Shocker: Cubs Don’t Intend to Pursue Juan Soto, Corbin Burnes

This is my shocked face. We’ve all known for a while now that the Cubs aren’t going to spend what it’ll take to land Juan Soto, not that it’ll matter if he doesn’t even want to consider Chicago as a destination. A lot of folks are going to want to make this about Tom Ricketts and Jed Hoyer, but it’s really just saving us all the hassle of thinking there was a chance at all. As with Shohei Ohtani last year, the market for Soto is extremely limited and might only include two teams.

If you still think the Cubs had a chance to change the slugger’s mind with a huge offer, you can save yourself a whole lot of mental anguish by rejecting that notion. He’s said winning is a priority and everyone believes he prefers to remain in New York. Even if you throw in the Dodgers as an option, other teams could match or exceed anything the Cubs might have offered while also boasting better rosters.

And if you’re holding out hope for a consolation prize like Corbin Burnes, well, you may want to begin the process of accepting disappointment there as well. Here’s a snippet from Sahadev Sharma and Patrick Mooney’s latest article:

Again, this is all stuff we’ve been saying for a while now. Burnes is expected to command upwards of $200 million, which is the going rate for aces in today’s market. However, his status as an ace moving forward remains very much in question following a steady decline in strikeout rate and cutter effectiveness. If you want something sharper than my analysis, this article from Isaac Groffman may be even more damning. It’s also a lot more dense, so be prepared if you choose to check it out.

At the risk of applauding Hoyer’s plan to improve around the margins of the roster, I can’t be mad about the decision to sit out the market. As SharMooney notes, the Cubs do intend to be very active on the trade market and in the pursuit of pitching. Landing an arm on a nine-figure deal isn’t out of the question, and Max Fried has been brought up several times. The Cubs are also said to have former Braves catcher Travis d’Arnaud on their radar, which could mean a Jon Lester/David Ross package deal of sorts.

Then there’s Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki, who Hoyer has scouted intently in hopes that he’ll come over early. A decision hasn’t been reached on whether the 23-year-old will be posted by his current club, the Chiba Lotte Marines, but letting him go to MLB this winter would mean he could only sign a minor league deal subject to international bonus pool caps. That’s what happened when Ohtani came over and it would represent a huge drop in compensation for both Sasaki and his NPB team due to the paltry posting fees.

But, man, you wanna talk about plugging some sexy numbers into Ivy’s — that’s the Cubs proprietary information platform — player-value algorithm. Somehow managing to land Sasaki would be a huge coup because of the cost/performance disparity, which would allow Hoyer to take swings elsewhere. With several top-100 prospects and a full roster, those swings are more likely to come in the form of trades simply because the Cubs have to make all the pieces fit together.

I know a lot of y’all love to huge those prospects tight and never let them go, but I’ve got some bad news for you if you believe every one of them will come up and contribute in a big way. The key is knowing which ones to keep, or maybe it’s just being comfortable with the fact that someone you trade away might end up being really good. Some of that is totally situational too.

As much as I’ve questioned the Cubs’ ability — or lack thereof — to further develop players at the highest level, there’s something to be said for dudes just figuring it out somewhere else. Maybe they just got too comfortable in one organization and needed a wakeup call, or it could be that something changed in their habits. A new team might have a coach who spotted something no one else ever had.

What I’m driving at is that a baseball executive can’t act out of fear that they’ll make the wrong move. That’s not much different from operating with a mandate to find value in each move, otherwise known as playing not to lose. I think Hoyer inhabits that space and I’m concerned about how it’ll impact the results of their move to a more analytical, emotionless player evaluation and development strategy.

It’s not hyperbole to say the Cubs’ trajectory for the next five years could be determined in the next three months. Hoyer wants to start getting really active by the time the Winter Meetings in Dallas roll around on December 9-12, so we may have about a month to go before we can really start drawing some conclusions.