Clay Holmes, Matthew Boyd Free Agents After Declining Player Options
All five members of the Cubs’ end-of-season rotation are now officially free agents, as Clay Holmes and Matthew Boyd have declined their player options. They join Kevin Gausman, David Peterson, and Shōta Imanaga on the market, though the Cubs have a five-day window of exclusive negotiations before those players can officially start talking with other teams. The current CBA ends on December 1, so there will be a little less than a month of full free agency ahead of the inevitable lockout.
Jed Hoyer has admitted that pitching is his top priority this offseason, and he’s also said that there are some deals that make sense regardless of what the new CBA structure looks like. As such, we can expect the Cubs to be active in these first few weeks. In addition to retaining one or two of the pitchers above as sort of a baseline, Hoyer could target bigger free agents to headline the rotation and/or bullpen.
Michael King has opted out of his deal with the Padres and is now a free agent; Freddy Peralta has ties to Craig Counsell and the NL Central; Adrian Morejon checks all the boxes for a big-ticket reliever, plus he could be viewed as a candidate to return to a starting role. There are many other possibilities, of course, but those three really stand out because of their performance and the fact that they won’t command Tarik Skubal money.
I’m still not ruling out a potential Skubal pursuit, but it’s highly unlikely he’ll get something done in the next month. Even if the Cubs stretching well beyond their comfort zone to sign the all-world southpaw seems dubious, consider how uncomfortable they already are after watching the Brewers run roughshod over their postseason opponents en route to their first World Series win.
Even though they’ve been staring up at their rivals to the north for years now, the Cubs always had the convenient excuse that the Brewers could never win when it mattered most. With that strawman now just a smoldering pile of embers, Cubs leadership can no longer be content to just be in the hunt for a playoff spot. Nor is it enough to hope that the Brewers will finally slow down, as that clearly hasn’t worked for the last half-decade or so.
Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with hope. Andy Dufresne taught us that hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. But Hoyer doesn’t have decades to chip his way out of prison with nothing but a Pete Crow-Armstrong poster to obscure his progress. So when it comes to the next few weeks, the Cubs can either get busy living or they can get busy dying.
