Last week, the Chicago Cubs traded low-level minor leaguer Nico Zeglin to the Houston Astros, in exchange for $250,000 in spending allotments for the 2025 international free agent period. Zeglin, 25, is essentially a non-prospect, and ostensibly, the right to spend an extra $250,000 on (mostly) teenagers from Latin America is low in value, too. There’s little time left to spend that money; the signing period ends on December 15.

After a one-month pause, the 2026 IFA period will open on January 15, but that will be a different budget. The Cubs can’t roll over any savings. Ostensibly, then, they have some plan to shell out a small amount of money (in baseball terms) to a couple of late-blooming players who are already eligible, before the window closes for 2025. 

As a revenue-sharing payor, the Cubs cycle only from the bottom tier to the middle of the pack from year to year, in terms of the amount they’re allowed to spend in the international free-agent space. For 2026, they’ll enjoy a relatively robust budget of $6.68 million, but that’s about $1 million less than (for instance) the Brewers have. Interestingly, too, despite having that flexibility, the Cubs haven’t been tied to any of the top 30 projected bonus earners for the upcoming class, via Baseball America or MLB Pipeline. (Those lists overlap, but not perfectly, so in effect, the Cubs appear to be frozen out on the top 35 bonus babies of the coming year.)

Taken together, that small trade with Houston and the fact that the Cubs appear poised to spread their bonus money pretty widely next year point in a particular direction: the team might be looking to diversify more and chase high-end talent less in Latin America. That would be good news, because it sure seems like that’s the best way to efficiently extract value from the endeavor of signing young players from those nations. 

Strict limits on the number of players a team can have on their roster and inside the United States make it harder than it was a decade ago to stockpile talent and get quality from quantity in the minor leagues. One remaining way to do that, though, is by signing a glut of youngsters from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and other countries in the Caribbean basin, who can be retained much more easily until they’re ready for Stateside assignments. Furthermore, splashing money on the highest-paid players each year comes with more concentrated risk; a case of age or performance-enhancing drug fraud can bait a team into a bad spend. Teams commit to these players so young that a player’s stock is sometimes on the wane by the time they actually, officially sign, even if they’ve been tied irrevocably to a team for 18 months by then.

The Cubs would not be the first team to move away from focusing on those players who appear to merit seven-figure bonuses and toward accumulating talent at low individual costs. It’s a case of “fast follow” on a trend gaining momentum throughout the league. They appear to have a player or two in mind for a last-second pickup before the end of this international signing window. When the next one opens, they’ll continue to rebuild what has been an underperforming international amateur scouting and development operation—not one player at a time, perhaps, but in bunches and bundles.