The Cubs may be staring at as many as 18 free agents heading into the 2027 season, and not every name on that list deserves another run in Chicago. A few of these decisions are going to be pretty straightforward, and the club should have no trouble walking away from the following group.
Caleb Thielbar is the kind of pitcher who reminds you how quickly relief value can swing. He was outstanding for the Cubs in 2025, including five scoreless postseason appearances, and that earned him a one-year, $4 million deal last offseason.
But 2026 was a rougher story. Thielbar dealt with a hamstring strain that may have affected him all year, and his production dropped hard enough that he finished with a 4.86 ERA and 1.30 WHIP after posting a 2.64 ERA and 0.88 WHIP the year before.
The strikeouts were still there - his strikeout rate sat at 28.3% - but almost everything else moved in the wrong direction. The walks climbed, contact got louder, and the ball left the yard more often.
Thielbar allowed 11 home runs in 50 innings, up from five homers in 58 innings last season. He was also left off the Cubs’ postseason roster for the Wild Card Series against the San Diego Padres, and with a $6 million mutual option and a $500,000 buyout on the table, Chicago won’t hesitate to take the buyout and move on.
Hunter Harvey is an even cleaner cut. The Cubs took a swing on his upside and paid for it.
Harvey had the kind of arsenal that could have worked in a big way out of the bullpen, but the injury risk was baked in from the start, and it won out almost immediately. He threw just four innings for the Cubs in 2026 before landing on the injured list in early April with right triceps inflammation.
That was basically the end of it. Harvey never returned after being placed on the 60-day injured list in May, and he never even got close to a rehab assignment.
The Cubs gave him $5 million in 2026 because the talent was tempting - a career 3.19 ERA, a high-90s fastball, and a 26.7% strikeout rate will do that - even though he had logged only 10.2 innings in 2025. Add in the $1 million buyout, and the club is looking at a $6 million total cost for a move that clearly didn’t work.
The only path back that makes any sense is a minor league deal.
Trent Thornton is the tricky one because the stat line looks respectable at first glance. A 3.35 ERA in 48.1 innings sounds useful enough, especially from a reliever.
But the Cubs were getting more smoke and mirrors than real reliability. Thornton returned to big-league action in early May after not pitching in the majors since July 31, 2025, when he tore his left Achilles, and his strikeout rate was only 15.8%.
That’s not the profile of a bullpen arm you can trust, and the underlying numbers matched the eye test. He didn’t look sharp, even when the results came in his favor, and this wasn’t a case like Javier Assad where a pitcher can at least give you 5-6 innings and work out of trouble. Thornton was living on borrowed time all season, and with the Cubs needing a much better bullpen, he’s the kind of arm they should be comfortable letting walk.
Tyler Austin never really got a chance to matter. The Cubs brought him in from Japan on a $1.25 million deal, hoping the 35-year-old could back up first base, share some platoon work with Michael Busch, and maybe chip in occasionally in left field.
Instead, he never even reached spring training games. A month after signing, Austin had surgery in February and never resurfaced.
The team described the procedure as a debridement on the patellar tendon in his right knee and said he would be out for months, but it never gave a firm timetable. In the end, Austin was just a footnote in the Cubs’ season, and there’s no real reason to think Chicago would put more resources into an aging first baseman with a knee issue.
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