Cubs looking forward to quiet winter

The shortest off-season in the history of the Chicago Cubs figures to be one of the quietest, at least when it comes to spending money on high-priced free agents.

We're now just more than a month removed from the Cubs winning the World Series, and lo and behold, it's time for the winter meetings.

Baseball's annual confab officially gets under way Monday outside of Washington. With Major League Baseball and its players having just struck a new collective bargaining agreement, certainty rules their vast and rich land.

No matter their successes or failures, the current Cubs have never been ones to stand still. This week, they signed veteran center fielder Jon Jay to a free-agent contract, with the anticipation that Dexter Fowler will take the free-agent route out of town. They also inked left-handed reliever Brian Duensing to a modest deal.

Veteran catcher and eternal Cubs folk hero David Ross has retired, and the team allowed pitcher Jason Hammel to go his own way. Others, such as dependable reliever Travis Wood, soon may depart via free agency.

Cubs general manager Jed Hoyer reminded the media this past week that the Cubs did two years of Christmas wish-list shopping last year, with the acquisitions of Jason Heyward, Ben Zobrist and John Lackey. Fowler returned to the Cubs in February after nothing materialized on the free-agent market.

So don't look for splashy free-agent signings. Trades are always a possibility.

"We really liked the talent available to us last off-season," Hoyer said. "It was a very good free-agent market. We felt like building upon a 97-win team that got to the NLCS but was swept, we wanted to improve some of the deficiencies on that club and really push things forward. So we were really aggressive with what we did last off-season.

"We told everyone at the time we felt we were kind of shopping for two off-seasons. With that in mind, I don't expect nearly the activity we had a year ago. I feel like right now we can go play from an offensive standpoint and feel very good about our group."

The Cubs picked up closer Aroldis Chapman in late July to shore up the back of their bullpen. Chapman is expected to move on as a free agent, so Hoyer and team president Theo Epstein will have to decide whether Hector Rondon can go back to being the closer or if the Cubs look for another established ninth-inning man. Rondon didn't look the same after battling a late-season triceps injury.

The addition of Jay gives the Cubs a crowded outfield picture, as he joins Heyward, Kyle Schwarber, Albert Almora Jr., Jorge Soler and Matt Szczur. So there's depth from which to deal, if the Cubs want to make a trade.

"We're going to still continue to look to improve the depth in our bullpen and improve the depth in our starting rotation," Hoyer said. "Those are things that probably never go away. You probably never stop trying to build that depth. Yeah, I think the bulk of our heavy lifting was done 12 months ago. It will be a quieter winter than last off-season.

"We're always listening. If good ideas come to us or we come up with an idea, we'll share them with other teams. But fans shouldn't expect a flurry of things because they got that 12 months ago."

The most under-the-radar, but important, move the Cubs made during the season was trading for left-handed pitcher Mike Montgomery. In a July 20 deal with the Seattle Mariners, the Cubs picked up a pitcher they control through 2021.

Montgomery proved to be a valuable swing man for the Cubs, and he picked up the save in Game 7 of the World Series at Cleveland. He could slide into the starting rotation in 2017.

Young, controllable pitchers will be attractive to the Cubs as they try to build an inventory of young arms.

"You try to identify those kinds of starting pitchers, those kind of relief pitchers and how to match up with them, Hoyer said. "It's definitely not going to be through lack of trying on our part to make that kind of deal. As we've talked about so many times, we do have an imbalance in our organization, hitting versus pitching. We're trying to accumulate as much pitching depth as possible.

"We were very healthy this year, which was wonderful and a big part of why we won the World Series. I don't think you can always count on that kind of health every single year. Building up a reservoir of preferably guys you can option, it's not going to be through lack of trying. We're going to keep on working to accomplish that."