Shocker: Cubs, Arrieta Have ‘Gap on the Years’ of Potential Contract Offer

As far at plot twists go, Jon Heyman’s revelation that the Cubs and Jake Arrieta aren’t seeing eye to eye on a contract offer is even less shocking than finding out that Bruce Willis was actually dead the whole time in The Sixth Sense. “[Arrieta] wants long (six or seven years) they want shorter,” the FanRag scribe reports.

Well, duh. I’m going to let you in on a little secret here, but I need you to lean in really close because I don’t want everyone to hear. Closer. Closer.

THIS HAS BEEN THE CASE FOR THE LAST TWO YEARS.

Arrieta didn’t want to sign an extension after his incredible 2015 campaign, knowing that he had two more guaranteed seasons over which to potentially increase his value. And once Stephen Strasburg inked a huge seven-year extension in May of 2016, Arrieta had more or less decided what he wanted to get out of his next contract.

“You want to be paid in respect to how your peers are paid,” said at the time. “I don’t think that changes with any guy you ask. It happens around baseball every year.”

Hey, did we mention that Scott Boras, self-appointed mayor of Playoffville, reps both Arrieta and Strasburg? The super-agent called out every team in the league during the GM Meetings, but had particularly harsh words for the Cubs and the “economic hurricane” currently circulating at 1060 W. Addison.

The Cubs are well aware of Boras’s bluster, so it’s unlikely that mini diatribe really impacted anything, though Heyman reported that the Cubs and Arrieta have not spoken since those meetings in mid-November. Still, that’s like saying I have spoken to one of my friends in a couple weeks. Either one of us could easily text or call the other and we know where to find each other, we just might not need to.

That Arrieta and the Cubs would have a gulf in what they were initially willing to accept or offer has been a given for at least 18 months, maybe more. At the same time, it’s not as though several other teams are falling over themselves to bring Arrieta’s “aces get seven years” claim to fruition. As such, this situation probably isn’t going to resolve itself anytime soon.

So the fact that the Cubs haven’t talked to their former employee recently doesn’t portend imminent doom for a reunion. Well, not any more than his likely demands and the team’s unwillingness to meet them already did.

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