Cubs MLB Roster

Cubs Organizational Depth Chart
40-Man Roster Info

40 players are on the MLB RESERVE LIST (roster is full), plus one player is on the 60-DAY IL 

26 players on MLB RESERVE LIST are ACTIVE, twelve players are on OPTIONAL ASSIGNMENT to minors, one player is on the 15-DAY IL, and one player is on the 10-DAY IL

Last updated 3-28-2024
 
* bats or throws left
# bats both

PITCHERS: 13
Yency Almonte
Adbert Alzolay 
Javier Assad
Jose Cuas
Kyle Hendricks
* Shota Imanaga
Mark Leiter Jr
* Luke Little
Julian Merryweather
Hector Neris 
* Drew Smyly
* Justin Steele
* Jordan Wicks

CATCHERS: 2
Miguel Amaya
Yan Gomes

INFIELDERS: 7
* Michael Busch 
Garrett Cooper
Nico Hoerner
Nick Madrigal
* Miles Mastrobuoni
Christopher Morel
Dansby Swanson

OUTFIELDERS: 4
* Cody Bellinger 
# Ian Happ
Seiya Suzuki
* Mike Tauchman 

OPTIONED: 12 
Kevin Alcantara, OF 
Michael Arias, P 
Ben Brown, P 
Alexander Canario, OF 
Pete Crow-Armstrong, OF 
Brennen Davis, OF 
Porter Hodge, P 
* Matt Mervis, 1B 
Daniel Palencia, P 
Keegan Thompson, P 
Luis Vazquez, INF 
Hayden Wesneski, P 

10-DAY IL: 1 
Patrick Wisdom, INF 

15-DAY IL: 1 
Jameson Taillon, P 

60-DAY IL: 1 
Caleb Kilian, P 

 



 

Minor League Rosters
Rule 5 Draft 
Minor League Free-Agents

TCR Friday Notes

....counting down to Vegas (I'm going next week, Cubs arrive at the end of the month).

- Feel free to use this as today's game thread, Cubs stay home in Mesa and battle the Angels; Ryan Dempster vs. Ervin Santana. 

- The big news of the week was another Lou lineup change, this one involving our highest paid player though. I immediately expressed my displeasure over the experiment, but I'll save my final judgement when it's actual put to use in a game that counts. Lou still has a few weeks to change his mind. I have no problems with moving Soriano to the 2-spot or the 5-spot or the 4-spot or even the 3-spot. I have all kinds of problems with giving Ryan Theriot even more plate appearances, even if it's just a handful more.

On the other hand...

There's just something about the Lou tenure so far that makes me give him the benefit of the doubt. It's not that I think he's infallible or anything. It's just that if he does go down this road with Theriot at the top of the order, I feel just as confident that he'll abandon it if it's not working. This is the complete opposite of how I felt about Dusty, who was stubbornly stupid.

- There's a brand spankin' new rumor about Brian Roberts today from the Sun-Times in which the Cubs have an offer of Sean Gallagher, Ronny Cedeno, Jose Ceda and Donald Veal on the table. That would probably be three of our top four pitching prospects and two players that could be beneficial for the Cubs this year in Cedeno and Gallagher. A steep price to pay, but that's what happens when baseball folks start believing that leadoff hitter is an actual position. If it does happen though, it probably does make the Cubs a little bit better this year, and let's face it, it's all about winning this year.

- Speaking of Ceda, Oneri Fleita was on XM radio this morning with John Sickels. If Ceda does stick with the team, the plan was to use him as a starter so he could work on his secondary pitches. The way Fleita explained it, he'd be paired with another pither in a sort of duel-starters format to limit his pitch count and innings pitched, but he would be starting games.

- It seems Jim Hendry was less than genuine when he said that the Cubs asked about Johan Santana but were informed that he was not interested in signing a long-term deal with a team that has its spring training in Arizona. Part of it might be true, but it didn't prevent the Texas Rangers from making a serious run, a run that I think we'd all loved for the Cubs to have at least attempted, even if ultimately turned down. I know...sour grapes on my part...but we are looking at Ryan Dempster as a viable rotation candiate right now.

- A few shout-outs to some other Cubs blogs. It looks like "The View from the Bleachers" has taken up our old spot at MVN...best of luck with that. They are running a home run derby contest which you're all encouraged to enter. Our friends at Ted Lilly Fan Club were inspired by my spring traning battles logo and created their own (or they're just openly mocking us).

- Baseball Prospectus and Will Carroll came out with the Cubs Team Health Report. I don't care to giveaway all their paid content, but the "red lights" were Geovany Soto, Carlos Zambrano, Sean Marshall, Jon Lieber and Kerry Wood. Also on BP, Nate Silver figures out a way to measure "heart". The Cubs, unsurprisingly, were the second worst at something.

- I had brief brush with baseball fame this morning that I thought I'd share with everyone. I went to my physical therapy appointment this morning and usually bring a baseball book to read as their is some downtime with heat wraps and whatnot. Today I happened to pick up "The Neyer/James Guide to Pitching". So I show up and start reading as they put the heat wrap on my elbow and there's a gentelman there with his wife and their pre-teen son is getting his knee worked on. To make a long story short, he turned out to be former pitcher Greg A. Harris and we had an opportunity to chat for a bit. He had no problem rubbing it in that he was part of the '84 Padres when he learned I was a Cubs fan. I quickly looked up his entry in the book and came across this interesting note: Harris pitched with both hands on Spetember 28, 1995. So we talked it up for awhile, covering a few topics from being at the Cubs first scheduled night game (he was with the Phillies at the time) and the confusion of having Greg W. Harris in the league at the same time. Fun way to start my morning...

- I wanted to mention that we did indeed find accurate service time information on the Cubs and added it to our 40-man roster page. Thanks to Arizona Phil and "Mannytrillo" for the assists on that one. You can find a full list of all major leaguers at the website for "The Book", although some of the Cub's players were off a few days from what is the official list being sent out by the organization.

- Finally, every week I'll give a mention of one our new features on the site. This week it's our "RSS Info" page. For those slow on the learning curve, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Essentially all of our front-page content is published to our RSS feed, and users can subscribe to that feed in a variety of ways. You can see our number of subscribers in the sidebar on the right, closer to the bottom. I use Google Reader myself to keep track of some of my favorite baseball sites and that way I don't have to go visit each and every site looking for updates - it's all in one handy place.

Now, there's a wide variety of uses and if you look on our RSS Info page via the menu link at the top of the page, you'll see that you can subscribe via email or automatically add it your favorite RSS reader (Google, Yahoo, etc). It also MIGHT be a better way for some to view our content, like those on certain handheld devices, as it's a stripped down version of the site (you just get the articles).

And for those with a Myspace or Facebook page, or if you have your own blog or website, we'd certainly appreciate if you'd consider placing the RSS widget on your site. A handy little gadget that will display TCR headlines on your page. You can also use it as a widget on your desktop. Just click on the "Options" link at the bottom of it and you'll see a bunch of icons for the code you need, depending on the type of page you have. You can also click on "Get This Widget" and customize it further, including adding more feeds to use as a news aggregator, if you wish.

Comments

so his work doesn't go to complete waste...This was his game thread post (sorry brother, don't hate me). ----------------

The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim Home of Disneyland I've Heard Walt Disney Was A Fascist visit the Cubs Friday afternoon at HoHoKam.

Ryan Dempster (2-0/3.00/9 IP) takes the mound for the fourth time this Spring, but there will be at least as much interest in Lou Piniella's batting order. I'm assuming that Ryan Theriot will again lead off, with Alfonso Soriano hitting second, and Kosuke Fukudome in the fifth spot.

Soriano has done a remarkable job of sounding supportive of Piniella's decision to bat him second while simultaneously letting on that he wishes it weren't so.

[ ]

In reply to by Rob G.

Well Lou did experiment with Sori at CF last year, and when he realized it wasn't working out was man enough to admit he was wrong and correct it. Something I couldn't say about Dusty. So if Sori bats 2nd then it's with the assurance that Lou will fix it if it doesn't work.

"It seems Jim Hendry was less than genuine when he said that the Cubs asked about Johan Santana..." Shocking I tell ya, SHOCKING!!

[ ]

In reply to by mannytrillo

I thought that was a very Manny like thing for Rob G to say. Did Santana get traded to the Rangers? I thought he got traded to the Mets for a package that was considered not very good. So, really what you guys wanted was Hendry to be an idiot and try to trade for a guy who wasn't coming to the Cubs instead of concentrating on, you know, attainable players. Good call. Suggest you see how the Rangers do this season.

[ ]

In reply to by The Real Neal

yeah, it's a bit of a random drive-by on my part...but I don't see how Hendry would have been more privileged to info than the Rangers front office to just not pursue it at all. A lot of speculation and a lot of sour grapes on my part, as I already noted.

The good thing about that proposed Roberts trade is that we don't lose Patterson. I bet if that trade goes through BP will make fun of the Cubs for trading for Roberts when they already have his clone on the 40 man. Not that I agree, because Patterson has those slow hands for a secondbasemen.

I'll be hanging in the chat room off and on. I contacted the widget developer to see what's with all that whitespace between paragraphs. If anyone adds it to their site, let me know.

Was that Billy Crystal out there?! 1b error (by Dempster himself) triple to left double to left homerun to left double to left fielder's choice walk triple to right K'S VLAD! walk yanked.

great outing by Dumpster. 1.2 5 hits, 6 ER, 3 BB did manage a K...i pray he won't be the 4th or 5th guy...

Good to see D-Lee is having a good game. Double and a triple already.

Cintron just got hit in the face with a batted ball while standing in the on-deck circle...

I believe Gallagher, Veal, Ceda, and Cedeno is a little too much for Roberts but it seems Lou has Hendry convinced he needs more LH hitting and a leadoff hitter to boot. Stone on the Score yesterday said he believes the deal WILL get done. Also, with Soriano batting 2nd he would see a lot of breaking balls therefore allowing the leadoff hitter (Theriot or Roberts) to have a very easy time stealing second base. The de facto result, is Soriano would be moving the runner to second (just not in the conventional #2 hitter manner). All looks great on the big whiteboard in the clubhouse I suppose. This makes a pretty potent lineup on paper: Roberts, Soriano, Lee, Ramirez, Fukudome, Soto, Pie, Theriot. What concerns me still is the starting pitching: Dempster reverted to form today, Gallagher/Veal is half the minor league depth (Samardzija/Marshall the other half). The only real heartburn in the deal for me is Ceda - what if he really develops into a dominant closer? Still, you have to give something to get something, but counting on Marquis/Lieber/Dempster to fill out the back end of the rotation........bad............bad, bad, bad. I can't believe I'm saying this but, I'd rather keep Murton and/or Patterson than giving up more young pitching for Byrd.

I haven't followed much of the Spring Training games but what I did see did not impress me from Fukudome at the plate. Anyone who has seen a bit more can tell me if something positive they have seen.

I've watched a few games on MLB.TV. He has a great eye, that I can tell. He makes the pitcher throw a ton of pitches, falls them off well, etc. He also seems good at making contact and slapping it the other way if need be. The games I happened to see haven't shown me much beyond that. I think I've missed most of his hits this spring. My impression though is to expect a Mark Grace-ish player. I don't think he'll hit more than 10-12 HR, but he'll have a lot of doubles, walk a lot, hit around .300, and put the bat on the ball when needed. Others probably disagree, but that's what I see coming.

Recent comments

  • crunch (view)

    steele MRI on friday.  counsell expects an IL stint.

    no current plans for his rotation replacement.

  • hellfrozeover (view)

    I would say also in the bright side column is Busch looked pretty good overall at the plate. Alzolay…man, that hurts but most of the time he’s not giving up a homer to that guy. To me the worst was almonte hanging that pitch to Garcia. He hung another one to the next hitter too and got away with it on an 0-1. 

  • crunch (view)

    amaya blocked like 6-8 of smyly's pitches in the dirt very cleanly...not even an exaggeration, smyly threw a ton of pitches bouncing in tonight.

    neris looking like his old self was a relief (no pun), too.

  • TarzanJoeWallis (view)

    In looking for bright spots the defense was outstanding tonight. The “stars” are going to need to shine quite a bit brighter than they did tonight offensively though for this to be a successful season.

  • Eric S (view)

    Good baseball game. Hopefully Steele is pitching again in April (but I’m not counting on it). 

  • crunch (view)

    boo.

  • crunch (view)

    smyly to face the 2/3/4 hitters with a man on 2nd in extras.

    this doesn't seem like a 8 million dollar managerial decision.

  • crunch (view)

    i 100% agree with you, but i dunno how jed wants to run things.  the default is delay.  i would choose brown.

    like hellfrozeover says, could be smyly since he's technically fresh and stretched.

    anyway, on a pure talent basis....brown is the best option.

  • Childersb3 (view)

    Use pitchers when you believe they're good. Don't plan their clock.

    I'm sorry. I'm simply anti-clock/contract management. Play guys when they show real MLB potential talent.

    If Brown hadn't been hurt with the Lat Strain he would've gotten the call, and not Wick.

    Give him a chance. 

    But Wesneski probably gets it

  • crunch (view)

    alzolay...bro...