeballs on Saturday afternoon: comfortably north of $500 million, but south of $600 million. While the league and the union have an agreed-upon interest rate they apply to deferrals and a formula for the CBT hit of a deal, we don't have to accept that net present value figure as a simple statement of the value of the contract. To Ohtani, who doesn't need to sweat the time value of money because he makes upward of $40 million per year through endorsements and other off-field income streams, this structure is worth much more than $460 million. He has a chance to limit his tax liability for the $680 million that will be paid after the contract ends, by moving out of California to any number of potential tax havens. He also has a chance to borrow against that money even before he actually receives it, if necessary, and thus invest and add to his mountains of cash. It just doesn't matter that much, to him, when he's paid. Nor should it matter much to fans of other teams. The Dodgers derive a small advantage here, because the extremity of these deferrals pushes that CBT hit down, but even by that calculation, Ohtani will be the highest-paid player in baseball, with a cushion of over $2 million on second place. If the deferrals were more along the lines we expected, the hit would be something like $53 million. That difference is small. It can buy the Dodgers an extra platoon bat or setup man each year, but it's small potatoes, really. The fact that they will be making such a small actual outlay to Ohtani during that time certainly helps, but only for bean counters. The CBA's rules penalizing big-market teams for repeatedly exceeding the CBT (especially the second, third, and fourth thresholds) will still be there. For most of the next 10 years, the Dodgers will have their first draft pick pushed back 10 spots. For most of them, they will lose international free agency spending power. They will pay high tax rates on their overages, and their overages will not be inconsiderable. This coming year, they'll lose two of their top five draft picks and a significant chunk of their IFA money--with the latter becoming especially restrictive if Roki Sasaki succeeds in convincing his NPB team to post him to MLB next winter. These impacts will be felt, even if they're getting an apparently tremendous bargain in the short term on Ohtani. Then, they'll have to pay him $680 million while (almost surely, given the unique demands and physical stresses of the unique thing he does) he retires to somewhere beyond the reach of the American IRS. It's fine to be mad that the Dodgers went so much further than the Cubs were willing to. It's fine to feel that the system is rigged, and that the league should revisit revenue-sharing rules to give more teams a chance to compete with the elite earners in the biggest coastal markets. Let's just stay focused on those real concerns. The particular structure of this deal doesn't make things as easy for the Dodgers as many have claimed, and it's not a circumvention or a subversion of anything. It's just a radical solution to the problem of paying a player $700 million.

There's nothing complicated about Emmanuel Clase. The Guardians' closer is just a rear-back-and-fire guy. He throws a cutter and a slider, and the cutter hums in at very nearly 100 miles per hour. It takes little more than that to be an elite relief pitcher, and for the last three years, that's what Clase has been. He's been an All-Star the last two seasons and led the American League in saves each year. He's also had a rubber arm, with seven more appearances than any other pitcher in baseball since the start of 2022. Nothing is ever quite as simple as it looks. Even though he's still touching triple digits with that cutter, Clase did lose half a tick in 2023, and with it went too many of his strikeouts. Somehow, he lost the mystical thing that makes one slider miss bats when dipping off the trajectory of a sizzling fastball, and fell in with the likes of the ones who make the same veer but don't earn the same result. Even so, Clase pounds the strike zone in a way few other closers in the sport do, and he has one of the best ground-ball rates in the game. That cutter stubbornly resists being barreled up, and hitters manage lots of weak dribblers. Yet, he did get hit harder in 2023, as his command of the cutter got a bit loose against lefties (more balls out over the plate, away from them, rather than crowding them inside) and he left his slider up too often against righties (where hitters could get underneath it a bit). Between fewer missed bats and more high-value contact, it's no great surprise that his ERA rose from just over 1.30 for the two previous seasons to 3.22. The very simplicity of his approach makes it a little hard to fix Clase, if we admit that he got broken last year. So much of his success depends on consistently executing those two dazzling pitches, with the intensity and physical electricity of his delivery, that the question of his value boils down almost solely to repeating well. It's not that he doesn't utilize sequencing or psychology at all; it's just that it plays a relatively small role in his game. Clase has extraordinary stuff, and the variable that controls his value is whether he can throw it where he wants to. Perhaps the variable that controls that, in turn, is the degree to which Clase's arm is currently under the assault of such heavy use. In the last few years of Terry Francona's career, he rode Clase hard. That wasn't callousness; he had little choice. Still, calling on Clase so often surely led to some of his fraying in terms of command and control. With a bit more protection from appearances on back-to-back days and multiple-inning outings, Clase might bounce right back to his unassailably elite level in 2024. That's why he'd be a great target for the Cubs. They can't count on Adbert Alzolay, alone, to hold down the back end of their bullpen. He, Julian Merryweather, and Mark Leiter, Jr. form the foundation of a decent bullpen, but Clase would round it out gorgeously. The team has enough pitching depth to keep the pressure of a heavy workload off Clase, and a better offense than Cleveland has had during his career. They also have Craig Counsell, who has plenty of experience keeping elite relief weapons fresh and who has proved exceptionally deft at it. With three more seasons of guaranteed money left on his deal and another two club options beyond that, Clase is a phenomenally valuable asset. He'd cost the Cubs a huge haul on his own--let alone as part of a package with Shane Bieber, Josh Naylor, or both, as some have mused. The Cubs would have to let the Guardians pick at least two pieces from the top end of their farm system, and they might need to surrender a young player from the big-league roster, too. Nonetheless, Clase's compelling. He's the rare closer with a truly transformational upside, and the combination of years and affordability on his contract means the impact would be long-lasting. Unless and until the Cubs expend trade capital to land a different star, he should be on your radar. The situation is a bit complicated, but the player himself and the value he promises are wondrously simple.

Things did not end well between the Tigers and Spencer Turnbull. The 2014 second-rounder out of Alabama climbed through the Detroit farm system over the next few years, and was occasionally impressive for his first few years in MLB. Early in 2021, though, he seemed to have turned a corner. That May, he threw a no-hitter. He was emerging as a star. Then, Tommy John surgery ruined everything. Turnbull missed the final four months of 2021 and all of 2022. In 2023, he made his return, but he was nowhere near as exciting or even as consistent as he had been before the injury. The team optioned him to the minors even though he claimed to be battling injuries to his neck and foot. After the season, Turnbull was vindicated, as the Tigers agreed to give him a full year of services time for 2023 despite having used the options to send him down. That was just a parting gift from Detroit, though. They non-tendered Turnbull, who is now a free agent a year (or two, had the service time not been restored to him) earlier than expected. Free agency won't be a lucrative exercise for him, at least this time, but he's on the market. The Cubs could swoop down and scoop him up as a swingman or sixth starter, and give him the season to rehabilitate his value. Obviously, if his sole interest is rebuilding that value and trying to hit free agency next year as a much-sought-after star with multi-year offers, Turnbull might prefer a team with less pitching depth than the Cubs have. If the Cubs can sell him on the value of their pitching instruction and development group, though, they might gain a leg up. There's plenty with which to work, and Turnbull does have untapped upside if someone can help him sort some things out. What Turnbull's arsenal looks like depends a little on whom you ask. Both Baseball Savant and Brooks Baseball show him making use of a slider, a sinker, a changeup, and a curveball, but his most-used pitch is listed as a four-seam fastball at Savant and as a cutter at Brooks. That's an important distinction, not only to projecting his performance but to understanding his recent struggles. Whatever you call that 93-mile-per-hour offering that fronts Turnbull's repertoire, he throws it with extreme cutting action (it would be 96th-percentile cut) and extremely heavy vertical movement (97th percentile) for a four-seamer. For a cutter, though, it's extreme in its lack of glove-side movement, and has more rising action than the average. Here's what his overall movement profile looked like in 2023. Turnbull's big problem is that, coming from a relatively low arm slot but opening up to an extreme extent with his stride toward the plate, he leaves the ball on the wrong side of the plate for his stuff on far too regular a basis. His primary offering really makes more sense as a cutter, especially in tandem with the rest of his stuff, but it ends up on the arm side of the plate as often as not. One reading of that location map could be, "Well, that's a four-seamer, then. It's just a four-seamer he throws at the top of the zone to chase whiffs." That almost works, but here are the locations of his slider in 2023. Again, this is largely a mechanical problem. Turnbull's open stride and arm slot combine to cause a lot of pitches released a hair too soon, missing arm-side. That's true for all his stuff, but especially the stuff that needs to be moving to the glove side instead. At this stage of a player's career, it's not as simple as pointing that out to him and expecting an instantaneous, effective change, but the fix here is not overwhelmingly complex. If Turnbull does make that fairly major adjustment, everything else might fall into place. If he could command the cutter to the glove side, his heavy sinker would become much more of a weapon, and he'd still be able to change eye levels against right-handed batters thanks to the depth on his slider. Against lefties, he was very reliant on the cutter/fastball in 2023, because his breaking stuff didn't work at all against them with the locations of his various offerings. A tweak to his delivery or position on the mound could effect a huge change against opposite-handed hitters. He'd probably only be interested in a one-year deal, because his value is pretty low at the moment. If the Cubs worked out such a pact with him, though, Turnbull could be a compelling complement to Hayden Wesneski and Javier Assad--or, should either of them be traded this winter as the team addresses other needs, a smart replacement for them. What do you think of Turnbull as an under-the-radar target for the Cubs? Who else are you keeping an eye on as a low-risk, high-reward guy?

At $700 million (even given massive deferrals), Shohei Ohtani was not a fit for the Cubs. I would argue that he's not even a fit for the Dodgers at that number, but they have it to spend and he's an extraordinary player, so now, he's a Dodger. The Cubs didn't land Ohtani despite their second earnest effort to court him, but if it was going to cost anything like this much money, they made the right choice by not overextending to win the bidding war. Perfect rationality is no way for a baseball team to live, but this contract represents a degree of irrationality that was always going to be insupportable. With that roadblock out of the way, though, the Cubs can now begin their offseason, for real. Over the next 10 days (before things begin to wind down for the holidays), there will be a flurry of moves throughout MLB. Chicago's chances of landing Yoshinobu Yamamoto are very slim, just as they were with Ohtani. It feels very much as though Yamamoto will end up with the Yankees or Mets, on a deal that could reach $400 million in total expenditures after accounting for the posting fee. There are plenty of other stars who will soon change teams, though, and the Cubs figure to be in on several of them. Tyler Glasnow's name keeps coming up in connection with the Cubs, but the Dodgers just gained about 700 million more reasons to be aggressive about a deal to bolster their rotation for exactly one year, so the competition there will be stiff. The Cubs' best bet to upgrade their own starting staff might yet be a Japanese phenom, because they're still being mentioned as a suitor for Shota Imanaga, and Imanaga has a chance to be the sneakily low-priced ace on this increasingly crazy market. Remember, a week ago, we heard rumors of the Cubs being interested in Jordan Montgomery. They could now get serious in pursuit of him, although you'd figure it's either Montgomery or Imanaga, rather than both. The fit with either makes sense, and probably more sense than the one with Glasnow, but any of the three would be a boon to the rotation. The team does need that, and would have even if they'd signed Ohtani. At the moment, though, the next move I would bet on from the Cubs is a trade with the Guardians. They've been linked to Shane Bieber, Emmanuel Clase, and Josh Naylor, and all three of them make sense for Chicago. They will not acquire all three, but various combinations of them have been kicked around by the two sides, and there are other interesting pieces who could flow each way. While Cubs fans all agree on the need for more swing-and-miss from the rotation, and while Bieber doesn't exactly promise to deliver that, we have to keep in mind that the Cubs have concrete preferences in their starters, and reasons for those preferences. Bieber fits those preferences. Clase would be an interesting pickup for the bullpen. He's obviously one of the game's best closers, but just as obviously, he pitched his arm off for Terry Francona at times during the last few seasons. I don't think Francona was consciously trading Clase's future for his own present, but the aging skipper turned to his All-Star relief ace so often to hold thin leads cobbled together by an anemic offense that Clase did wear down under the burden as last season progressed. When he's right, though, he's overpowering, and building a bullpen in front of him would feel like a breeze, compared to the difficulty of assembling a usable committee each year over the last few. Naylor is a brilliant fit for the Cubs, but the Guardians aren't yet clearly ready to trade him. He's such a heartbeat of that team that they can't easily let him go, even if they have pressure coming from the farm system in the form of top prospect Kyle Manzardo. The idea of Naylor's slashing left-handed offense and solid glove at first base is highly appealing, though. There are all of those options, and plenty more. The Cubs could pivot to trying to trade for one of the Marlins' controllable starting pitchers, although whether any of them represent a sufficient short-term upgrade over the team's options of Ben Brown and Cade Horton to justify their cost is a reasonable question. They could try to sign a player they did once woo as a coveted international free agent, in Jorge Soler, or swoop in to collect the Dodgers' jetsam after J.D. Martinez's time as the designated hitter in Los Angeles was semi-officially ended by Ohtani's signing. They could engage with Rhys Hoskins on a short-term deal, or Matt Chapman on a longer one. There might be a couple of interesting trade targets in Minnesota, where the Twins need to unload the salary of either Jorge Polanco or Max Kepler and want starting pitching. Ryan McMahon could be a really nice complementary piece and long-term addition, if trading for him were only the third-biggest move of the winter. He'd only be disappointing as a headline move for the team. The Padres might look to offload even more salary, before they go about reassembling a competitive team. The Mariners have Logan Gilbert, who might be available for a deal centered on young hitters. Opportunities abound. Jed Hoyer is just getting started, after this chance slid by. He might have a slightly narrower road to success from here, but he has multiple forms of currency with him and there are still jewels to find. Which direction do you want to see him go?