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Anthony Rizzo

Yankees Activate Anthony Rizzo, Aroldis Chapman

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The Yankees announced they’ve activated first baseman Anthony Rizzo from the COVID-19 injured list. He’s in tonight’s lineup against the archrival Red Sox, hitting second. Additionally, closer Aroldis Chapman is back from the 10-day IL. In corresponding moves, outfielder Jonathan Davis and reliever Nick Nelson were optioned to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.

To create space for Rizzo on the 40-man roster, New York activated outfielder Trey Amburgey from the 10-day IL and returned him to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Because Amburgey was originally selected to the big league roster as a replacement for a player who had gone on the COVID-19 IL, he could be removed from the 40-man and sent back to the minors without being placed on waivers.

Rizzo returns ten days after testing positive for the coronavirus. For the first time, he’ll pair with Luke Voit, who was activated from his own IL stint at the time Rizzo landed on the shelf. It’s an abundance of offensive riches for the Yankees, who’ll have to also find playing time for Joey Gallo, Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton between the outfield, first base and designated hitter.

Chapman landed on the IL on August 7 with inflammation in his throwing elbow. While a bit of an ominous-sounding diagnosis, it turned out to only require a near-minimal stint. In his absence, Chad Green, Zack Britton and Jonathan Loáisiga picked up save opportunities, but that role will again fall to Chapman, manager Aaron Boone confirmed to reporters (via Erik Boland of Newsday). The hard-throwing southpaw rebounded from a dreadful few weeks in the middle of the season to post seven consecutive scoreless outings leading up to his IL stint.

The Yankees have almost completely bounced back from the spread of COVID-19 in the clubhouse over the past couple weeks. Reliever Clay Holmes is the only player remaining on the COVID IL for the red-hot Yankees, who have won twelve of their last fifteen to catch the Red Sox and A’s in the American League Wild Card race.

Yankees Notes: Cole, Montgomery, Sanchez, Rizzo, German

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In the wake of another COVID-19 outbreak in the Yankees clubhouse, some of the impacted players are preparing to return to the field.  Manager Aaron Boone told reporters (including Kristie Ackert of The New York Daily News) that Gerrit Cole and Jordan Montgomery will be activated from the COVID-related injury list to start the Yankees’ next two games.  Cole will face the Angels on Monday, while Montgomery will face the Red Sox on Tuesday in one half of a doubleheader.

Additionally, catcher Gary Sanchez started a Double-A rehab assignment today, and could potentially be activated for one of those games against the Red Sox.  “We’ll see if we want to do another rehab game with them, potentially on Tuesday, but the idea would be he plays [today] and then come be with us tomorrow and work out, have a full day with us and then we’ll kind of evaluate the next step,” Boone said.

Six players are currently on the COVID list, which only added to roster issues for the injury-riddled Yankees.  Despite all these absences, however, the Yankees have been one of baseball’s hottest teams, with a 19-9 record since the All-Star break.

Anthony Rizzo was a big part of that hot streak, batting .281/.400/.563 in his first 40 plate appearances in the pinstripes since being acquired by the Cubs at the trade deadline.  Rizzo was also hit by a positive COVID test, and after over a week away, will begin to take steps towards returning to the field by undergoing cardiac testing on Monday.

Domingo German has been sidelined by right shoulder inflammation since August 1, and the right-hander tossed a bullpen session yesterday to continue his recovery process.  Boone said German threw all fastballs yesterday and will add more pitches in his next bullpen, which could take place as early as Monday.

Yankees Activate Luke Voit, Place Anthony Rizzo On COVID-IL

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11:30AM: The Yankees have also recalled Luis Gil as a replacement player and optioned Nick Nelson to Triple-A, per a club announcement.

9:51AM: The Yankees have activated Luke Voit and placed Anthony Rizzo on the COVID-IL. Manager Aaron Boone says Rizzo has tested positive, per Lindsey Adler of The Athletic. He also is exhibiting some symptoms. As a positive test, he will be quarantined for at least 10 days.

The Yankees are now further hampered by an ongoing COVID outbreak that has already seen them place Gerrit Cole, Jordan Montgomery and Gary Sanchez on the IL in recent days. Since being acquired in a deal just before the deadline, Rizzo has had an excellent debut as a Yankee. In nine games, he’s slashed .281/.400/.563, for a wRC+ of 163.

The club will now turn to Voit and hope that he can return to last year’s excellent form. His wRC+ of 152 in 2020 was one of the best in the league. But 2021 has been a struggle so far, with a wRC+ of 98 while dealing with various injuries. The club reportedly nearly traded Voit after acquiring Rizzo, but the deal fell through at the last hour. After a knee injury in July, he had only started a rehab assignment a few days ago. But it seems Rizzo’s positive test has hastened his return.

Despite scrambling to cover for all of these players missing time, the team is on a hot streak and currently just 1 1/2 out of a playoff spot.

Cubs’ Hoyer Discusses Lack Of Extensions For Core Players

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It’s been a surreal week for Cubs fans, watching the core of the 2016 World Series club head out the door at the trade deadline in exchange for a series of prospects. Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo and Javier Baez have been the faces of the Cubs for a half decade now, but they now find themselves with the Giants, Yankees and Mets, respectively. Also out the door are closer Craig Kimbrel, right-hander Ryan Tepera, lefty Andrew Chafin, outfielder Joc Pederson and outfielder Jake Marisnick.

Generally speaking, fans knew this was coming, but even after president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer made clear that the Cubs were shifting to a seller’s mindset, there were many who questioned just how far the sale would go. Bryant had long been viewed as a trade candidate after talks with him had failed to materialize in a deal multiple times in the past. Baez, however, had spoken more optimistically about reaching a deal in the past, as had Rizzo. Now, days after the deadline, Hoyer expressed frustration during a radio interview on ESPN 1000.

“I put my head on the pillow every night knowing that we put our best foot forward,” said Hoyer (Twitter thread via ESPN’s Jesse Rogers). “The extensions we offered these guys will hold up exceptionally well, historically they’ll hold up exceptionally well against the open market. I don’t know why guys didn’t want to sign. I don’t know why guys didn’t even want to counteroffer sometimes.”

Hoyer lamented that while many players publicly expressed interest in staying long-term, “when we sat down to do negotiations, that wasn’t how they acted.” Somewhat curiously, he pointed across town to the White Sox, noting that Lance Lynn “could’ve gotten more on the open market this winter but he said ’I want to stay here.'” Of course, Lynn is a 34-year-old trade acquisition who isn’t at all in the same position as the core Cubs who were dealt last Friday, and the implication of blame residing with the now-former Cubs players lacks plenty of critical context.

Rizzo, for instance, would’ve been a free agent in the 2018-19 offseason had he not inked a seven-year, $41MM contract back in May 2013. That deal contained a pair of club options and ultimately wound up paying him $75MM over nine years. There’s a difference in taking the “I want to stay here” approach when you’re an inexperienced pre-arbitration player and a soon-to-be free agent, but Rizzo surely felt he’d already given the Cubs one major break and may have been less inclined to do so a second time. Hoyer was clear that his comments were more general and that not all applied to all three of this core trio, so perhaps the Lynn comparison wasn’t intended to strike a parallel with Rizzo — but it’s difficult to overlook that disconnect.

In Hoyer’s defense, we don’t know how many attempts were made to further extend that contract over the years, but Rizzo’s initial extension proved a to be an overwhelming bargain for the club. We do know that back in March, Hoyer proclaimed he was “very confident” that the Cubs would extend Rizzo. That optimism, which came after Rizzo had already turned down a reported five-year, $70MM offer, didn’t manifest in a deal.

Hoyer is probably correct in asserting that said offer will hold up well against open-market bids, barring a huge post-trade surge for Rizzo. That said, it’s also not hard to see why Rizzo would be nonplused with the offer, if the reported terms were indeed accurate. He was entering the final season of the previously mentioned bargain extension, and a year prior he’d seen the Cardinals lock up Paul Goldschmidt for nearly twice as much — a contract that would begin with Goldschmidt’s age-32 season. Next year is Rizzo’s age-32 season. There’s no ignoring that Rizzo was coming off a down season in 2020, but the gap in those offers is still rather sizable, to say the least.

Baez, meanwhile, spoke openly and often about his desire to remain with the Cubs long-term — just as they similarly expressed interest in keeping him. Talks between the two parties seemed to be ongoing for years, with his chances of striking an accord regularly framed as the most favorable of this core trio.

As with the Rizzo/Lynn bit, it’s important to remember that Hoyer was speaking generally rather than addressing all of his former core players. But his assertion that some players didn’t even bother to counter the team’s extension offers certainly seemed to catch the attention of Baez’s agent, Nick Chanock of Wasserman. Chanock tells ESPN’s Jesse Rogers that the Baez camp did indeed present the Cubs with a counterproposal not long before the Covid-19 pandemic shut the league down. Rogers goes on to write that the team didn’t rekindle those talks, nor did they make a final offer to Baez before trading him.

Reports from ESPN’s Buster Olney and MLB Network’s Jon Heyman earlier this summer suggested that the Cubs offered Baez anywhere from $160MM to $180MM, though the length of those deals isn’t clear. It’s also worth noting that at the time, Baez was a 27-year-old shortstop coming off consecutive six-WAR, All-Star seasons — one of which saw him finish runner-up in NL MVP voting. As with Rizzo, that numbers reported by Olney and Heyman will likely “hold up historically” against any open-market earnings for Baez this winter, but that’s only true in light of Baez’s 2020-21 decline at the plate.

Arguably the most notable bit of context in all this is the Cubs’ brazen manipulation of Bryant’s service time, wherein they called him up to the Majors in 2015 the first day he was assured of missing a full year of service that season. In doing so, they effectively pushed his free agency back a year. Bryant went on to win NL Rookie of the Year honors and NL MVP honors over the next two seasons while earning scarcely more than the league minimum.

The Cubs eventually won a service time grievance over Bryant after a league-appointed arbitrator ruled in the team’s favor. Bryant was not granted the extra year of service he sought. No one would expect any team executive to willingly bring such matters up in an interview of this nature, but that’s a clear piece of the puzzle being left untouched in Hoyer’s telling of the situation.

On the one hand, it’s refreshing to see a team’s president of baseball operations speak with candor rather than deliver the same tropes we hear time and again. On the other, it’s almost befuddling to state that it’d be “bad faith” to go into specifics regarding individual negotiations only to then cast blame on the entire group of players while painting with broad strokes. Nearly any GM or agent, when discussing contract negotiations, will break out some variation of the “it takes two to tango” cliche. Hoyer’s assertion that the Cubs “put our best foot forward and tried our hardest, but it was not reciprocated,” however, puts the onus squarely on the players.

Perhaps in some cases, that’s where the “fault” (for lack of a better term) should lie. Perhaps the team will have better luck this winter with catcher Willson Contreras, who said this weekend that even in spite of the sell-off, he hoped to remain with the Cubs and was “happy to talk” if the team “wants to rebuild around me.” But comments questioning the extent to which former teammates were committed to the team don’t seem the best way to set the table for negotiations with Contreras or any other player — and they’re unlikely to assuage a fanbase that has heard more about the luxury tax and revenue losses for the past few years than about any headway in retaining the core players who changed hands last week.

Cubs Trade Anthony Rizzo To Yankees

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In a surprise move, the Yankees acquired three-time All-Star Anthony Rizzo from the Cubs this afternoon, both teams announced. The move brings to an end Rizzo’s nine-year tenure on the North Side. In exchange, Chicago will pick up a pair of prospects: outfielder Kevin Alcantara and right-hander Alexander Vizcaino.

It’s the second big deadline acquisition for the Yankees, who just yesterday swung a deal for another corner bat in Joey Gallo. The front office continues to bolster the offense, adding another above-average hitter to a lineup that has underperformed expectations over the course of the year. It doesn’t hurt that Rizzo — like Gallo — hits from the left side, adding balance to an order that was extremely right-handed heavy two days ago.

Rizzo is no longer the player he was at his peak, but there’s no doubt he’ll be a boost to the Yankees order. The 31-year-old is hitting .248/.346/.446 (115 wRC+) with 14 home runs across 376 plate appearances. He’s been an above-average bat in every season of his career, outside of a brief run as a rookie with the 2012 Padres. Rizzo doesn’t strike out often, punching out in just 15.7% of his plate appearances this season while making contact on an above-average 81.8% of his swings. Both figures are right in line with his career marks.

Those bat-to-ball skills should appeal to fans concerned about the Yankees’ whiff-heavy offense. New York has a 24.5% strikeout rate as a team (excluding pitchers), the sixth-highest mark in MLB. The acquisition of Gallo only figures to increase that tendency (although the slugger more than offsets the whiffs with huge power and walk totals). Rizzo’s much more likely to put the ball in play, albeit without as much impact as some of the Yankees’ other middle-of-the-order players. He still makes plenty of hard contact, but that hasn’t translated into huge extra-base output this year. Rizzo’s .198 ISO (slugging minus batting average) and barrel rate are both above-average but no longer elite.

Of course, the Yankees incumbent first baseman is among the right-handed power types that make up a good chunk of the roster. Luke Voit led MLB with 22 home runs in 2020 and is reportedly nearing a return from the 10-day injured list. His name surfaced in surprising trade rumors this morning, though, and it now seems fairly likely he’ll find himself on the move before tomorrow afternoon’s deadline. With Rizzo at first base and Giancarlo Stanton at designated hitter, there wouldn’t seem to be much room for Voit.

New York could see a Voit transaction as a way to clear some payroll space. The 30-year-old is making $4.7MM this season (with a matching luxury tax number) in his first year of arbitration. He’s still due around $1.6MM of that money for the rest of the season. Voit is controllable for three additional campaigns via arbitration.

Clearly, New York is working extremely hard to stay below the $210MM luxury tax threshold. The Yankees CBT figure is a bit below $206MM, in the estimation of Roster Resource’s Jason Martinez. New York has gotten the Rangers and Cubs to absorb the entirety of Gallo’s and Rizzo’s respective salaries as part of their ongoing effort not to take on any additional obligations.

Of course, doing so requires parting with more talented prospects. The Cubs seem to have done well in adding Alcantara and Vizcaino, both of whom ranked among the top 15 minor league talents in the organization on Baseball America’s midseason update. Eric Longenhagen of FanGraphs also ranked the duo highly, slotting Alcantara as the sport’s #120 overall prospect entering the year.

Alcantara, 19, draws praise for his projectable frame and chance to grow into big power. A center fielder now, he might grow out of the position, but he’s a high-upside addition to the lower levels of the Cubs’ farm system. Alcantara’s playing in the rookie level Arizona Complex League, so he’s years from the majors — similar to the group of players Chicago picked up from the Padres in last winter’s Yu Darvish trade.

Vizcaino’s a nearer-term addition. He’s topped out at High-A, but the changeup specialist is already 24 years old and was selected to the 40-man roster last offseason. He still has a pair of minor league option years remaining after this season. Longenhagen suggests his delivery likely points to a bullpen future, but he’s been a starting pitcher to this point in his career. Vizcaino hasn’t pitched much this season due to injury, but he tossed 115 innings of 4.38 ERA ball across two levels of A-ball back in 2019.

Alcantara and Vizcaino makes for a solid return on-paper, since Rizzo will hit free agency at the end of the season. There’s no question, though, that his departure will be a bitter pill to swallow for many Cubs fans. Rizzo was one of the faces of the Cubs most successful runs in decades, and a beloved figure on the 2016 World Series team. For many on the North Side, it’ll hurt to see him go — no matter the regard of the players the team received in return.

It’s likely only the beginning for Chicago, who still figures to market Kris Bryant, Craig Kimbrel and perhaps Javier Báez within the next day. Like Rizzo, Bryant and Báez will reach free agency at the end of the season, and the Cubs are obvious deadline sellers. Chicago has reportedly made some efforts at a Báez extension, but that was also true of Rizzo and ultimately didn’t come to fruition. The Rizzo trade is the biggest move yet in should be a series of transactions for the Cubs in the coming hours.

Jack Curry of YES Network was first to report the sides were nearing agreement on a Rizzo trade, as well as the identities of the prospects involved and the Cubs assumption of the salary. Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic reported the deal had been completed.

Latest On Interest In Cubs’ Trade Chips

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12:41PM: The White Sox and Red Sox are two of at least seven teams interested in Kimbrel, 670 The Score’s Bruce Levine writes, while the White Sox have also scouted another Cubs reliever in Ryan Tepera.

10:49AM: The Cubs completed another trade last night in sending Andrew Chafin to the Athletics, setting the stage for what should be a very busy week of transactions for Chicago in advance of Friday’s 3pm CT trade deadline.  Many of the biggest names remain, and rumors continue to circulate about where these top names could land.

Closer Craig Kimbrel is drawing much of the buzz, and The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reports that the Padres are among the teams interested in the veteran reliever.  While many of the Cubs’ most notable trade chips are rental players, Kimbrel is controlled through the 2022 season due to a $16MM club option.  He also has around $5.5MM remaining in salary for this season, so he isn’t an entirely inexpensive proposition for a team looking at the right-hander as just a rental.

This is a particular factor for a team like the Padres, who are facing a luxury tax overage for the first time in franchise history.  Team ownership is willing to make that leap beyond the $210MM payroll threshold, though the Padres are naturally exploring ways (such as unloading Eric Hosmer’s contract) to avoid the tax if at all possible.

The Red Sox “have at least had preliminary conversations ” with the Cubs about first baseman Anthony Rizzo, ESPN.com’s Jeff Passan reports, which seems like a natural fit considering how little production the Sox have received from the first base position this season.  Boston is the first team officially linked to Rizzo on the rumor mill, as Passan writes that Rizzo’s market “is not so robust” since he is a veteran position player who is a free agent after the year.

In fact, there has been more speculation about Rizzo possibly staying with the Cubs rather than leaving, even though extension talks in Spring Training failed to produce a new contract.  Recent reports suggested that the Cubs would look to again discuss extensions with both Rizzo and Javier Baez prior to the deadline, but NBC Sports Chicago’s Gordon Wittenmyer reports that “no extension talks are happening with” either player.

This doesn’t mean that either will be traded, however.  In fact, Wittenmyer hears from sources around baseball that the Cubs will be keeping both Baez and Kyle Hendricks beyond Friday’s deadline.  (MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand reported last night that the Cubs weren’t looking to move Hendricks and that a trade was unlikely.)  It isn’t quite as firm about whether or not Rizzo could remain or be dealt to Boston or another team, but if the first baseman is kept, Wittenmyer writes that the Cubs will again look into extending both Rizzo and Baez before they reach free agency this winter.

Cubs Will Reportedly Try Again On Rizzo, Baez Extensions Before Exploring Trades

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The Cubs have already traded Joc Pederson to the Braves and are expected to continue selling veteran players in the two weeks leading up to the deadline, but they’ll first take one last effort at hammering out contract extensions with shortstop Javier Baez and first baseman Anthony Rizzo, reports MLB Network’s Jon Heyman (via Twitter).

Both Rizzo and Baez have been viewed as extension candidates with the Cubs for the past several years, but neither has worked out a deal to remain in Chicago beyond the 2021 campaign. Rizzo is playing out the second of two option seasons that were included on his original  seven-year, $41MM contract with the club.

Chicago unsurprisingly picked up both of those club options, and Rizzo will end up earning a combined $75MM over a nine-year term. The Cubs reportedly offered Rizzo a five-year, $70MM contract extension back in Spring Training — about $60MM less than the Cardinals guaranteed Paul Goldschmidt for the same portion of his career.

As for Baez, he’s playing out his final arbitration year and earning $11.6MM before reaching free agency. The two parties were reported to be progressing in talks on a long-term deal in spring 2020 before the season was shut down.

Neither Rizzo nor Baez is playing at peak levels in 2021, although both have rebounded somewhat from a down year in 2020. Rizzo posted a .222/.342/.412 batting line in 243 plate appearances last year but is up to .247/.342/.429 so far in 2021. His .182 ISO (slugging minus batting average) is his lowest mark since 2012, as is his 9.7 percent walk rate. Rizzo’s production this season is still comfortably above the league average, by measure of wRC+ (111), but it’s a far cry from his 2014-19 levels (.284/.388/.513, 141 wRC+). He’ll  turn 32 next month, however, which surely impacts the team’s comfort level both in terms of contract length and annual value.

For Baez, the 2020 season was nightmarish. He batted just .203/.238/.360 with career-worst walk (3.0) and strikeout (31.9) percentages as his power dipped to its lowest level since 2016. This year, he’s batting .238/.284/.493 with 21 home runs — some of the best power output of his career. However, Baez’s long-troubling strikeout issues have ballooned to new heights in 2021, as he’s fanned in 36.6 percent of his plate appearances. He remains an excellent defender and won’t turn 29 until the offseason, so there are still several years of Baez’s physical prime left.

Both players are somewhat difficult to value from an extension standpoint at the moment. Rizzo hasn’t bounced all the way back from last year’s downturn in production, and any new contract would be buying out his mid-30s. Baez is younger and enjoying a larger bounceback effort, but his glaring swing-and-miss tendencies and bottom-of-the-scale OBP are difficult to overlook.

The Cubs have tried at various points to lock up both players, and it seems it’ll be even more difficult now to hammer out terms in a two-week window leading up to the trade deadline — particularly when the front office is also dedicating so much time to fielding trade interest in other players on the roster. That’s not to say an extension for either player is out of the question, but the timing isn’t exactly working in their favor. The absence of an extension doesn’t make a trade a foregone conclusion, however; either player would be a candidate for a qualifying offer, which would give the Cubs an opportunity to retain them on a high-priced one-year deal or at least gain a compensatory draft pick should they sign elsewhere.

As notable in Heyman’s report on the likelihood of extension talks with Baez and Rizzo is that it appears no such talks are being planned with star third baseman/outfielder Kris Bryant. The former NL Rookie of the Year and NL MVP is enjoying a more substantial rebound season than either of his two aforementioned teammates and figures to enter the offseason as one of the top free agents on the open market. He’ll draw interest from a wide number of contenders as they look to bolster their lineup over the next 14 days, and the absence of any last-ditch extension talks would seem to indicate an acknowledgement of that ship having sailed.

Bryant, Craig Kimbrel, Zach Davies, and Andrew Chafin are among the likeliest Cubs to change hands in the coming days, and they’ll surely receive interest in veterans Willson Contreras and Kyle Hendricks as well. Contreras, however, is controlled through 2022 via arbitration. Hendricks is signed affordably through the 2023 campaign with an option for 2024. Given that level of remaining club control, there’s less urgency to make a deal involving either player, though that won’t stop other teams from trying to pry them loose.

Cubs’ Recent Losing Streak Changes Trade Deadline Outlook

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A couple weeks ago, the Cubs had positioned themselves as likely buyers during trade season. As recently as June 24, Chicago was tied with the Brewers atop the NL Central, nine games over .500. The past two weeks have been an unmitigated disaster for the North Siders, though.

Between June 25 and July 7, the Cubs lost eleven consecutive games. They snapped that streak with a win over the Phillies last night, but Chicago enters tonight’s matchup against Philadelphia with an uninspiring 43-44 record. The Brewers, meanwhile, have rattled off a 10-3 stretch over that time, opening up an 8.5 game lead on Chicago within a 14-day span. (The 45-41 Reds have also since passed the Cubs to jump into second place in the division). Chicago isn’t a whole lot closer in the Wild Card race, trailing the Padres by seven games (with Cincinnati and the Nationals also above them in the standings).

An eleven game losing streak can certainly tank a team’s season, and it seems it might’ve in the Cubs’ case. On June 24, FanGraphs gave Chicago a 35.7% chance of making the playoffs; entering play today, their odds were down to 6.4%.

With a playoff berth all of a sudden seeming highly unlikely, the calculus for the Cubs front office changes considerably, a fact that president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer acknowledged this evening. Speaking with reporters (including Jordan Bastian of MLB.com, Paul Sullivan of the Chicago Tribune and Gordon Wittenmyer of NBC Sports Chicago), Hoyer sounded far more willing to move players off the big league roster than he’d been a couple weeks ago.

“Eleven days ago, we were certainly fully on the buying side … and obviously (teams) are now calling to see which players are available,” Hoyer said. “So it’s a very different scenario than we’d expected. Life comes at you fast.” Asked whether the front office is willing to make players available, Hoyer noted their responsibility to consider anything “that can help build the next great Cubs team,” citing their aforementioned dwindling playoff odds.

The implications for the Cubs are obvious. Three of their highest-profile players — Kris Bryant, Javier Báez and Anthony Rizzo — are all slated to hit free agency at the end of the season. If the team isn’t contending in 2021, it stands to reason any or all of them could find themselves on the move over the next few weeks.

Certainly, there’d be plenty of interest in every member of that group. Bryant has bounced back from a disappointing 2020 to hit a very strong .269/.349/.498 with sixteen home runs over 324 plate appearances this year. He’s making far more consistent hard contact and barreling balls up at a rate he hasn’t since his MVP peak. Bryant’s production has tailed off after he got out to a scorching start to the year, but his combination of excellent season-long numbers and overall track record would make him perhaps the top player on the trade market were the Cubs to make him available.

Rizzo’s .250/.343/.439 line is down rather significantly from his best seasons. It’s still above-average offensive production, though, and he continues to offer a rare combination of bat-to-ball skills and hard contact (to say nothing of quality defensive marks at first base). Báez has struck out at an alarming 36.6% clip this year en route to a .234 batting average and a .282 on-base percentage. But he’s also popped 21 home runs and slugged .496, and he’s a comfortably above-average defender and baserunner.

Between their career accolades, key roles on the 2016 World Series team, and impending free agencies, that trio figures to draw the most fanfare in advance of the July 30 trade deadline. They’re far from the only players on whose availability other teams might inquire, though. Zach Davies, Joc Pederson and Jake Marisnick are useful players set to reach free agency this winter. (Marisnick has a mutual option for 2022, but mutual options are rarely exercised by both parties).

Willson Contreras, controllable via arbitration through 2022, is one of the game’s best catchers and was the subject of trade discussion last offseason. Closer Craig Kimbrel is having an incredible bounceback campaign, pitching to a 0.57 ERA with a 46.2% strikeout rate and 8.5% walk percentage after struggling mightily between 2019-20. Kimbrel’s $16MM salary for 2021 now looks more than reasonable, as does the matching option on his contract for 2022.

Certainly, it’d be a surprise to see all of those players change teams in the next few weeks. Hoyer pushed back against the idea the Cubs were planning to kick off any sort of full-on rebuild, even as he acknowledged that the 2022 roster will look different from the current iteration. He also noted there’s still some possibility — slim as it now seems — the team plays its way back into contention over the coming weeks.

The Cubs have eighteen more games before the deadline. After facing the Phils tonight, their slate through July 29 consists of seven games against the Cardinals, six against the lowly Diamondbacks, and four against the Reds, one of the teams they’ll need to leapfrog for a postseason spot.

Winning thirteen or fourteen of those contests might get the Cubs sufficiently close to the postseason picture that the front office decides not to orchestrate a sell-off. The core of the current club has been pivotal to arguably the franchise’s most successful five-year run in over a century. It certainly wouldn’t be a surprise to see Hoyer and his front office give the group as long a leash as possible this summer to try to play their way back into the mix.

Nevertheless, the most likely scenario is that the club’s dreadful past two weeks dug them a hole too deep to come back from. That’s an inescapable reality Hoyer acknowledged this afternoon, one that may result in a few of the franchise’s most important players of recent memory donning new uniforms in a few weeks’ time.

The Cubs’ Deadline Dilemma

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The 2021 season hasn’t gone as the Cubs expected after trading away their ace and listening to offers on several other highly regarded players over the winter. Trading Yu Darvish, non-tendering Kyle Schwarber and generally avoiding any additions until some bargain pickups late in the winter, the Cubs appeared ticketed for a transition year. With Kris Bryant, Javier Baez and Anthony Rizzo set to become free agents after extension talks failed to bear fruit, a retooling of some extent appeared nigh.

Perhaps the Cubs didn’t count quite so much on the inactivity throughout the rest of the division. The Cardinals eventually added Nolan Arenado in a blockbuster trade with the Rockies, and the Brewers made some nice late moves, most notably signing Kolten Wong to a two-year pact, but the NL Central was a wasteland in terms of hot stove activity. The Reds dumped their two best relievers to trim payroll and now have MLB’s worst bullpen. The Pirates, setting out on a lengthy rebuild, obviously made little effort to improve. Even the Cardinals, beyond their acquisition of Arenado, opted not to address some spotty pitching depth.

The result was an eminently winnable division for anyone other than the rebuilding Pirates. (Sorry, Pittsburgh fans.) And with all the focus on the looming turnover in Chicago after Theo Epstein stepped away and Jed Hoyer ascended to the top baseball operations spot, it almost became easy to forget that the Cubs won the division by three games during last year’s shortened season. Subtracting Darvish and Schwarber hurt, but the Cubs added some complementary veterans to round out the roster a bit: Zach Davies, Joc Pederson, Trevor Williams, Jake Marisnick, Andrew Chafin and old friend Jake Arrieta all entered the mix. It was at the very least a competent roster in a lackluster division.

Add in varying levels of resurgences not only from Bryant, Rizzo and Baez but also from written-off closer Craig Kimbrel, and the Cubs suddenly find themselves in the thick of the division race. Bryant was playing at a near-MVP level for much of the season until a recent slide. Rizzo’s bat isn’t back to peak levels but is much improved over 2020. Ditto Baez. And Kimbrel? The right-hander is sitting on a 0.59 ERA with a 46.4 percent strikeout rate against an 8.9 percent walk rate — both the third-best single-season marks of his career. He’s played so well that the $16MM option on his contract for next season suddenly looks like a bargain.

The result is a second-place Cubs team that finds itself in a gray area with just over one month until the trade deadline. Entering the year, the predominant question regarding Bryant was: “Where will he be traded this summer?” Now, it’s shifted to: “How can they trade him when they’re only a few games out of first?”

In reality, it’s hard to envision the Cubs trading anyone if they’re this close to the front of the division. To the contrary, this team looks more like a buyer than it does one that should be expected to dangle Bryant, Baez, Rizzo, Kimbrel, Davies, Pederson, Chafin or any of its impending free agents. The front office may have envisioned the Darvish trade as a launching point for similar deals down the line — clear payroll, add some young talent to lay the groundwork for the next generation — but instead the 2021 season now has the feel of one final hurrah with the 2016 core.

The context of the division and the schedule plays an important role, too. The Cubs have dropped nine of their past thirteen games, including series losses to the Dodgers and Mets. Normally, that might’ve begun to shift the team away from potential buying status, but their Central-division competition hasn’t exactly been thriving, either (outside of the first-place Brewers).

The Cardinals have dropped eight of their past 10 games as they try to weather major rotation injuries. They were recently swept by both the Cubs and by a Reds team that put its two best relievers, Lucas Sims and Tejay Antone, on the injured list. Cincinnati has now dropped seven of ten themselves. There’s plenty of talent on both the Cardinals and the Reds, but injuries have impacted both clubs quite a bit in recent weeks.

The schedule in July will be pivotal for the division as a whole. Chicago plays three games in Milwaukee and three in Cincinnati before hosting the struggling Phillies for four and the Cardinals for three. Coming out of the break, the Cubs will play six of their first 14 games against MLB’s worst team, the Diamondbacks; the others are, again, against Cincinnati and St. Louis. It’s probably not what the front office envisioned, but given all that context it’d take a somewhat of a faceplant, primarily against a series of .500-or-worse opponents, for the Cubs to really be in position to sell.

The Darvish trade, of course, looks all the more egregious now that starting pitching is precisely what the Cubs need. Sahadev Sharma and Patrick Mooney of The Athletic took a thorough look at the Cubs’ rotation needs this morning, noting that executives around the league don’t expect them to make an aggressive, blockbuster style acquisition. The likelier focus, per Sharma and Mooney, would be on pitchers with reasonably affordable salaries and/or relatively low costs of acquisition.

Fans are never going to be excited by any report suggesting that their team’s primary targets are middle-of-the-road pitchers who can simply keep them in the game for five or maybe six innings at a time, but given where the Cubs are versus where they likely expected to be, it’s also not a huge surprise. A Darvish-caliber arm isn’t walking through that door, but someone like Merrill Kelly (D-backs), Chris Flexen (Mariners, if they sell pieces controlled beyond ’21) or Tyler Anderson (Pirates, if the Cubs don’t mind sending a prospect elsewhere in the division) are all speculative names that fit that general mold.

The next few weeks of games are going to be pivotal to most clubs around the league; there aren’t many clearly defined sellers. Even underperforming clubs like the Twins and Cardinals have so many games left against division rivals and/or rebuilding teams that they’ll probably wait to definitively commit to a course of action. But there might not be a team whose long-term outlook will be so closely tied to the fate of its July performance than the Cubs.

There are long-term implications for every team this time of year, but the Cubs have a slew of short-term veterans to market if they wish to sell — several of whom are longtime cornerstones. This could be a month in which they genuinely jumpstart an accelerated rebuild — not unlike the one the Yankees engineered in 2016 when they traded away Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman.

On the flip side, if the Cubs continue to exceed expectations, the pendulum would swing in the other direction, likely leaving the team with some draft compensation (via qualifying offers for Bryant, Rizzo and/or Baez). Not only would they lose the opportunity to add to a thin farm via trade — they’d perhaps further deplete the current system to make a measured push to remain in the division hunt.

A few clubs always find themselves performing something of a tightrope walk this time of year, but the Cubs are among the more prominent examples in recent memory. The clubhouse probably relishes the fact that they’ve upset the front office’s expectations to date; every group of players wants to win, after all. If they can keep it up a month longer, we’ll likely be looking at a much different deadline than most expected for the Cubs after they shipped Darvish to San Diego in exchange for Davies and a handful of lottery-ticket teenagers who might not make it to the Majors before the entire roster turns over.

Hoyer: No Current Extension Talks With Cubs’ Core Players

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The core of the Cubs’ 2016 World Series club is nearing the end of its tenure in Chicago, and president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said Thursday that there are no current extension talks with any members of that core (Twitter link via 670 The Score’s Bruce Levine). Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant and Javier Baez are all slated to become free agents at season’s end, while catcher Willson Contreras hits the market following the 2022 season.

For much of the offseason, talk around Bryant was focused on whether he’d even make it to Opening Day. The fact that former Rookie of the Year and NL MVP had a dismal 2020 season likely helped keep him in Chicago, as last summer’s struggles paired with a hefty arbitration raise to sap much of his trade value.

A quarter of the way through the 2021 season, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. While the entire league seems to be plagued with anemic offensive performances, Bryant is better than ever. Through his first 167 trips to the plate, he’s raking at a .301/.401/.615 pace with 10 homers, 14 doubles and a pair of stolen bases. He’s even doing so while splitting his time between third base and all three outfield positions, showing off plenty of defensive versatility.

Rizzo is also in the midst of a resurgent campaign, having increased his average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage over last year’s levels. He’s still not back to peak form, but a .250/.361/.443 slash is solid — particularly in the aforementioned era of strikeouts and near-weekly no-hitters. Rizzo is a rarity in 2021, having walked at a higher clip (14.8 percent) than he’s struck out (12.4 percent). The Cubs reportedly offered him an extension in the vicinity of five years and $70MM back in Spring Training, which checks in at about $60MM shy of the $130MM commitment the division-rival Cardinals made to Paul Goldschmidt. That deal began in Goldschmidt’s age-32 season — the same age at which Rizzo will play in 2022.

Baez, meanwhile, is enjoying a more productive season than he did in 2020, albeit with plenty of red flags. He’s raised his slash line across the board but is now striking out at a 37.2 percent clip that represents the highest non-rookie mark of his career. Even though he’s raised his average 60 points over its 2020 level, Baez’s OBP is still resting just shy of .300. He’s batting .263/.299/.526 on the whole, which is certainly sound production, but he’s needed career-highs in BABIP (.351) and homer-to-flyball ratio (32.3 percent) in order to get there. If either of those two marks regresses or his strikeouts continue to tick up, Baez’s 2.7 percent walk rate will become all the more glaring.

Contreras, the only one of the group controlled beyond the current season, is hitting .254/.349/.462, continuing a lengthy run as one of the game’s best-hitting backstops. That he’s controlled into 2022 puts a bit less of a spotlight on him, but there were some trade rumblings surrounding Contreras over the winter.

At 21-21, the Cubs needn’t yet entertain the idea of any sort of broad-reaching fire sale. They’re still just 3.5 games back of the Cardinals in the NL Central and very much in the mix as of mid-May. Should they wilt in the coming months, any of the impending free agents would make for a plausible trade candidate. There would of course be PR implications to consider with dealing from that group, but an unavoidable reality; even if the Cubs hold onto everyone through season’s end, they’ll eventually have to bid adieu to at least one, if not two or all three of Bryant, Rizzo and Baez in free agency. For now, the hope is likely that the group puts together a big showing over the next two months, positioning the Cubs as division favorites and deadline buyers.

The more interesting scenario to consider, though, will be what the Cubs will do if they’re still in precisely this spot come mid-July. A Cubs team hovering at .500, give or take a couple games, would have to weigh two sides of a difficult dilemma. Make one final run with an offensive core that really hasn’t gotten it done in October since that World Series victory, or sell off some of the most iconic players in recent franchise history? The former route could leave the Cubs with little to show in terms of compensation for a core that won’t stay intact. The latter route would be tantamount to waving a white flag while still in striking distance of a postseason bid while turning the page on a historic era of Cubs baseball.

Hoyer, it should be noted, did make clear that the Cubs maintain an “open-door” policy and aren’t ruling out future negotiations. But Rizzo said earlier this year that he’d made his peace with the lack of an extension, while Bryant has never seemed all that likely to sign before free agency. They’ve talked with Baez for the past two to three seasons without a deal ever coming together. Generally speaking, the expectation of a deal for any of the bunch coming together before free agency (save for perhaps Contreras this offseason) should be low.

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