After Missing on Tanner Scott, Cubs Among Teams Pursuing Carlos Estévez

The Cubs put in a strong multiyear bid for Tanner Scott but came up short as the Dodgers added the left with a four-year, $72 million deal. For what it’s worth, my understanding is that the Cubs were at the same length with a figure somewhere in the mid-$60 million range, so they most definitely stretched out of their comfort zone. Now they need to pivot in a hurry if they want to make good on all the talk about prioritizing the bullpen because the relief market has picked up a lot of steam lately.

According to Jon Morosi, the Cubs are among several teams pursuing 32-year-old righty Carlos Estévez. Bruce Levine apparently said at CubsCon that Estévez is their guy, though this smells an awful lot like an agent leveraging teams that missed out on Scott as a means by which to get more money for his client. Guess we’ll find out.

After spending several years with the Rockies, Estévez spent last season with the Angels and Phillies. Unlike his Hollywood namesake, however, he’s never spent time in the California Penal League. One of my four bold-ish predictions was that the Cubs would add either Estévez or Clay Holmes, and that’s probably the only one that still has a chance of coming to pass. Estévez is coming off his best season with a 2.45 ERA and a 5.7% walk rate, though there’s reason to worry about the risk of a multi-year deal.

His fastball velocity was down a bit and his whiff (25.6%) and strikeout (23.6%) rates were only middling while his chase rate (24.4%) was only in the eighth percentile. Estévez is like the pitching version of Cody Bellinger in that his production was solid in spite of terrible batted-ball data. Keeping hitters to a .229 BABIP with 0.83 homers per nine innings feels like a fluke when you see that he was in the 18th percentile or lower for average exit velocity, hard-hit rate, ground ball percentage, and barrel percentage.

That probably won’t matter much if Jed Hoyer can’t figure out how to control the wind at Wrigley, but surviving a summer of more favorable hitting conditions will be tough if Estévez maintains those same numbers. And hey, maybe he can keep getting away with it by making some little tweaks. His ride-run heater and firm slider made him really tough on righties and cutting down on walks meant his mistakes weren’t magnified.

I’d like this potential move a whole lot more if I knew the dude would be able to get back to his whiff and K numbers from 2023 while also keeping the walks down. The Cubs need to add high-leverage relievers and they might be getting a little anxious at this point, especially as several other teams are after Estévez. There are definitely bigger risks out there than a guy who’s made at least 54 appearances in six different seasons, though I think I still prefer Kirby Yates on a higher-AAV deal that would likely only be for one year. Kyle Finnegan has also come up quite a bit.

More to come.

The post After Missing on Tanner Scott, Cubs Among Teams Pursuing Carlos Estévez appeared first on .