Chicago Cubs President of Baseball Operations Jed Hoyer sat in with Dave Kaplan and Gordon Wittenmyer for a long, wide-ranging, thoughtfull-candid talk on the ReKAP podcast. I highly recommend you watch/listen if you get a chance, because it provides so much more context and perspective on the things a front office does, why the make the choices they do, what the constraints are, so on and so forth. Of course he’s not going to tell us EVERYTHING, but any hour-long look you get is going to be useful.
That said, you probably want to know right away what Hoyer said about the remainder of this offseason, and to Kap’s credit, he got right into it from the jump, asking Hoyer what was left on the Cubs’ shopping list.
“Mostly focused right now on bench and bullpen,” Hoyer said. “Just trying to supplement the roster as much as we can. I feel good about our team but I definitely think there are obviously ways to improve, and we’ll just keep on looking at the free agent market and the trade market and see if we can do that.”
Hoyer was confident that the Cubs aren’t done, and that they may well be active through Spring Training. But he emphasized the word “supplement.” He also said that the bullpen was probably area they’ve been focused on most in free agency.
In other words, those top-tier impact bats? The remaining mid-rotation starting pitchers? Sure, it’s always possible some sweetheart deal falls into the Cubs’ lap and they jump, but those are not the main focuses. Instead, it’s what we’ve been saying for a while: they need another high-quality arm in the bullpen, and they need some kind of reliable veteran position player for the bench. I anticipate the Cubs will get both of those things, even if they aren’t the sexiest names in the player pool.
So now the question is … how do we feel about that?
Well, for me, it’s not like I’ve been quiet about the implications of the Colin Rea signing. To me, it was crystal clear the moment that deal dropped that the Cubs were not going to FOCUS on adding another starting pitcher. Not because Rea is so good that they don’t need one (they kinda do … ), but instead because I didn’t see any way the Cubs were dropping $5 million on a swingman like Rea WHILE ALSO adding another higher-priced starting pitcher WHILE ALSO adding the reliever and bench bat we already knew they needed. It just didn’t work with the math we were anticipating for the budget, which, in turn, told me the budget was probably lower than we were thinking. Payroll is probably going down this year.
That is all to say, we don’t have to like any of this stuff, but we absolutely do have reason to expect an impact arm in the bullpen from that Kirby Yates/Tommy Kahnle/etc. tier (I guess I list those two because they have increasingly become my favorite two from that group). I am assuming they don’t really stretch to land Tanner Scott since this front office does not sign large, multi-year deals with relievers. But if the chips fall ever so perfectly and the deal is just too good to pass up, well, maybe.
Adding such an arm will be a needed and potentially significant improvement to this roster. I think they seem like they are still short a reliable middle-rotation arm, but so be it. If the budget is the budget and they just can’t fit someone like Jack Flaherty, I have to move on mentally. (Obligatory caveat: maybe someone’s market collapses, and the Cubs wind up swooping in with a one-year offer for someone like Flaherty. Fine. You can never totally rule that out, and Hoyer wouldn’t either. I just don’t think it’s likely, and, as he said, it certainly isn’t the front office’s focus.)
We can also expect the Cubs to continue to explore creative trade options (and if they aren’t yielding a huge salary increase overall to the roster, hey, maybe they do add an impact starting pitcher).
We can also expect that bench bat that Hoyer mentioned, and I think the best bet there is that it’ll be someone who can play third base to provide a little safety blanket for Matt Shaw (and hopefully some pop off the bench).
The Cubs are something like $40 million under the first tier of the luxury tax, which maybe shouldn’t even be a cap for this team, but almost certainly is, especially after squeaking over last year. Maybe some crazy turn of events in-season pushes them over the tax – if the team is crazy good, and there is a super obvious need that comes with a lot of salary – but I think that’s extremely unlikely.
Moreover, as things stand, as we think through the many curious financial decisions the Cubs have made this offseason, and as we hear that the bullpen and the bench are the focuses right now, I think it’s only fair to conclude they don’t have “$40 million” left in 2025 dollars to commit. Again, we can hate it, but I just think that’s the logical conclusion here. It’s probably closer to half that amount, or maybe less.
Here’s hoping they at least get a really, really good late-inning arm, and a really, really good bench bat …