It’s Tuesday night here at BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in and join us for a while. We can check your coat for you. There’s no cover charge. We still have a few tables available. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started,
but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
The World Series starts on Friday. It’d dead week.
Last night, I asked you if the Cubs should pursue free agent and old friend Kyle Schwarber in free agency. The majority of you were against it as 62 percent said the Cubs should look elsewhere. But there were a lot of strong opinions both ways, which was good.
On Tuesday night, I don’t normally do a movie essay. But I always have time for jazz and that time is now.
We’re continuing our feature of Halloween-themed jazz tuned for October, so here is Cab Calloway and His Orchestra performing “The Ghost of Smokey Joe.”
Welcome back to everyone who skips all that jazz.
Tonight we’re going to start making the Cubs shopping list for the winter. I think that everyone, including Jed Hoyer, thinks that the Cubs starting pitching was thin. Certainly if everyone had stayed healthy, the Cubs had a solid starting rotation. But we all know that pitchers don’t stay healthy. One of the keys to the Dodgers success over the past few years has been that they realize this and have the money to do something about it. The Dodgers load up on far more pitching than they need in April and figure that by the end of October, they’ll just have barely enough healthy arms to survive.
I strongly believe that the series against the Brewers would have gone differently had Cade Horton been healthy and the Cubs entire season would have been better had Justin Steele not gone down early in the year. But they did and Shōta Imanaga never looked the same after his mid-season injury. So by the time the National League Division Series rolled around, the Cubs only had Matthew Boyd and Jameson Taillon as starters that they could trust.
So tonight we’re going to start to make out our wishlist to Santa. Which free agent starting pitcher would you most like to see under the Cubs tree this December? Because the Dodgers are proving that you can never have too many.
I have four candidates, although you can vote other and tell us which one I left out that you’d like to see as a Cub. (Jack Flaherty might be the most obvious candidate that I’m not listing, if he opts out. He may not.) What I don’t want to see you vote is for “Trade for Tarik Skubal/Paul Skenes/whomever.” I’m sure we’d all like to see Skubal or Skenes in a Cubs uniform. But that’s not really something the Cubs have much control over. The other team would have to want to trade him and the Cubs would have to have something the other team wants. I’m pretty sure that no team in baseball has a fair trade package for Skenes. Skubal is different because he’s a free agent after this upcoming season, but the Tigers are also contenders and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to trade him when they would need him if they want to win the World Series—and the Tigers are contenders.
The four candidates are as follows. Tell me which one would be your first choice to join the Cubs.
Right-hander Dylan Cease:
Bringing Cease back to Chicago has a certain poetic justice in that the Cubs drafted and traded him as a minor leaguer for Jose Quintana back in 2017. But they say “you can’t go home again,” and there’s no guarantee that Cease’s return to the Cubs organization would be a happy one. But of course, there’s risk in every pitcher and free agent signing.
There is some reason to think Cease might be an especially risky signing, however. Cease went 8-12 with a 4.55 ERA for the Padres last season. That’s not good, and it goes in with a pattern in Cease that alternates good seasons with poor ones.
But digging in deeper to to Cease’s numbers, they may not be as bad as that ERA suggests. Cease struck out 215 batters in 168 innings last year, which gave him a league-leading 11.5 strikeouts per nine innings. The average velocity on Cease’s fastball was 97.1 miles per hour last year, which was his highest since the shortened 2020 season. So he’s not exactly losing velocity. Cease had an expected ERA of 3.46 and a fielding-independent pitching number of 3.56. Both of those numbers are higher than they were in 2024 when Cease finished fourth in Cy Young Award balloting, but they still indicate that Cease may be the victim of bad luck and bad defense.
When Cease gets into trouble, it’s usually because he’s walking too many batters. And his walk totals were up last year. But they were still in the realm of “quite acceptable” for someone who strikes out so many batters.
Cease is also remarkably durable for someone who throws so hard, having led the league in starts in three of the past five years with 33 and having made 32 starts in the other two seasons.
I don’t know how much any of these free agents will command on the open market, but I think they all get deals of at least four or five years. Cease turns 30 just after Christmas, so a five-year deal for him wouldn’t be especially risky. I do think that Cease will command the highest overall contract of my four choices. Cease’s deal could be over $150 million.
Left-hander Framber Valdez:
Valdez is about as under-the-radar pitcher that you can be for a two-time All-Star and someone who started and won a clinching Game 6 of the 2022 World Series. You rarely hear Valdez mentioned among the top pitchers in the game, but he’s certainly been a stabilizing factor for the Astros for several years now.
Valdez is primarily a sinker/cutter pitcher who relies on getting a lot of ground balls, which is perfect for the Cubs infield defense. He had the worst season of his career in 2025, going 13-11 with a 3.66 ERA. If that’s the worst a guy can do, then that’s a really good pitcher. His expected ERA was 3.75 but his FIP was 3.37.
Valdez has also been remarkably durable, throwing over 175 innings in each of the past four seasons.
One downside to Valdez is that he finished the 2025 season on a sour note. He put up an ERA of 6.05 over the final two months of the season as the Astros coughed away a playoff spot. Valdez was also much better in Houston than he was on the road last year. He’s always had better home splits than road splits. Maybe not as dramatic as last year, but he does seen to thrive at whatever they’re calling Houston’s ballpark these days.
Valdez also turns 32 in November. On the one hand, that means he might not get a five-year deal. On the other hand, it means that he could start experiencing an age-related decline at any moment. (I do believe the aging curve for pitchers is quite unpredictable, however, unlike for hitters.)
Then there is the fact that Valdez is a left-hander that is at least somewhat similar to Shōta Imanaga and Matthew Boyd. More to Shōta than Boyd. Most hitters do struggle to hit left-handers in the modern game and the Cubs have leaned into that. But would that be giving them too many looks at similar stuff? Or just more stuff that they can’t hit?
Left-hander Ranger Suárez:
Suárez took a huge step forward in 2025. He’d been a solid mid-rotation starter for the Phillies for years, but this year he threw more strikes and the result was the best season of his career. In 2025, Suárez went 12-8 with a 3.20 ERA. He earned that too, as his xERA was 3.15 and his FIP was 3.21.
Suárez is a slider/changeup left-hander, which is pretty similar to Matthew Boyd. On the downside, that’s giving hitters two looks at similar stuff. On the plus side, the Cubs did pretty well with Boyd, didn’t they?
Having only just turned 30, Suárez will probably be looking for a four- or five-year deal. But without the same track record as Cease and Valdez, Suárez probably won’t command the same number of dollars. The Cubs four-year, $68 million deal with Jameson Taillon should serve as a rough guide to what Suárez is looking for.
Right-hander Michael King:
I’ve seen the Cubs connected to King a lot in online speculation, only because the Cubs like to take chances on players coming off of injuries and King did miss time twice last year. First with a shoulder nerve issue that caused him to miss almost three months and then a knee problem that forced him to the injured list for another month.
But when King is healthy, like he was in 2024, he can be very good. In 2025, King made 15 starts and went 5-3 with a 3.44 ERA. That’s OK, although his xERA of 4.26 and a FIP of 4.42 indicate more trouble. But when King was healthy in 2024, he made 30 starts (and one relief appearance) and went 13-9 with a 2.95 ERA. He had a 3.57 xERA and a 3.33 FIP in 2024.
King has only been a starter for two years after he got traded to San Diego from the Yankees in the Juan Soto deal. But he seems more suited to starting, as he’s a big (6’3”) guy with a four-pitch, kitchen-sink arsenal of a four-seam fastball, a sinker, a slider and a change, all of which he throws about equally. The sinker is definitely his best pitch. It averaged 92.7 mph last year with good movement.
King just turned 30 and doesn’t have the same track record of the other pitchers, so he might come for fewer dollars or years.
All four of these pitchers are likely to get qualifying offers, so they’d cost the Cubs a draft pick to sign.
Other starting pitchers that are or could be free agents this winter are Jack Flaherty, Nick Martinez, Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly. Those pitchers won’t likely have qualifying offers. Martinez definitely won’t, because he’s already gotten one.
So do you hope that the Cubs get any of these four pitchers for the holidays?
Thanks for stopping in tonight. We hope we filled in this dead period between baseball games. Please get home safely. Don’t forget your coat if you checked it. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow for more BCB After Dark.
