NEWSLETTER
I’m glad to hear this, even if nothing comes of it transactionally, and even if the road back for Liam Hendriks is going to be long. He’s just one of baseball’s really good guys, and it would bum me out if the Cubs didn’t even get themselves on his radar now that he’s a free agent.
But they did:
I wouldn’t expect substantial conversations to take place any time soon. Hendriks, 34, beat cancer at the start of this season, making an improbable and inspiring return to the mound just four and a half months after initially announcing his diagnosis. Unfortunately, he quickly dealt with an arm issue that ultimately resulted in Tommy John surgery in August. At the absolute earliest, then, he would not be able to pitch again on a big league mound until September of 2024.
That’s his intention, though, which should surprise no one. Hendriks says he was pitching through a smaller tear for a very, very long time, so he hopes the new UCL will actually improve his health and ability to perform deeper into his career.
“Unfortunately, it ended up this way, but I’ll be 35 with a brand new elbow and so hopefully it gives me a couple extra years,” Hendriks told MLB.com shortly after his surgery. “…There’s nothing I can do to change it. It will be nice to be able to brush my teeth without any pain for the first time in about a decade.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind I’ll be back. Same thing as when everything happened in January. (I’ve been) pitching with a less than stellar elbow for 15 years, so having a new one out there, hopefully I can add an extra couple of years on the back end. I’ve always said I wanted to pitch until I was 40. And this means after this one I should be able to hopefully go longer.”
Transactionally-speaking, the challenge in signing Hendriks any time soon is that if he gets a big league deal – say, a one-year deal with a club option for 2025 – he has to take up a 40-man roster spot until the end of Spring Training, at which point he could be transferred to the 60-day IL and removed from the 40-man. I would say there’s a chance he gets a big league deal at some point in Spring Training, but it’s also possible teams will first want to see how his progress is going early in the season, when his mound work gets going. It’s also possible a team would try to get him to sign one of those rare multi-year minor league deals so that they can work with him immediately on rehab, and then still have him in the org for 2025 (presumably on a much higher big league salary than the minimum).
In any case, the point here is that the Cubs were among the teams that reached out right away when Hendriks became a free agent, likely telling him to keep them in mind before he does anything. I’d love to see the Cubs take a crack at rehabbing Hendriks and giving that new UCL a spin. He’s just a guy you want in the organization.
You may remember that Hendriks was actually very briefly a Cub in the offseason of 2013 (they claimed him on waivers almost exactly a decade ago, in fact), but he was lost on waivers later that offseason. It wasn’t until 2015 that he really broke out with the Blue Jays, and then the A’s, and then the White Sox. Over that time as a top-tier reliever, Hendriks posted a 2.94 ERA over 456.1 innings, with a 32.7% K rate and 5.7% BB rate. You couldn’t expect him to return as that guy in 2025, but a quality reliever and an incredible clubhouse presence? Absolutely.
