Cubs Not Close to Zac Gallen Deal
The Cubs signed Zac Gallen, or did they? It’s been a wild day already, with Bob Nightengale of USA Today reporting that the Cubs had reached a contract agreement with free-agent starting pitcher Zac Gallen. Cubs Insider quickly learned that the deal was not happening, which Nightengale later clarified in an updated post.
UPDATE: The Chicago Cubs are HOPEFUL of finalizing an agreement with free-agent starter Zac Gallen on a multi-year deal, but the deal is NOT DONE with others still in contention. Gallen, with three top-10 Cy Young finishes, has averaged 32 starts a year for the past 4 seasons.
— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 6, 2025
While the Cubs are interested in Gallen’s services, as Mark Feinsand mentioned on Friday, no deal is close between the two parties. Gallen is coming off of the worst year of his career, with a 4.83 ERA and 1.26 WHIP in 192 innings.
The real question is why Nightengale reported that the deal was happening. Evan had two fun ideas, both of which I wanted to briefly discuss.
Conspiracy theory time: Zac Gallen and Tatsuya Imai are both Scott Boras clients, so the Cubs could be doing Boras a solid by getting other teams to up their offers to Gallen.
— Evan Altman (@DEvanAltman) December 6, 2025
Or, and this would be chef's kiss perfect given the source, what if the initial report was actually the Cubs' offer to King? https://t.co/GZZOtW4kCh
— Evan Altman (@DEvanAltman) December 6, 2025
The offseason is all about leverage, something that could easily be involved in this debacle. Scott Boras has a lot of clients this winter, so getting on the agent’s good side wouldn’t be a bad idea. However, the Cubs and Boras already work together often, so it doesn’t feel like they need much help with their relationship. If Nightengale got the wrong player and the Cubs offered that contract to someone else, Michael King would make sense from a value standpoint. He’ll probably end up getting more than $22 million a year, but it seems plausible that the Cubs started their bidding at the qualifying-offer value.
The Cubs remain focused on Tatsuya Imai and Michael King, but keeping Gallen as a secondary option seems like a fair assessment. Gallen signing before the other top arms seems odd unless there’s a team out there that truly believes it can fix him over the offseason.
