Last week, Cubs fans worked themselves into a fine lather — one might even describe it as a snit — over their club’s failure to come to terms with newly acquired outfielder Kyle Tucker regarding his 2025 contract.
The sides have filed for arbitration, facing a $2.5 million gap. Tucker wanted $17.5 million; the Cubs offered $15.
The Cubs and newly acquired OF Kyle Tucker could not come to an agreement on a salary for 2025, per a source. The Cubs filed at $15 mil. Tucker's camp at $17.5 mil.
— Jesse Rogers (@JesseRogersESPN) January 10, 2025
Last season in Houston, in his second-year arbitration, Tucker made $12 million and batted .289 with a .993 OPS in 78 games. Represented by Excel Sports Management, he is scheduled to be a free agent at the end of this season.
The thinking of Cubs Nation is simple: you just traded for the guy and you think he’s the next great Cub, so why spoil the mood now? Don’t nickel and dime him — okay, $2.5 million, but that's chump change in baseball money — give Tucker whatever he wants so he doesn’t hate you and everything you stand for when it’s time to do that long-term deal.
It’s an understandable and even an expected sentiment among fans, especially those (and this often describes Cub fans) who believe their front office is run by money-grabbing incompetents. [That would be you, Tom Ricketts, Jed Hoyer and Carter Hawkins.]
There are, however, at least three scenarios that would make the Chicago front office’s willingness to take Tucker to arbitration seem logical. All one needs to do — and again, I acknowledge this is difficult for Cub fans to get their minds around — is come to terms with the notion that the front office might actually know what it’s doing.
Scenario 1: Playing for 2025
Assume for a moment what Cubs fans assume generally, namely that their front office loves money above all else. Under this scenario, Hoyer and Hawkins are willing to go to the mat over $2.5 million, even if that pisses off Tucker enough to sabotage hopes of a long-term deal.
What’s wrong with that logic? Plenty, actually.
Begin with the fact that Kyle Tucker is a professional athlete, meaning that come the end of the 2025 season, he intends to make his services available to the highest bidder. That’s actually the stance Tucker and his reps took with the Astros, which is why the Cubs were able to get him for relatively cheap in the first place.
At the moment, it looks very much like Tucker wants to go to free agency. No real surprise there; top-quality players take that stance all the time. It’s the stance Juan Soto took just last winter with the Yankees, who had acquired him in what turned out to be the vain hope that they could charm him into hanging around.
They couldn’t, but the consolation prize turned out to be one superb year from Soto: a .989 OPS, 41 home runs, 109 RBIs, and a leadership role on a pennant winner.
With Tucker, Cubs fans’ concern is that he’ll pull a season-long hissy fit. The opposite is far more likely. In his walk year, Tucker is more likely to give the Cubs his best effort, if only because he’s staging himself for 30 suitors, not just one.
If Cubs management, which has certainly held extensive talks with Tucker’s agency, has come to the conclusion that he’s not signing no way, no how, then what’s the point of giving him the $2.5 million? Fight over it and — win or lose — take his best 2025 season, knowing it’s likely to be very good.
Scenario 2: They’re still talking
The Cubs and Tucker have filed for arbitration. But that does not necessarily mean they’ve cut each other off, retreated to their respective bunkers, and begun preparing for financial war.
It’s entirely plausible that Hoyer and Excel continue to talk, if not about 2025 then about moving forward from it. Historically, the most likely scenario coming out of the prospect of an arbitration hearing is that the sides strike a deal on their own, either prior to the actual hearing or during it.
That may be a one-year agreement or longer.
The current Cubs management has an extensive recent history of avoiding arbitration. Among players on the current roster, only Ian Happ failed to reach a deal prior to his hearing. That occurred in 2021; Happ won and got $4.1 million; the team had offered $3.25 million.
In 2023, Tucker took the Astros to arbitration over, coincidentally, a difference of $2.5 million. Tucker wanted $7.5 million; the Astros offered $5 million. The Astros won.
Scenario 3: The long-term view
The third scenario is a codicil to Scenario 1: suppose, purely for the sake of argument, that Tucker plays his butt off for the Cubs in 2025, they have a good season, then he hits the road for free agency.
How does that play out from the standpoint of the Cubs’ front office?
Pretty well, probably. Begin with the supposition, a plausible one, that in November of 2025, we’re all talking about what a difference Tucker made to the Cubs in his one season on the North Side. Maybe he led them to the playoffs; maybe he was an MVP candidate.
Now he’s gone, but so what? That same 2025 season also gave the Cubs a chance to road test all three of their young outfield prospects — Owen Caissie, Kevin Alcantara and Alexander Canario — and determine which is to be anointed the full-time successor to Tucker.
At, I might add, a significantly lesser financial commitment than Tucker would have cost.
Granted, it’s possible that all three of those highly touted prospects flame out this coming season, at which point Hoyer and Hawkins fire their scouting, development and analytics departments and look like the idiots Cubs fandom already thinks they are. Perhaps Ricketts fires them, too. Life is full of chances.
By going to arbitration with its newest human asset, the Cubs front office is taking one of those chances. But it may not be as illogical a step as the fan base makes it out to be.