The Chicago Cubs came out of the All-Star break holding the National League’s top wild-card spot and a pitching staff that ranked 21st in baseball. Jed Hoyer told the Chicago Sun-Times this week which of those two facts will drive the rest of July.
“You can’t have too much pitching,” Hoyer said. “You never have enough.”
The Cubs entered Friday with a 4.33 team ERA, and the reason is not a mystery: the rotation has been picked apart by injuries all season. Matthew Boyd is back from a long layoff. Jameson Taillon and Edward Cabrera are expected to rejoin the group at some point. Even with all three, the Sun-Times report describes a front office that intends to add arms rather than count on the ones returning.
The names circulating as potentially available in that report run from Tigers ace Tarik Skubal to former division rival Freddy Peralta, the Twins’ Joe Ryan and Sonny Gray of the Red Sox. The gap between those tiers is enormous — Skubal would cost a top-of-system package, Gray a far smaller one — and how far up that ladder Chicago is willing to climb is the question the deadline will answer.
The Sun-Times framed it as Hoyer’s last big chance to bolster a roster carrying championship expectations. The team is 54-43 after Friday’s 5-2 loss to Minnesota at Wrigley Field, six games behind Milwaukee in the division and comfortably inside the wild-card field. That is the profile of a club that adds.
The complication is that everyone else in the wild-card race needs pitching too, and the supply of controllable starters is thin. My read is that Chicago has the system depth to win a bidding war it chooses to enter; whether Hoyer enters one is the story of the next two weeks.
For fantasy purposes, the players to watch are the Cubs’ current back-end starters, whose roles are least secure if Chicago lands a rotation arm. Boyd’s value is stable — he is a mid-rotation piece regardless of who arrives — but anyone streaming a Cubs fifth starter should expect that slot to change hands before Aug. 3.
