NEWSLETTER
About a week ago, it was becoming a pretty clear expectation that Chicago Cubs intended to open the season with 14 pitchers on the 26-man roster. Given the very dense bullpen competition, the need to protect starter innings early in the season, and the general favoring of more pitching over more position players in recent years, it all tracked. Even as it was going to make for a very difficult set of roster decisions on the bench.
But now, even as the bullpen competition features more than eight guys you’d like to make the team, it sounds like the Cubs are not actually committed to nine in the pen. Instead, the Cubs might want to be able to carry five players on the bench to open the season, which would mean only eight reliever spots are available.
“We’ve talked a lot about 14 pitchers and 12 position players,” Cubs President Jed Hoyer said in the wide-ranging conversation with NBC Sports Chicago. “But that’s not set in stone either. We could end up with 13 and 13 as well.”
Immediately, I wonder if some of the tune-changing comes from Nico Hoerner’s emergence as the best overall option at second base, which would mean you’d suddenly need an “extra” bench spot if you wanted to keep a guy like Eric Sogard or Ildemaro Vargas on the big league roster (since Hoerner wouldn’t be optioned to start the season). Right now, if Hoerner is the starting second baseman, the bench would be incredibly crunched if you had just four spots: back-up catcher is one, David Bote is another, and Jake Marisnick is another. So you’d have just one spot for Sogard, Vargas, Rafael Ortega, Matt Duffy, or Cameron Maybin.
If you swap out a pitcher, you can keep at least two of those guys, which, in a DH-less NL world, you might be more inclined to do.
More support for the idea that the Cubs might go with five on the bench and only eight relievers, via the Sun-Times and Tommy Hottovy:
What might ultimately determine the Cubs’ bullpen to start the season could be roster crunch on the bench. The Cubs might lean toward a five-man bench, which would mean they would only carry 12 pitchers. If that’s the case, shifting toward versatility and pitchers who can throw multiple innings might be a deciding factor in who makes the roster.
“We want to get all these guys extended to get them multiple innings,” pitching coach Tommy Hottovy said. “But we see them all as late-inning leverage relievers, too. So it’s kind of balancing that through spring, giving them opportunities to get up and down multiple times but also pitching in leverage situations now that we can’t roll innings and we have to do all these things.”
In other words, if the composition of the bullpen is such that there are multiple multi-inning relievers in place to open the season, maybe you could more easily get away with only eight relievers. If Adbert Alzolay opens in the bullpen, for example? And Shelby Miller? And if guys like Jason Adam or Ryan Tepera or Andrew Chafin could give you multi-inning appearances?
These are obviously interrelated topics, and options/minor league opt-outs/40-man spots are the hand behind the hand. The Cubs will want to optimize the roster balance, yes, but they’ll also want to keep as much talent in the organization as possible. If that means going with five on the bench gets the tiebreaker, so be it. Because we know what happens almost immediately when the season starts: guys get dinged up, guys get optioned, and so on. Whatever the roster is on day one is probably not what the roster will be as soon as day ten.
