Cubs Rumors: Team interested in reuniting with a familiar face who's now a top arm

The Chicago Cubs have added some left-handed relief help this winter, bringing in names like Caleb Thielbar and Rob Zastryzny to work in camp alongside Luke Little - the lone lefty bullpen arm returning from last season. But they haven't managed to land a late-inning weapon, so the latest rumor connecting them to Brooke Raley makes a ton of sense.

Raley, who turns 37 in June, is drawing interest from clubs, including the Cubs and New York Yankees, and has even received multi-year interest, which is somewhat of a surprise given his age and the fact he's coming off Tommy John surgery. But teams may be thinking since they won't get a full year's worth of work from him in 2025 (he won't be ready to pitch until mid-season, at best), locking him down for 2026 could help them hedge their bets a bit.

He's a very different pitcher than the one the Cubs selected more than a decade ago in the sixth round of the 2012 MLB Draft. After initial struggles, he headed overseas for the better part of a decade, pitching in Korea from 2015-2019 before returning to pitch for the Houston Astros and Cincinnati Reds in the shortened 2020 campaign.

Since turning in a somewhat rocky 2021 season with the Astros, Raley has re-invented himself into one of the most reliable left-handed relievers in the game. Since the start of the 2022 season, he owns a 2.58 ERA, 3.13 FIP and 1.092 WHIP across 115 1/3 innings of work, split between the Tampa Bay Rays and New York Mets. He made just eight appearances last year before requiring Tommy John in June - ending his season in the process.

He works with a unique pitch mix that includes a sweeper, cutter, change-up and sinker. Looking at his 2023 numbers so we have a larger, more representative sample size, he leaned on that sweeper 36 percent of the time, throwing the sinker and cutter roughly a quarter of the time and then sprinkling in the change as needed.

Raley excels at limiting hard contact - opponents had an xBA of just .162 against him two years ago. The dollars have to make sense given the the whole situation (aging reliever coming off Tommy John in his late-30s), but on cost-effective deal, adding him to the bullpen mix for the second half stretch run could be a huge pickup for the Cubs as they look to secure their first division crown since 2020.