DALLAS – Cubs right fielder Seiya Suzuki “would consider” a trade, depending on the landing spot, his agent Joel Wolfe told reporters at the winter meetings in Dallas Tuesday.
Suzuki has a full no-trade clause, but if a trade came together, he could choose to waive it. Wolfe said he and president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer had a conversation on the topic on Monday night.
“He told me what teams they’ve been talking to,” Wolfe said. “I don’t think he wants to trade Seiya, but there may be a scenario where he feels like he has a deal that he can’t say no to. So he’s talked to us about what teams Seiya would consider. And it’s a small universe of where Seiya would consider going. Seiya is a very strongly opinionated guy. So I could see where that might happen, but it didn’t sound like it was necessarily likely.”
At this stage in the offseason, the Cubs have been involved in wide-ranging exploratory trade talks. And after missing the playoffs with an 83-79 record in back-to-back-years, it doesn’t make sense for them to limit their options by labeling players as off-limits. If they are going to shake up their offense, a trade is the most likely avenue to do so.
“I do believe in our offense,” president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said Monday. “We have a good offense, and it has some upside to it. We have a lot of young players underneath those guys. But if there’s areas that we can clearly upgrade, I think we would look to do that. But one of the challenges is, we have a lot of good players, so in order to upgrade over those players, you have to clear that bar by a fair amount on certain guys in order to make the move justified.”
This story will be updated.