The Cubs have a handful of spots that look spoken for, but the designated hitter job is still very much open for business.
Pete Crow-Armstrong has center field locked down, and Michael Busch, Alex Bregman, Nico Hoerner, and Dansby Swanson give Chicago a firm core around the diamond. But in the outfield and at DH, the picture is murkier. Ian Happ and Seiya Suzuki are free agents, Michael Conforto is a free agent too, and if someone steps forward, there’s a path to one of those starting roles.
That’s why BJ Murray is worth watching this month. Levi Weaver of The Athletic pointed to the 26-year-old rookie September call-up as a player who could fight his way into a long-term job, and the opportunity is real for the Bahamas native.
“DH? Now we might be talking. Going into Monday's action, the team leader in games played at DH was Moises Ballesteros (43 games), who the Cubs have since traded to the Angels for reliever Ryan Zeferjahn,” Weaver writes.
With Ballesteros gone and Conforto set to hit the market after the season, Murray has a lane to make a case for himself as Chicago’s future DH through the end of the 2026 season.
His minor league track record gives the Cubs something to work with. Across 581 games in the minors, Murray posted a .257 batting average with 73 home runs and an .803 OPS. It’s not eye-popping production, but it’s enough to keep him in the conversation as a possible answer at DH.
The big-league start, though, has been rough. Murray is already on the Cubs’ roster, but in nine at-bats he has one hit, two strikeouts, no walks, and no extra-base hits.
The sample is tiny, so the numbers won’t define him. Still, he’s already sitting at -0.2 bWAR for the season, and if that pace somehow held over a full 162 games, it would come out to -7.3 bWAR. That’s an ugly figure, even if it’s only a snapshot.
The point is simple: Murray has a chance to show something in September, but he’ll need a much better run to put himself in position for a long-term starting job in Chicago.
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