PT TOMORROW: NL Central—Bote's big chance

Chicago Cubs

The Cubs made a pair of surprising roster moves in preparation for the regular season, the first of which was optioning Nico Hoerner (2B/SS, CHC) to the minor leagues. While many immediately pointed to service time manipulation, Sahadev Sharma of The Athletic wrote a piece shortly after the move laying out the club’s reasoning, which mostly relied on the strong play of David Bote (2B/3B, CHC) this spring and the aggressive approach the team took to promoting Hoerner to the majors in 2019 and 2020. Regardless of whether readers buy that reasoning or not, Bote’s grip on the second base job is far from ironclad. He’s struggled to make consistent contact (68% ct%, 27.1% K%) through 711 career plate appearances. Furthermore, for...

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