CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – SEPTEMBER 30: Carson Kelly #15 of the Chicago Cubs rounds the bases after hitting a home run during the fifth inning of game one of the National League Wild Card Series between the San Diego Padres and the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field on September 30, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images)
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It’s nice to be a baseball executive with money to spend.
Jed Hoyer, the Cubs’ president, was in that position last December. He had offloaded Cody Bellinger, who used an opt-out clause to walk away from a guaranteed $52.5 million, including $27.5 million in 2025, and said the inevitable goodbye to Kyle Hendricks, who had earned $16 million in the last of his 11 seasons in Chicago.
While their big move was trading for Houston run-producer Kyle Tucker, Hoyer and general manager Carter Hawkins also entrusted $29 million over two seasons. to 34-year-old lefty Matthew Boyd, based largely on his strong postseason with Cleveland last year.
This has proven to be a great move. But there still some flexibility and Hoyer/Hawkins used it to make an acquisition few saw coming. They invested $11.5 million over two guaranteed years to add a relatively unsung veteran, Carson Kelly, to a catching mix that seemed adequately anchored by the homegrown Miguel Amaya.
Turns out this may have been the move that got the Cubs into the National League Division Series. Kelly came out of the gate swinging the hottest bat of his 10-year career, hitting .370 with seven home runs and a 1.415 OPS in his first 16 games, and then Amaya went on the Injured List with a strained oblique in late May.
Amaya wound up the season playing only 28 games — playing well enough to compile 0.8 fWAR — and was left off the Wild Card roster. Meanwhile Kelly started 101 games as the catcher, and overall hit .249 with 17 homers and 50 RBI. He delivered 2.6 fWAR, which ranked sixth among NL catchers with at least 400 plate appearances.
Kelly was terrific in the Cubs’ three-game Wild Card victory over San Diego. His homer in Game 1 — the second of consecutive homers by Seiya Suzuki and Kelly — gave the Cubs a 2-1 lead in a game they would win 3-1. He was 2-for-3 in the clinching 3-1 victory on Thursday. He’s not noted as a great framer of pitches but he played a role in a critical strike-three call against Xander Bogaerts in the ninth inning (although Bogaerts’ body language may have played an even bigger role).
For Kelly, the three games at Wrigley Field marked his first ever in the postseason after playing 667 regular-season games. He was a second-round choice of the Cardinals out of an Oregon high school and spent three seasons in St. Louis as an understudy to Yadier Molina. He was traded to Arizona in 2019 and served as the Diamondbacks’ primary catcher for four seasons before moving on to Detroit and Texas before the Cubs called.
Kelly was not known to be in great demand last winter. He had hit .221 with 18 homers over 245 games the last three season, averaging less than one-half run above replacement.
But Hoyer and Hawkins had quietly put a veteran catcher on their off-season wish list, even as they praised how Amaya had emerged in the second half of last season. Kelly signed with the Cubs on Dec. 13 — the same Friday the 13th they traded for Tucker.
Only the most hard-core seam-heads took the time to break down both of those moves. But Kelly has done almost as much as Tucker to get the Cubs on the road to somewhere in October.
Unlike Tucker, a free agent who will generate lots of interest, he figures to almost certainly stick around to try to build off the postseason run that continues on Saturday, when the Cubs open the NLDS in Milwaukee. But the focus for now is to try to get the most out of this late-arriving opportunity.
His signing makes the list of the most impactful moves of the off-season. The longer they Cubs keep playing, the more you’re going to hear about it.