NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Jed Hoyer, the Cubs’ president of baseball operations, pushed back on a report Tuesday that the team is no longer in the race for star pitcher and slugger 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 the Cubs haven’t been given a “status check” from the Ohtani camp — although that doesn’t mean Ohtani hasn’t narrowed his choices. Similarly, the Cubs haven’t 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. During Dodgers manager Dave Roberts’ scheduled availability Tuesday, he spoke openly to reporters about the Dodgers’ meeting with Ohtani, revealing that they hosted him at Dodger Stadium for two to three hours earlier this week.
“We want to respect Shohei’s wishes [and his agent Nez Balelo’s] wishes as far as being private,” Roberts said. “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 news 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 previous 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 personally had not met with Ohtani. Asked if others in the Cubs’ front office had met with him, Counsell repeated, “I have not.” He declined to comment about whether that indicated anything about the Cubs’ interest level.
“I don’t think this is my spot to talk about individual players,” Counsell said. “It’s a great question but not the spot to talk about it.”
Ohtani is expected to command a record-setting contract. Over the years, Hoyer has been open about his reluctance to offer long deals to free agents, preferring shorter contracts with higher average annual value. Shortstop Dansby Swanson, whose signing defined the previous Cubs offseason, inked a seven-year, $177 million deal. But Hoyer doesn’t have a steadfast rule against long contracts.
“It’s hard to see into the future that well,” he 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, their offseason plan doesn’t completely hinge on landing him.
“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 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.”
Although the free-agent market has been slow-moving to this point, Hoyer said the Cubs “have lines in the water” and have had a lot of conversations. Because the market is top-heavy and “not the deepest,” in his estimation, he predicted there would be numerous trades around MLB this offseason.
