Cubs, Kyle Tucker Avoid Arbitration

The Cubs and Kyle Tucker have avoided arbitration, reports Jesse Rogers of ESPN. The outfielder will make $16.5MM next year and won’t need to go to a hearing. Tucker is represented by Excel Sports Management.

Last week was the arbitration filing deadline, meaning that any teams and players who did not come to agreements had to exchange filing figures. The Cubs and Tucker did not agree, with the club filing at $15MM and Tucker at $17.5MM. The $2.5MM gap between their numbers was the largest of the 17 filings. MLBTR contributor Matt Swartz had projected Tucker for a $15.8MM salary this year. If a hearing came to pass, the arbiter would have had to select either Tucker’s number or the club’s, with no ability to pick a midpoint.

That made the likelihood of a hearing very high. Teams and players are allowed to continue negotiating and free to reach deals after the filing deadline, though most teams take a “file-and-trial” approach these days. That means they have a policy against doing one-year deals after the deadline, thus giving them leverage in salary talks. When a file-and-trial team does a deal after the deadline, it usually involves an extra year, perhaps as an option. That prevents it from being used as a precedent in future arbitration calculations, so the overall trend of file-and-trial policies is to slow the inflation of salaries.

The Cubs have been a file-and-trial team, as most are these days, but have made an exception here. None of the reporting on Tucker’s deal suggests that there’s any kind of option. He is an impending free agent and excellent player, so he wasn’t going to give away a free agent year on a club option. The two sides could have agreed to some kind of mutual option that would never be picked up, but don’t appear to have done so.

It’s unclear why the Cubs broke from their usual policy here, paying Tucker beyond the midpoint of the filing numbers and his MLBTR projection. Speculatively speaking, it could be because he was just acquired from the Astros and the Cubs didn’t want to tarnish the beginning of their relationship with their new star player. An arbitration hearing can sometimes lead to friction between player and team, with Corbin Burnes with the Brewers and Ryan Helsley with the Cardinals some recent examples. Burnes spoke of his negative arbitration experience in February of 2023, while Helsley recounted his to Foul Territory in March of last year.

Tucker has previously gone to an arbitration hearing. He first qualified for arbitration going into 2023, with he and the Astros unable to reach an agreement for his salary that year. He filed at $7.5MM and the Astros at $5MM, with the club ultimately emerging victorious. The two sides avoided arbitration for 2024 by agreeing to a $12MM salary.

It’s also perhaps possible that the Cubs would like to keep Tucker for the long term and didn’t want to sour the relationship with a bad first impression. President of baseball operations Jed Hoyer recently appeared on the Cubs Rekap Podcast with David Kaplan and Gordon Wittenmyer (hat tip to Michael Cerami of Bleacher Nation) and discussed Tucker’s situation, downplaying his concern about the relationship with Tucker. He also said that there are no conversations about an extension. Though the Cubs would love to have Tucker long term, Hoyer suggested they would probably approach him about contract talks later, suggesting that playing in front of the home crowd at Wrigley would help their chances.

While it may be true that Tucker will enjoy the experience of being a Cub this year, there are still reasons to expect an extension isn’t likely. He’s been one of the best players in baseball recently. In the eyes of FanGraphs, he essentially averaged five wins above replacement per year from 2020 to 2023. He produced 1.8 fWAR in the shortened 2020 season, then finished the next three seasons with either 4.9 or 5.0 fWAR. In 2024, he took things to a new level with 4.2 fWAR in just 78 games, missing significant time due to a shin fracture.

He has hit .279/.358/.525 over those five seasons for a wRC+ of 143. He has stolen 88 bases and received strong grades for his outfield defense. His 20.9 fWAR over those years puts him in the top 15 among all position players in the league. He likely would have been in the top ten if not for fouling a ball off his shin and fracturing it last year.

Given that production and the fact that Tucker is set to be a free agent going into his age-29 season, he is well positioned for a significant payday. To lock up an MVP-caliber player a year before free agency isn’t cheap, as shown on MLBTR’s Contract Tracker. Mookie Betts got $365MM from the Dodgers while Francisco Lindor got $341MM from the Mets. The largest deal in Cubs’ history is their $184MM pact with Jason Heyward, so they would likely have to double that to keep Tucker from becoming a free agent next winter.