Cubs “In Serious Talks” With Marcus Stroman

5:54 pm: Stroman indicated the sides were in agreement on Twitter.

5:14 pm: The Cubs are “in serious talks” with free agent Marcus Stroman, tweets Jon Heyman of the MLB Network. Matt Spiegel reported this afternoon that the sides were in discussions.

After opting out of the 2020 campaign, Stroman accepted an $18.9MM qualifying offer from the Mets last winter. Betting on himself should pay off handsomely, as he’s coming off a strong 2021 campaign that positions him as the top arm still on the free agent market. Entering the offseason, MLBTR ranked Stroman the #11 free agent overall, projecting him to receive a five-year, $110MM guarantee. With Max Scherzer, Kevin Gausman and Robbie Ray all now off the board, Stroman looks the best bet remaining to provide above-average innings in bulk over the next few seasons.

The 30-year-old doesn’t feature the high-octane, strikeout stuff those other top arms possess. Yet he’s nevertheless been a mid-rotation or better starter for essentially his entire career, thriving on the back of huge ground-ball rates. Stroman has induced grounders on over half the balls in play against him in every season as a big leaguer. His 50.8% mark in 2021 was a personal-low, but even that mark checked in about seven points above the league average for starters. That figure was over 60% for most of his 2014-19 run with the Blue Jays.

Those huge ground-ball tendencies have kept Stroman largely immune to the increasing home run rate around the league. He’s never had a season allowing even one longball per nine innings pitched, an impressive achievement as the typical starter has allowed between 1.2 and 1.5 homers per nine over the past few years.

Stroman also owns strong control of his arsenal, headlined by a worm-burning sinker he uses a bit more than 40% of the time. He’s never had a season with a higher than average walk percentage, including an even 6% mark in 2021 that was a couple points lower than the 7.8% league rate. Beyond his fastball, the right-hander mixed in a slider, split and cutter more than 15% of the time, according to Statcast.

That repertoire has served Stroman well, as he’s reliably produced in recent seasons. He’s pitched to a sub-4.00 ERA in four of his six seasons with 100+ innings pitched, including a personal-best 3.02 mark over 179 frames with the Mets in 2021. Despite an atypically small frame for a starter, Stroman has also proven a consistent workhorse capable of shouldering fairly significant workloads. He’s started 32+ games and exceeded 175 innings in four of the past five full seasons, with his 19 starts and 102 1/3 frames in 2018 the lone exception. Going back to the start of 2016, he ranks fifteenth in innings pitched league-wide.

As an added bonus, Stroman is coming off his best season from a swing-and-miss perspective. He generated whiffs on a career-high 11.6% of his offerings in 2021, just north of the league mark. The New York native is typically below-average from both a strikeout and swinging strike perspective. But he’s proven capable of succeeding without many whiffs, and any uptick in swing-and-miss stuff could take Stroman’s game to the next…