No Other Extension Talks This Year for the Cubs?

Just to button things up on the extension front as we exit the very early part of the season – when you do still see extensions come down, as we have the last few weeks in baseball – it doesn’t sound like the Chicago Cubs will have any more coming.

The team extended Nico Hoerner in Spring Training and then Ian Happ earlier this month, and that is going to be that for now:

As Jed Hoyer implies, the team doesn’t actually have a lot of arbitration-level players who make for obvious extension candidates, at least not after Hoerner and Happ. In that pre-arbitration group, you could make an argument for guys like Justin Steele, Keegan Thompson, Adbert Alzolay, or maybe Patrick Wisdom, but you could also argue for each of those guys that the Cubs would be better served letting the team control play out through arbitration. And then you have guys like Christopher Morel and Nelson Velazquez, but they are still in the minors for now.

In other words, I’m not surprised to learn that the Cubs don’t anticipate any in-season extension negotiations from here. Let’s see where things stand after the season. Hey, that’s what Jed said.