NASHVILLE – Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer pushed back on a report Tuesday that the Cubs were no longer in the race for Shohei Ohtani.
“I don’t know where that came from,” Hoyer said. “There’s nothing to report whatsoever.
“On all the Ohtani stuff, just like I would any free agent, I’m not going to talk about discussions or meetings or where it is. I’d keep that quiet, like anything else.”
Hoyer did say that the Cubs have not been given a “status check” from the Ohtani camp. Of course, that doesn’t mean Ohtani hasn’t narrowed down his choices. Similarly, the Cubs have not given Ohtani’s camp a “status check” of their own.
“The truth is that with this free agent pursuit and others, very few people are aware of what’s being discussed or what’s going on, on purpose,” Hoyer said. “I think that all sides have kept it that way. And I think it’s going to stay that way.”
Not everyone has been so tight-lipped. In Dodgers manager Dave Roberts’ scheduled availability Tuesday, he spoke openly to reporters about the Dodgers’ meeting with Ohtani. He revealed the team hosted Ohtani at Dodger Stadium for about two to three hours a couple days ago.
“We want to respect Shohei’s wishes, [his agent Nez Balelo’s] wishes, as far as being private,” Roberts told reporters. “So, I think that we took the necessary ways to do that, to honor his wish. But obviously people talk and things, and so I don’t think that I need to share what we talked about.”
Still, the disclosure that Ohtani met with the Dodgers appeared to run counter to the secrecy that has characterized his free agency.
“In this case, there’s real secrecy, but everyone knows there’s secrecy,” Hoyer said when asked how the dynamic compared to prior experiences with free agents. “I think there’s been others that are really secret that no one knew about. So I’ve seen this kind of secrecy before, but it wasn’t necessarily ‘public secrecy’ – if that’s even a thing you could say.”
All Cubs manager Craig Counsell would say, even after being informed of Roberts’ comments, was that he himself had not met with Ohtani. When asked if the Cubs front office had met with him, Counsell repeated: “I have not.” He declined to comment on whether that indicated anything about the Cubs’ interest level.
“I don’t think this is my spot to talk about individual players,” he said. “It’s a great question, but not the spot to talk about it.”
Ohtani is expected to garner a record-setting contract. And over the years, Hoyer has been open about his reluctance to offer long deals to free agents, preferring shorter deals with higher average annual value. Even Dansby Swanson, whose signing defined the Cubs’ offseason last year, inked a seven-year, $177 million contract. But Hoyer doesn’t have a steadfast rule against long contracts.
“It’s hard to see into the future that well,” Hoyer said Tuesday. “You’re betting on human beings with bones and ligaments, and all those different things. But certainly, there’s times when a player’s talent has it make sense to do that.”
As much as Ohtani’s addition would improve the Cubs, the club’s offseason plan doesn’t completely hinge on landing the superstar.
“You may have one thing you really want to get done, but ultimately, I also think you can get in trouble trying to time things out,” Hoyer said. “The timing doesn’t always doesn’t always work. Sometimes you have to, if this deal makes sense, if it’s all aligned, you have to do it and realize the repercussions of that.”
Though the market has been slow-moving, Hoyer said the Cubs “have lines in the water” and have had a lot of conversations. Because the free agent market is top heavy and “not the deepest,” he predicted there’d be a lot of trades around MLB this offseason.
