Chicago Cubs chances of bring back Jake Arrieta dwindling

Chicago Cubs: Other starters impacting the market in big ways

In the last week alone, Masahiro Tanaka, Johnny Cueto and Wei-Yin Chen all opted into the remaining years on their current contracts. These decisions took three potential free agent arms off the open market – thus driving up the demand for those left. This rings especially true for high-level arms like Yu Darvish and Jake Arrieta

Per usual, Evan Altman over at Cubs Insider put together a really nice piece on this whole concept over the weekend. He summed up these recent moves, offering up these thoughts: (the entire pieces is worth your time)

"What this means is that Jake Arrieta is going to look that much more desirable to the teams in need of starting pitching. He was already in line for more than what seems like a laughably low prediction of $100 million over four seasons, but the utter lack of top-flight starters outside of Arrieta and Yu Darvish means that we’ll likely see even that much more separation at the top of the market."

A notable talent gap

In short, the free agent market for starting pitching looks like this: Arrieta and Darvish, a big gap, and then everyone else testing the waters of free agency.

MLBTR predicted four years and $100 million for Arrieta, which, to pretty much everyone who knows what the right-hander brings to the table, is laughable. Now that three other quality starting pitchers (I use that term lightly with Chen), his price is sure to blow past that mark with whomever he signs.