NEWSLETTER
The kind of report I have really been dreading this week, particularly in tandem with Mark Feinsand’s late-night report that “sources” hadn’t included the Chicago Cubs’ name in identifying the teams still in the mix for Shohei Ohtani.
It is, for all intents and purposes, a report that the Cubs are out:
If you want to comfort yourselves, you could pick one of three primary lanes:
1.) You think Nightengale is simply wrong. Bad report. Ignore it. Obviously it’s happened before.
2.) You say that “optimism” “significantly waning” is not the same thing as out.
or, 3.) You say that the Cubs are just so stealth, as they were on Craig Counsell, that this is a planted leak so that they can stay stealth. (Or, if you get real conspiratorial, it’s a plant job by the Padres to try to pressure other teams on Juan Soto (“Watch out! The Cubs are about to get back in! Didn’t you see they’re out on Shohei?!”).)
Me? I have trouble picking any of those lanes. Obviously it’s POSSIBLE that the report is just wrong – we know how secretive this has been – but the “Team X is out” reports have tended to have a little something behind them throughout this process. And again, Nightengale isn’t quite alone on this, even as other recent reports had the Cubs still in.
I’ll wait for local confirmation – or a surprise Cubs move that pretty clearly means they’re out – before I totally freak, but this doesn’t feel too good right now.
“The Cubs can still have a successful offseason without landing Shohei Ohtani … ” is a sentence I always knew I might have to say at some point, but I sure hoped I never would.
UPDATE: On ESPN 1000 just now, Jesse Rogers says it doesn’t FEEL like the Cubs are gonna get Ohtani at this point. He heard some things last night that gave him the vibe it won’t happen. It’s not a 100% no just yet, at least not in terms of his own personal confidence. It’s not something he feels confident in writing just yet. But … well … sigh. That’s the vibe.
And this was not just Rogers offering a guess, by the way. He said it was more than informed speculation, and it’s sourced information, even though all he could take away was a vibe.
SO MANY MORE UPDATES: All right, so things got a little crazy after these initial reports. Nightengale expanded on his tweet with a full article, the thrust of which – on the Cubs – was that they balked at 10 years and $500 million, which makes zero sense to me. I wrote about how dubious I was about that claim here.
Meanwhile, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts was UNCOMMONLY candid about the process, openly saying that they’d met with Ohtani this weekend and that he felt good about it, and that Ohtani was their top priority.
But then this happened:
It seems unbelievable that simply admitting that you spoke with Ohtani and it went well and all that would somehow make a player suddenly not want to sign with you. I won’t get hopeful about that, even though it would be EXTREMELY hilarious if the Dodgers had this in the bag and then Roberts fumbled it so badly.
Note that, throughout the process, the Cubs have said absolutely nothing. Heck, they’re the only team involved that we don’t even know a lick about whether they had a meeting. Look how Craig Counsell handled things today:
Soon after all this, Jed Hoyer met with the media – I guess he’s in Nashville now! – trying to squash anything and everything about the Ohtani reports:
Then you had Jesse Rogers on ESPN 1000 just a bit ago – I was not able to at that moment – and apparently he said Jed Hoyer found Bob Nightengale to offer some “stern” thoughts:
Oh my. Apparently Hoyer very much did not agree with Nightengale’s reporting on this topic, and frankly, he probably didn’t want anything whatsoever getting out there about the Cubs and Ohtani for obvious reasons.
So, in the end, does this mean the Cubs are actually still in on Ohtani? Maybe so! Perhaps the original default position is still appropriate: there are reasons to speculate that the Dodgers are the favorite, but nobody actually knows much of anything for sure.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Just a little something from Bruce Levine that, as far as he’s heard, the Cubs are still in it (but that it’s not like he can say they’re the leader of the pack):
AND ANOTHER UPDATE: The Athletic duo of Patrick Mooney and Sahadev Sharma do something between fully reporting and fully JUST tea leaf reading to come to the conclusion that the Cubs are probably moving on/pivoting/think Ohtani isn’t going to happen for them. I understand that there are still some folks out there including the Cubs’ name in lists of suitors, but the balance of evidence at this point suggests it is highly unlikely that the Cubs are going to be continuing on in a serious pursuit from here. They maybe aren’t “out,” but it no longer seems like they are firmly in.
