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The Chicago Cubs entered the trade deadline season with a massive need in their starting rotation. They had entered the season with a hole in the pitching staff, but the injuries to Justin Steele and Jameson Taillon made this roster void even bigger.
The Cubs were connected to a plethora of different starting pitchers in a potential deadline blockbuster. Pitchers like Joe Ryan, Merrill Kelly, Zac Gallen, Sandy Alcántara, Edward Cabrera, and plenty of others were linked to the Cubs.
But Chicago didn’t land any of these pitchers, and the team’s president of baseball operations, Jed Hoyer, shed some light as to why the Cubs didn’t make any of these expected blockbuster moves.
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“From a starting pitcher standpoint, it was a really tight market,” Hoyer said shortly after the deadline passed on Thursday, via ESPN’s Jesse Rogers. “Very few rental starters. Of the marquee controllable starters, none of them changed hands. We didn’t acquire them but no one else did either. We felt the asking price was something we couldn’t do to the future.”
Hoyer has a point.
There weren’t very many rental starting pitchers on the market, and the Cubs didn’t land one of those. While a controllable pitcher would have made a lot more sense for the Cubs’ future, it seems as though the price tag on those top names was too much for anybody to acquire.
The Cubs opted out of overpaying for a talented pitcher, instead rolling forward with their starting rotation. It could come back to haunt them, but it seems like the better option than mortgaging the farm system to land the arm who would help.
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