Th♉e Chicago Cubs are making highly-effective lefty swi🌜ng man Drew Smyly available to all other teams for nothing.
That’s the report tonight from Bob Nightengale:
A team that claims Smyly will simply take on his contract, and that’s it. No trade. Just a freebie if you take the contract.
In Smyly’s case, that contract is as follows: he’s owed about $1.9 million the rest of this season, and then he will receive a $2.5 million buyout on a mutual option for 2025.
In other words, while you can get Smyly for “free” right now, you have to have $4.4 million available in your budget to do it. I tend to doubt there’s a team that, at this stage of the year, is going to do that. The Cubs probably know this, so there’s very little risk in putting him on waivers anyway.
Then again, Smyly really has been excellent for a long time now: 2.84 ERA over 50.2 relief innings this year (mirroring what he did in relief last year), and a 1.82 ERA since the start of June. He’s been a stud. Maybe some very wealthy team will want him so badly that price is no object. (The timing matters, by the way, because a guy has to be in an organization before September 1 in order to be playoff-eligible for that organization.)
One question I expect folks will have🦄: is this the Cubs saying the season is over? A white flag signal? Well, it certainly leans in that direction, since a competitive Cubs team would very much want a great lefty reliever down the stretch and into the postseason.
The counter there is that the Cubs do have some relievers at Iowa that they assuredly want to get a look at, as well as a veteran like Adrian Houser they’d probably be happy to call up and maybe not lose a ton of actual performance results.
But there’s no doubt that offering Smyly to other teams via outright (irrevocable) waivers this time of year means the Cubs would be happy to lose him for nothing. Just salary savings. Their season was never going to turn on Smyly, but, yeah, it’s white flag adjacent.
The second question folks will have: does a Smyly claim bring the Cubs back under the luxury tax? No way to know, since we didn’t even know they were going to be over it in the first place until that was recently revealed by Jed Hoyer and Carter Hawkins. If they are very close, then sure, $4+ million could be the difference. (But again, that could also be the difference in the other direction for a claiming team, which would make him less likel📖y to be claimed. Two-way street.)
We’ll see what happens this week, when the Smyly waiver resolves. We will know quickly.
Last question this prompts: is anyone else being put on waivers? Patri൲ck Wisdom? Mike Tauchman? Julian🌌 Merryweather?
