The Cubs haven’t yet reached a contract agreement with Kris Bryant

The deadline to sign players before arbitration figures were exchanged was noon Friday.

Justin Wilson, Kyle Hendricks and Tommy La Stella, three arb-eligible Cubs, signed deals before that deadline.

That leaves three Cubs who haven’t:

Leading the list of unsigned players is Kris Bryant, who could receive a raise of $8 million and push toward the record of $10 million by Ryan Howard for a first-year arbitration-eligible player.

Other unsigned arbitration-eligible players are Addison Russell and Justin Grimm, who didn’t agree to a deal before the noon deadline.

There’s been no word at all about Bryant and Russell; the Grimm non-signing was noted by several writers on Twitter.

In my previous estimates of 2018 salaries for those three players, I had Bryant at $9 million, Russell at $2.5 million and Grimm also at $2.5 million. Bryant and Russell are both clients of Scott Boras, so their non-signing isn’t probably a surprise to you.

As noted in the quote above, the record for a first-year arbitration signing was set by Ryan Howard of the Phillies, who received that $10 million in an arb hearing in 2008. It’s possible that Boras might ask for more than that for Bryant.

Arb hearing dates will be set over the next few days for players still unsigned. They can, of course, still sign deals up to the day of the hearing. The Cubs have not had a player go to a hearing under the Theo Epstein regime; the last one was Ryan Theriot in 2010 (and prior to that, no Cub had gone to a hearing since Mark Grace in 1993). Pedro Strop in 2015 and Jake Arrieta in 2016 both had hearings scheduled, but both settled before the actual hearing time.

As always, we await developments.