For me, once Owen Caissie was not called up last week, I took that as the signal that no prospect call-ups were going to be happening here near the end of the year. Although the Iowa Cubs’ season just ended, and you could use that, combined with the Cubs’ official elimination from postseason contention, as a basis to bring a guy up, the Cubs have never really done that kind of thing with only a week left in the season.
Sure enough, we should not expect any call ups from here, per Craig Counsell, via the Athletic:
‘With the Cubs mathematically eliminated from the playoff race, the final week of the season could have been a chance for the club to take a look at Kevin Alcรกntara and Owen Caissie. Counsell, however, said, โThereโs no plans for that right now.โ’
Caissie was the one guy who made the most sense, given that he’d spent the whole year at Triple-A, had performed well, is expected to compete for big league at bats next year, and has to go on the 40-man roster by November anyway (Rule 5 Draft protection). Alcรกntara, though he is already on the 40-man roster, played only 35 games at Triple-A, and feels a half-click behind Caissie on the development trajectory (if you’re talking about a guy who could come up and impact the big league team with the bat, specifically).
Why would you have called Caissie up last week or this week, knowing he wasn’t going to start that much and wasn’t going to be the difference between a playoff spot or a playoff miss?
Well, the argument is that, since you know he is going to be on the 40-man anyway, and since you know he’ll be in big league Spring Training, and since you know he will be trying to win big league opportunities all next season, you could use this time to give him a quick sense of what life in the big leagues is like. Get that part of the adjustment process out of the way, and set him up for an offseason where he really knows what he’s working toward. He gets to know his teammates a little better, the coaching staff, the manager, the ballpark, road travel, sees big league routines, faces some big league pitchers, etc., etc. There’s value in it for sure.
On the flip side, why not just call him up? Well, there are a few countervailing arguments there.
For one, there’s the 40-man spot. Sure, you have to add him by November anyway, but there are two months worth of procedural maneuvers to make before then, and having extra space on the 40-man juuuuuust in case can wind up having a lot of value to the organization. So we shouldn’t treat that part like it’s nothing.
For another thing, and especially now, it’s such a short call-up. Would Owen Caissie really get a lot of long-term development value from six days in the big leagues, especially if he’s not actually playing? Or would it just be like a really exciting whirlwind of a vacation? I don’t want to overstate the value part, because I expect there is a pretty big difference between multiple weeks in the big leagues and a handful of days. Maybe it’s just not enough to outweigh everything else.
Lastly, there’s the actual 26-man roster move part of it. To bring up Caissie means to bump someone else out … the final week of the season. Kinda cold, unless there’s an injury that requires an IL stint. You could justify it, obviously – Caissie is much more important to the future of the organization than some other guys on the big league roster – but if you’re already leaning toward not calling him up, then maybe this is the tiebreaker.