Cubs President Jed Hoyer spoke with the media from the Winter Meetings, some of which we discussed last night. Some of the media session is available via Marquee, and I’ll embed it here so you can watch for yourself: As I said, I got into a lot of the meat last night, but there was one snippet at The Athletic that I thought deserved a call out today: “We’re definitely looking for another starter,” said Hoyer, who also sounded open to adding another swingman to go between the bullpen and the rotation. “Could we add multiple guys that can make starts? Yes.” So, we knew the Cubs were looking to add another starting pitcher. And we knew the Cubs were going to be adding to the bullpen. But Hoyer reminds us that there’s a third option that the Cubs might be exploring: swing guys. Last year, later in the offseason, the Cubs wound up inking one of the best swing-pitcher deals when they got Colin Rea. And, given Craig Counsell’s proclivity for using pitchers as “out-getters” who can pitch in a variety of situations, it would make sense that the Cubs may want to add to the current group of those swing types (Rea, Ben Brown, Javier Assad, Jordan Wicks). Among those guys on the market right now are a couple we’ve discussed before in Sean Newcomb and Dustin May, with the latter also being kind of a reclamation type. I wonder if Walker Buehler finds himself also having to be open to that kind of role. There are also guys like Nick Martinez, Aaron Civale, Andrew Heaney, Kona Takahashi, and many more reclamation or fringe-starter arms who may succeed as swing men. Even old friend Brad Keller is being viewed by some teams as not just a reliever or not just a starter, but a guy who could wind up doing both for them. All of that is to say, assuming the Cubs add at least one starting pitcher who is more of a clear front-half-of-the-rotation type, why wouldn’t we be curious about seeing them explore the fringy starter/swing-man market? I like it. We’ve seen how valuable those guys can be, and we’ve also seen how many of them can surprise you out of the bullpen. Just keep it in mind going forward.

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