Tucker Trade Brings Astros Back to Earth, Wakes Cubs From Hibernation

When Juan Soto signed with the Mets this week, there were four parties who should’ve been celebrating: First, the Mets, who nabbed the biggest on-base threat since Barry Bonds, and in the process got to blow raspberries at their old money neighbors. Second, Soto himself, who was already grotesquely wealthy but is now due the kind of lucre that will allow him to oppress multitudes if he so chooses. Third, Scott Boras, who in addition to being paid a handsome commission proved that he still had his mojo after a mortifying 2023-24 offseason.

The fourth winner: Kyle Tucker. The “next-best thing” to a 26-year-old free agent with a .421 career OBP, to someone who is projected by ZiPS to accumulate more than 100 WAR, is… well there’s no such animal. But Tucker is as close as you’ll get these days. If Soto is worth $51 million a year, what is Tucker worth? I don’t know. Neither do the Houston Astros, but they’re clearly not interested in finding out.

On Friday, Houston traded the presumptive top free agent in next year’s class to the Chicago Cubs in exchange for Isaac Paredes, Hayden Wesneski, and third base prospect Cam Smith.

Tucker will enter free agency after his age-28 season — young for a player on the open market, but three years older than Soto — and while injuries limited Tucker to 78 games in 2024, he posted a very Soto-like line when he was healthy: .289/.408/.585, for a 180 wRC+ and more walks than strikeouts. Had he played his customary 150-odd games, he’d have cleared 40 home runs and eight WAR easily.

I looked at the figures underlying Tucker’s breakout back in May, and this was no BABIP-fueled hot streak. Tucker was more patient than ever in 2024. He walked more and hit better because he was more disciplined and put more balls in the air — a quality that paid off huge in Minute Maid Park, where the Crawford Boxes in left and the short wall in right make home runs plentiful.

Wrigley Field isn’t quite so homer-friendly; the walls are close in the power alleys, but the wind is capricious. (Every time I visit Chicago, I wish someone would’ve warned me about the wind.) Baseball Savant has the old jewel box as the 21st-most homer-friendly park in the majors over the past three years, one spot behind Camden Yards, whose barrenness just necessitated a redesign.

But let’s say Tucker’s monster half-season in 2024 is a one-off. Even if he regresses all the way to his previous form, he’ll still be the Cubs’ best position player. If you extrapolate his 2020 stats out over a 162-game season, Tucker produced either 4.9 or 5.0 WAR every year from 2020 to 2023. During Soto’s free agency, you heard complaints about his defense or baserunning, because some people will find a reason to nitpick about everything.

You can’t level the same charge against Tucker, who stole 30 bases in 2023 and 25 the year before that, despite lacking top-end speed. He won a Gold Glove and put up a 5-OAA season as recently as 2022. This is not a DH in the making.

The Astros might not be the juggernaut they were half a decade ago, and their run of seven straight ALCS appearances came to an end this past October, but they’re still the reigning champion in a highly winnable division. Why would they want to get rid of Tucker?

Well, it’s going to be expensive to keep him once he hits free agency a year from now. And those two clauses are not independent: Tucker is almost certain to hit free agency because of how much Soto just blew the lid off previous free agent contract norms.

When Giancarlo Stanton signed his record-breaking extension with the Marlins a decade ago, he reset the ceiling for what a baseball player could earn on one contract. For most of the 21st century, that limit had been in the mid-$200 millions, established by Alex Rodriguez and reinforced by Albert Pujols. And the limit Stanton established — low-to-mid-$300 millions — stayed in place arguably until this week.

Eventually, as macro-level inflation and industry-specific revenue trends brought more money into the game, a star could earn a Stanton-type contract, but for nine or 10 years instead of 13. Two lucky souls — Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani — got into the $400 million range, but each was by acclimation the best player in the world when they signed their respective deals.

What’d that mean? It took another paradigm-breaking player, Soto, plus a healthy market with multiple motivated bidders, plus the greatest agent in the history of the sport with something to prove, to move the limit out of the $400 millions. But eventually, $300 million contracts became available not just to Trout and Harper and Cole and Lindor, but to consistent All-Stars like Trea Turner or even rookies like Yamamoto. The ceiling only moves once a decade, but more and more players get closer and closer to it.

Before Soto, elite corner outfielders (Judge, Betts, Harper) made $300 million, more or less. That’s clearly changed. Tucker’s agent can now go to suitors and say, “Well, if my client is even two-thirds as good as Soto, then a $500 million contract seems reasonable!”

Despite running fairly high payrolls throughout their dynasty, the Astros have tended not to dip into that corner of the market. In fact, with the exception of Jose Altuve, they’ve been pretty ruthless about letting franchise icons walk: Dallas Keuchel, George Springer, Cole, Carlos Correa, and Justin Verlander all rung the bell for big money after leaving Houston. Just this offseason, as the Astros are trading Turner, they’re also shopping Framber Valdez and cutting Alex Bregman loose.

For a long time — more specifically, under the administration of GMs Jeff Luhnow and James Click — the Astros were savvy about turning the roster over. Only five players and one major league coach — Altuve, Bregman, Verlander, Yuli Gurriel, Lance McCullers Jr., and Gary Pettis — stayed with the organization from the 2017 championship team to the 2022 championship team. (“Hey, why was there so much turnover on the coaching staff and front office?” I hear you asking. Don’t worry about it.)

During that period of constant turnover, Houston also reaped the benefits of a farm system buoyed by a decade of ineptitude and/or tanking. For example: The Astros installed Tucker in their lineup full time in 2020, but they drafted him no. 5 overall in 2014, a pick they earned, if you want to call it that, in 2014, their last losing season.

Since then, the Astros have not only been picking lower — Tucker was their last top-10 pick — they’ve been shipping away their next generation of contributors in order to reinforce the team in the present day.

I don’t think owner Jim Crane has lost a second of sleep over trading for Verlander or Grienke, but even a so-called sustainable winner can only sustain itself for so long. And while the Astros are accustomed to letting their stars walk, they’ve heretofore refrained from cashing in on a player like Tucker a year early.

Trading Tucker instead of extending him, or even running it back for 2025 and banking a compensatory pick, is — and I’m sorry, I don’t know a kinder way to put this — very Tampa Bay Rays. It’s the kind of trade you make when you’re building a team to make the playoff bubble as cheaply as possible, and is more than a little undignified for a team that’s been as successful as the Astros have been. Only the Dodgers have a playoff streak as long as Houston’s, and only the Dodgers can match the Astros’ four pennants and two World Series titles in the past decade. If Bregman signs elsewhere and Valdez gets traded, I would not be surprised to see Houston drafting in the first half of the first round once more in 2026.

With all that said, the Astros could’ve done worse, considering that Tucker is only under team control for one year and is unlikely to sign an extension. This trade begs to be compared to the deal that sent Betts to Los Angeles in 2020, and for the record I think the Astros got a better return than the Red Sox did then.

Paredes is the biggest name, a 30-homer man in 2023 and an All-Star this past season. He turns 26 in February, and is eligible for arbitration for the first time this winter, giving the Astros two extra seasons of team control compared to Tucker. Paredes has played all four infield positions in the majors, but these days he spends almost all of his time at the corners. With Bregman’s likely departure, both first and third base are now positions of need in Houston, and Paredes has been a competent defender at both ends of the diamond.

If you read FanGraphs regularly, the one thing you probably know about Paredes is how he hit all those home runs. Especially in the works of Ben Clemens, Paredes has almost become a meme as the metonym for a lift-and-pull approach.

Over the past two seasons, Paredes has by far the highest pull rate on fly balls in the majors, and the second-highest fly ball rate on pull-side batted balls, trailing only Anthony Santander. That quality made him into a cult hero at the Trop, where the left field foul pole is just 315 feet away. After Paredes’ midseason trade to the Cubs, he struggled mightily, but Minute Maid Park — soon to be Daikin Park — is Xanadu for cheap home runs down the left field line.

The pre- and post-trade splits would seem to indicate that Paredes is a hitter who needs a favorable home park to be an average-or-better starter, but the Astros can give him that.

Speaking of hard-hitting third basemen, Smith might end up being the headliner here. The no. 14 overall pick out of Florida State this past July, he hit .387/.488/.654 with a ridiculous 90th percentile exit velocity of 112 mph in his draft year. With the draft being as late as it his, Smith made it into only 32 professional games across three levels, but he hit .313/.396/.609 with 16 extra-base hits over 134 plate appearances. His quality-of-contact numbers weren’t quite as good with a wood bat, but he posted a maximum exit velo of 111 mph and an EV90 of 107 — well above the major league average — with an in-zone contact rate of 84%.

Eric Longenhagen thinks that Smith can stick at third despite having below-average range, and that his line drive-oriented swing could produce even better power numbers if he optimizes it for loft. (I’ll toss my own two cents in here and remind the reader that Tucker did this last season and went completely busalooey.) The worry with any trade of a superstar is that the return will end up being more quantity than quality, and it’s harder to re-create a star in the aggregate than Moneyball made it look. Smith is Houston’s best shot at getting an impact player out of this trade.

Wesneski, who came to Chicago at the 2022 deadline in the deal that sent Scott Effross to the Yankees, has been a serviceable spot starter and low-leverage reliever across 190 innings in a Cubs uniform. He throws five pitches, among them a four-seamer that sits around 94 mph and a low-80s slider that he’s leaned on more and more as his career’s gone on. One thing to look out for: Wesneski is comically homer-prone, having averaged 1.66 HR/9 in his career, on a HR/FB rate of 16.7%. Which, given Wesneski’s solid-but-unremarkable strikeout numbers, tanked his FIP and kept him within half a win of replacement level each of the past two seasons.

The Astros have had some success developing relief pitchers over the past few years, so maybe they see something in Wesneski. But more likely than not, the success of this trade, from Houston’s perspective, will rest on Smith’s development and Paredes’ ability to golf mistakes into the Crawford Boxes.

I’ve been focusing on the Astros so far, partially because their decision to jettison Tucker set this whole thing in motion, but partially because Tucker’s impact on the Cubs is rather obvious: He’s going to be their best position player from the moment he shows up for spring training. Possibly by quite a large margin.

The Cubs have spent most of the 2020s in a muddy middle between contending and crapitude. They’ve made the occasional big-time move, signing both Cody Bellinger and Dansby Swanson to lucrative contracts, and mining the Japanese import market for Shota Imanaga and Seiya Suzuki. They’ve cultivated some solid homegrown players, but they haven’t had a five-WAR season from a position player since Javier Báez left town.

In fact, I’ll do you one better: Other than Kris Bryant, the last Cubs position player to post a season of 6.0 WAR or better was Alfonso Soriano in 2007. It has, in short, been a minute since they had a position player like Tucker.

As much as I consider the AL West to be there for the taking, the NL Central might be even more so. The Pirates and Reds are out to convince the world their owners are totally broke. The Cardinals have been so directionless over the past two seasons I’ve actually started to believe the Yadier Molina Leadership Mojo myth. And if you want to talk about a team that’s built to win exactly 90 games as cheaply as possible, look no further than the Milwaukee Brewers, who have won three out of the past four division titles. The Brewers seem to have a club policy against employing more than 1 1/2 good hitters at the same time, and the rest of this division is making them look like the 1990s Atlanta Braves.

The NL Central, in other words, has been dying for the Cubs to stop hibernating.

Well, they’re certainly awake now. And even with Tucker’s estimated $15.8 million arbitration award on the books, the Cubs are still under $200 million in estimated payroll for 2025, and more than $30 million under their payroll bill from last season. So they can still keep adding.

And the good news keeps coming. While I was asking Eric for his input on Smith, he went out of his way to communicate his excitement about Matt Shaw, the Cubs’ first-round pick in 2023 out of the University of Maryland. He called Shaw “among the twitchiest, most fun to watch players in the minors” and “a 5-foot-9 stick of dynamite who plays with all-out effort.” Shaw, a middle infielder in College Park, has apparently taken to third base in the pros and shows the potential for plus defense there.

With Paredes out of the picture, Shaw — who started 2024 in Double-A and went on to make 35 appearances for Triple-A Iowa — is now the presumptive Opening Day starter at third base for the Cubs.

Unless they do something wild, like sign Bregman.