You know the drill by now – I mean, I just said it earlier today with the Joe Biagini signing: “The Chicago Cubs haven’t done a ton yet this offseason to make firm and fast additions to the big league roster, but they have certainly done what we expected them to do on the bullpen side of things: accumulate interesting, upside arms on the cheap. Don’t read that as a criticism, either. They’ve been good at it for a couple years now, and I’m not going to start betting against the approach: get a huge volume of guys in the door who do one or two things that you can’t teach, try to massage some other part of their game to get overall improvement, and figure that you can hit on maybe 20 to 30% of them.”
The Chicago Cubs haven’t done a ton yet this offseason to make firm and fast additions to the big league roster, but they have certainly done what we expected them to do on the bullpen side of things: accumulate interesting, upside arms on the cheap. Don’t read that as a criticism, either. They’ve been good at it for a couple years now, and I’m not going to start betting against the approach: get a huge volume of guys in the door who do one or two things that you can’t teach, try to massage some other part of their game to get overall improvement, and figure that you can hit on maybe 20 to 30% of them.
Not much else doing right now for the Chicago Cubs, but they’re sticking to their now-usual route when it comes to the bullpen: find and sign as many “interesting” and “unique” guys as possible.
As Bryan points out on Twitter, Kelley, 27, is a sidearmer who had the ninth lowest release point in baseball in 2020. So that’s definitely “interesting” and “unique.” The long-time Red Sox farmhand was exceptional in the minors, but hasn’t translated it in the big leagues yet, either in his debut with the Red Sox in 2019, or with the Phillies this past year (both very small samples):