Cubs begin remaking the bullpen with veteran Phil Maton in what's their biggest offseason challenge

CHICAGO — Bullpen volatility from year to year often presents one of the biggest challenges a major league team faces when constructing a roster.

The Chicago Cubs pulled all the right levers this past season in building a relief corps that was one of the best in baseball in the first half and helped them win their first postseason series since 2017. President of baseball operations Jed Hoyer and the front office is charged with trying to reload a bullpen that returns only Daniel Palencia from its high-leverage arms.

“It’s an opportunity in a lot of ways; in some ways, it is a challenge,” Hoyer said earlier this month. “We need a number of guys. We hit on a lot of guys last year, so we’ll probably look at the same thing. We’ll look at small trades, we’ll look at small deals, we’ll look in major league free agency. But, yeah, we do need to add a number of arms back there.

“But the good news is we have somewhat of a blank canvas back there. We’re not saddled by any underperformers or anything like that. We just need to go out and find good arms and give guys opportunities, and I think our defense, our pitching group does a good job with those guys on that.”

The Cubs took their first step in overhauling the bullpen Tuesday by signing veteran right-hander Phil Maton, 32, to a two-year contract with a 2028 club option.

Although he doesn’t possess elite velocity — his fastball averaged 90.6 mph in 2025 — Maton’s deception within his four-pitch mix helped him strike out 81 batters in 61 1/3 innings for the St. Louis Cardinals and Texas Rangers. Over his last four seasons with five teams, Maton posted a 3.33 ERA, 121 ERA+ and 10.1 strikeouts per nine innings.

Hoyer and the Cubs haven’t been inclined to give out multiyear contracts to relievers. It’s a market they largely have avoided, but the organization is willing to go down that route if it believes in the fit, which came to fruition with Maton.

While they don’t have an appetite for free-agent deals with relievers that go beyond three years and want to avoid tying up potentially bad money in that area of the roster, the Cubs will continue to be active in the relief market this offseason as they essentially build their 2026 bullpen from scratch.

“It’s not my favorite thing to do. I prefer shorter commitments in the bullpen, but I’ll never say never,” Hoyer said. “We offered some last year (and) we didn’t win the bidding. So it’s not a hard and fast rule, but you can guess that we’re probably going to be more focused on shorter commitments.”

The Cubs took a varied approach to putting together the 2025 bullpen, from a minor league deal with a big league camp invitation (Brad Keller) and an in-season minor league trade for a player who hadn’t been in the majors since 2021 (Drew Pomeranz) to signing a 38-year-old reliever coming off his worst season (Caleb Thielbar) and a trade-deadline acquisition (Andrew Kittredge) that gave manager Craig Counsell another reliable late-inning option.

“We are proud of the decisions we made in the last couple of years in the bullpen and the ability to get more out of some guys that people thought we were going to be able to — we made some mistakes there, too, to be sure,” general manager Carter Hawkins said earlier this month. “As we look to this year, the fact that we had some success doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable to take perceived risks on players, but we see it as a really rewarding challenge.

“If we could find guys that fit our price range that had less variance and more sure things, that would make me feel really good. But we’ll continue to look for that while at the same time looking for undervalued players as well. I don’t think we’re ever comfortable, and the day you get emboldened is the day you start making really big mistakes.”

Keller remains an intriguing option to return to the Cubs, but he might have pitched his way out of what the team would feel comfortable paying the 30-year-old right-hander. In his first full season relieving, Keller produced a 2.07 ERA and 187 ERA+ in 69 2/3 innings.

“We told Brad when we were having our exit meetings after our last game that we had an awesome time with him (and) we’d love to repeat that,” Hawkins said. “We’ll see how it all plays out. Hard to say exactly where his market, our markets are going to be, but that’s definitely a guy that we would love to see in the Cubs uniform again.”

Beyond arms for the big league bullpen, the Cubs also will be looking to bolster their internal depth through minor league free agency. Relief options are an internal weakness, which could become problematic in the event of injuries or ineffectiveness at the major league level.

The current 40-man roster features six pitchers who were used in a big league bullpen during the 2025 season — Maton, Palencia, Porter Hodge, Luke Little, Gavin Hollowell and Ethan Roberts — with Colin Rea, Jordan Wicks and Ben Brown having experience starting and relieving and Jack Neely and Riley Martin having spent the entire year at Triple-A Iowa.

The Cubs can be aggressive, taking advantage of their roomy 40-man roster that currently has only 31 players, by making offseason waiver claims to add depth and experience to the bullpen.