Fun while it lasted

Check our the baseball podcast with David Brown - Ep. 463. Bregmania, Jan. 15, 2026

Yesterday's Alex Bregman introductory press conference was pretty much standard fare for the Cubs. Jed got to be smug, the player got to be genuinely excited about getting paid big money to play in a cool city, and they made him wear a jersey over his suit and a baseball cap.

But in many ways it was stranger than most Cubs' press conferences. Not just because Scott Boras made a rambling, tortured analogy about how the Cubs and Bregman fit together like a socket and a plug.

Does Scott think you plug a lamp into the socket? Remind me to never let him do any electrical work on my house.

This reminds me of one of my favorite stories. Right after college I lived with my friend Eric, and one day I was in the living room hanging out with my cousin Ben, and Eric walked in carrying a lamp and headed upstairs to his room. Ben and I looked at each other confused. We've both known Eric our entire lives, and let's just say he's not a big reader. We were genuinely curious why he needed a lamp.

A few minutes later he came down, went to the fridge grabbed a beer and joined us in the living room. We asked him what the lamp was for.

"Light's broken in my room."
"What do you mean, broken?"
"Last night, I hit the switch and it went poof and light didn't light. Hasn't worked since."

Ben and I just stared at each other.

I went and got a light bulb and headed upstairs. Eric wanted to know where I was going.

"I'm going to fix your light."
"Huh?"

He followed me up, and I unscrewed the cover on the ceiling fixture in the middle of the room, unscrewed the somewhat black light bulb. Tossed it in the garbage can. Screwed in a new one. Put the cover back on. Walked to the switch and, magic!

He honestly thought a burned out lightbulb had irreparably broken his light fixture.

Eric now works for Boras Corp, in the maintenance department.

OK, the last part might not be true.

The light socket thing was not the weirdest part of the press conference.

It could have been when Jed told us that Bregman was going to play in the World Baseball Classic (he didn't say for what country), and that he'd be gone for a while "in May." Uh...Jed, have Carter explain to you how a calendar works.

It could also have been when we learned that Bregman has been meeting with Cubs minor league coordinators to find out what the Cubs hitting plan is (my guess is they don't have one) and what his new teammates are working on this winter so he can be of help to them in the spring. That might be a very nice thing. Or it could result in Moises Ballesteros hitting him in the head with a footlong hot dog and telling him to mind his own business.

But for me, the weirdest part of the press conference, was courtesy of a question to Jed by our pal Jon Greenberg.

Jon Greenberg: "There's a difference between being a winning team and a contender, were there points in the year last year where you were like, 'We're an Alex Bregman away from being a real contender,' and is that what you feel this move does to the Cubs for 2026?"

It's a very good question, and I knew when Jon asked it that it was going to piss Jed off, and it did.

Jed: "Actually, I feel like we were a real contender last year."

Well, Jed. You weren't. You started the season a pitcher and a real hitter away from being that and you never added either, and when you pissed away the trade deadline, we all knew that your team was destined to win much of nothing.

"I think when you look at the totality of our season it was really impressive. Of course during the course of a season you're looking at your roster and thinking about what you could add, what you could improve on. But I guess I would probably fight against the idea that we weren't a real contender last year, but obviously the goal going into this year was improvement."

The Cubs had five fun playoff home playoff games, but in the end they won nothing but a round of the playoffs that they should have been able to avoid. If getting beaten in the divisional round was "really impressive" with your roster, then your roster was never one that could be considered a "real contender."

And Jed knows they weren't good enough. I guess he can't really say, "Tom and Crane fucked us last year by not making the money available to have both Bregman and Kyle Tucker on the team at the same time, and so not only were we completely incapable of matching up with the Dodgers, we couldn't even get through the fucking Brewers, who were so overmatched against LA themselves, that if Shohei hadn't hit three homers in a game while shutting them out for seven innings, there would be no reason to ever remember that series ever happened."

But I wish he would say that because it's true.

It was a good thing the Cubs introduced Bregman yesterday morning, because by last night the fantastical idea that they were now an NL pennant contender was crushed in an instant with the news that Kyle Tucker, their best player last year on a team that was not good enough, is now a Dodger.

It's just a stark reminder that even when the Cubs try to pretend they are going for it, that what they are doing isn't actually going for it. What the Dodgers do is.

The Dodgers are a team largely built with stars that other teams were too fucking dumb, or just incapable of, keeping. The Red Sox gave them Mookie Betts, the Barves decided Matt Olson was a better investment than Freddie Freeman, the Angels frittered away seven years with Shohei and Mike Trout so haplessly that Shohei just started driving in a different direction from the same house to his new team. And now they have Tucker, who both the Astros and Cubs decided not to even bother offering a contract to.

Yes, he's getting $60 million a year for four years (not a misprint) to play for the Dodgers, but he's not even the highest paid player in annual salary on this own team! Hell, he makes $10 million less than Shohei. And yes, I'm sure a huge amount of his contract is deferred, like Shohei's is, but he's going to eventually get all that money. I'm sure he can scrape by on the $35 million or so he'll get paid in current salary.

I also think it's funny that the deal has player opt outs after years two and three. Because sure, he's going to opt out of $120 million or so. Sure.

The Cubs team is better than the one they had last year. At least until every injury prone pitcher on their starting staff gets hurt at the same time. Adding Bregman was a very good, very smart move. So was trading for Edward Cabrera.

But it wasn't enough before the Dodgers signed Tucker. And it really isn't enough now.