Ryan Dempster made a point on Wednesday, and it’s a good one:
No, it doesn’t sound like there’s active work being done on extending the core. Yes, it sounds like talks are active about trading Kris Bryant or Kyle Schwarber before the Cubs have to commit to going into the arbitration process with them (the deadline for that decision is Wednesday). Yes, it sounds like a dramatic reshaping may be in the works.
But it also might not be, because the market might not be there, and to Dempster’s point, this is pretty standard fare for a Major League Baseball franchise’s offseason.
We like to have deadlines by which we’ll have finality. It’s part of what makes the NBA free agency process so compelling. But in baseball, especially these last few years, there are few hard deadlines. We may get huge news by Wednesday. We might not at any point this offseason. The actuality will land somewhere between those two, but the broader idea is that we probably aren’t going to get a specific idea on what to expect the 2021 Cubs to look like for a long time, and it’s not some secret Jed Hoyer’s holding close to his chest. It’s just the way the game works. The offseason involves reacting, not just acting. And we have a long way to go.
