“Starting route to Courtyard Charleston,” the computerized voice intoned as Mark Weisman drove a diesel Ford Super Duty F-250 rental truck out of Myrtle Beach on the morning of Aug. 30 for a road trip south on Route 17 through South Carolina. Weisman, the strength and conditioning coach for the Cubs’ Low-A affiliate, is viewed as a kind of “Captain America” figure within the organization. Weisman grew up in the Chicago suburbs, briefly attended the Air Force Academy and walked on as a bruising fullback at the University of Iowa, where he ran for more than 2,600 yards and 32 rushing touchdowns, which was good enough to go to training camp with the Cincinnati Bengals in 2015, but not enough to stick in the NFL.
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The NFL unofficially stands for “Not For Long,” but the same slogan could be applied to Major League Baseball, where 30 franchises constantly churn through players to find value at the margins, hunting for the slightest of fleeting competitive advantages. The Cubs believe they have one hitched to the back of that pickup truck for the roughly 100-mile ride from Myrtle Beach to Charleston. Once this BeaverFit “gym on wheels” is stationed outside the Pelicans’ team hotel, the garage-style doors can be unfolded and set up as weightlifting racks and pull-up bars. The container includes barbells, benches, kettlebells, bands and bumper plates, essentials for training athletes to get bigger, stronger and faster before they reach Wrigley Field.
The Cubs are using equipment rooted in designs for an environment far different than the Carolina League. BeaverFit is a defense contractor and the largest supplier of fitness equipment to the U.S Armed Forces, according to the company’s website. At various points this season, Myrtle Beach’s roster featured: Kevin Alcántara and Pete Crow-Armstrong, two prospects who were traded for Anthony Rizzo and Javier Báez, respectively, last year; Kevin Made, a slick-fielding shortstop out of the Dominican Republic; James Triantos, a second-round pick in the 2021 draft who graduated from high school in three years; and Moises Ballesteros, a stocky 18-year-old catcher from Venezuela with a sweet left-handed swing.
Pete Crow-Armstrong (AP Photo / Matt York)The Cubs partnered with BeaverFit as a way to upgrade the facilities at Pelicans Ballpark and give their players more structure and flexibility on the road. Instead of trying to find gyms in different cities or disrupting schedules to work out at an opponent’s stadium, players can develop their own routines and stay on the individualized programs the Cubs create for each prospect. Steven Pollakov, the Pelicans hitting coach and a Cubs hitting coordinator, is Weisman’s childhood friend from suburban Chicago and the co-pilot in the rental car for those road trips back and forth from Myrtle Beach, hauling a trailer that sits 6 feet by 20 feet and weighs approximately 7,500 pounds when fully loaded with equipment. They definitely get looks and questions about the trailer at the Marriott Courtyards, Comfort Suites and Holiday Inns of the Carolina League.
“It gives us a huge advantage for player development — if we use it,” Weisman said. “We have the guys that want to put the work in. We could have this great trailer, but if no guys are coming down to it, it’s useless. We have the guys coming down and doing the work. We have buy-in, from the top down.”
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Ten years ago, Theo Epstein earnestly outlined his idealized vision of a “Cubs Way” during his press conference to open spring training ahead of the 2012 season. He described unified systems of teaching from Wrigley Field through the Dominican Summer League, granular details all the way down to which foot a player should hit the bag with when he’s making the turn. Those instructional manuals now sound quaint compared to the Myrtle Beach hitter who walks out of the hotel for a morning workout at a military-inspired mobile facility. The intensity of those workout sessions is turned up or down based on the load-management data collected from the performance vest and GPS unit the player wears during games.
Advanced motion capture technology tracks the hitter’s swing in practice and games. Even at a lower level like Myrtle Beach, the Cubs are presenting a hitter like Alcántara with the type of information he would see in a major-league clubhouse, detailed breakdowns of where sliders are being thrown and in which counts he’s typically seeing that pitch. Between Wrigley Field, Triple-A Iowa and their Arizona complex, the Cubs have three of the extremely limited number of Trajekt Arc pitching robots in circulation, giving their hitters the chance to practice against a machine that projects an image of Madison Bumgarner — or any major-league pitcher with an available data profile — and fires baseballs with the exact same characteristics as Bumgarner’s pitches from an identical arm angle.
If the Ricketts family hired Epstein tomorrow, he wouldn’t use the same blueprints because the game has changed so much over the last decade. Epstein fully recognized the need to adapt and evolve, initiating a series of sweeping changes around the end of the 2019 season, which included shake-ups at the top of the scouting and player development groups, the creation of new positions like directors of hitting and pitching, and a breakup with star manager Joe Maddon. Now an influential consultant for MLB, Epstein has a secure legacy as a future Hall of Fame executive, the architect of the legendary teams in Boston and Chicago that ended championship droughts that lasted 194 years combined.
Yet even more than that singular, coveted World Series title, the Cubs once promised to build a perennial contender that would avoid the boom-and-bust periods the franchise is going through now. As part of his exit agreement with the Cubs after the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, Epstein helped execute the succession plan that elevated longtime general manager Jed Hoyer to president of baseball operations. Faced with COVID-19-related budget cuts, a sagging farm system and a cluster of popular players nearing free agency, Hoyer non-tendered Kyle Schwarber and traded Yu Darvish, Craig Kimbrel, Kris Bryant, Rizzo and Báez within his first 253 days on the job. Hoyer also remodeled the front office and reset the organization’s priorities.
Those changes have been jarring. The purging of players from the 2016 World Series team is nearly complete. A front office obsessed with data has seen frequent turnover at multiple levels of baseball operations. Pitching breakthroughs may also be accelerating the competitive timeline. To better understand what Hoyer refused to publicly label as a “rebuild” — and size up the rapidly shifting landscape across the baseball industry — The Athletic spoke with dozens of sources inside and outside the Cubs organization. This explainer is based on a series of interviews, some of which were granted on the condition of anonymity, so the individuals could more freely discuss the club’s strengths and weaknesses. Those conversations revealed or reaffirmed some of the friction between the business and baseball sides of the franchise, the long-simmering tension between analytics and the game’s human elements, and the positive signs that could be pointing toward playoff baseball at Wrigley Field as soon as next year.
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“We have to follow through on how you build a consistent winner,” Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts said. “The way you build a consistent winner is to find a good young core and supplement them with the right guys at the right time. I have confidence that Jed knows what he’s doing.”
When Epstein and Hoyer took over a 91-loss team after the 2011 season, they used “parallel tracks” as the metaphor for supporting the major-league club while building a scouting-and-player-development machine. But sometimes, that looked more like a vicious circle as the Cubs constructed a World Series team and then failed to seize the dynasty that once appeared to be within reach.
Baseball operations hoped for more financial flexibility after the 2016 World Series bonanza. Ownership pointed out that the team with the National League’s highest payroll failed to make the playoffs in 2019. Executives prodded Maddon to change his laissez-faire methods and create a greater sense of urgency in the clubhouse. Maddon humored his bosses and read “Managing Millennials for Dummies,” but he wondered what the problem was after three straight trips to the NL Championship Series and a 95-win season in 2018.
Business operations pushed for shiny new things like Marquee Sports Network and the DraftKings sportsbook at Wrigley Field just as the pipeline of talent was beginning to dry up and the team’s most marketable players were nearing free agency. There was a chicken-or-the-egg debate between amateur scouting and player development: Were the Cubs drafting the right players and not training them properly? Or were those instructors not being given enough talent to work with? Players noticed the growing real-estate empire in Wrigleyville and ownership’s pursuit of Chelsea, the Premier League soccer club, questioning why there had to be a budget crunch in baseball operations and another multiyear rebuild. The decision to lay off 100-plus employees in business and baseball operations in 2020 deeply hurt the organization’s morale.
With the Cubs releasing Jason Heyward from the final year of his $184 million contract, and Willson Contreras most likely declining a qualifying offer from the team and becoming a free agent, Kyle Hendricks will be the only active player remaining from the 2016 World Series roster, assuming he fully recovers from the tear in his right shoulder capsule and pitches again next season.
“Winning is a debt,” Heyward said. “It’s not pretty. You have to give up a lot of things, on and off the field, (as) an individual and as a group. We were able to pull off a lot of special things together. We did a lot of winning. I think now what we’re seeing coming to the end of that is some of the debts you have to give back.”
Jason Heyward (Kamil Krzaczynski / USA Today)A series of win-now trades — combined with prospects ascending to Wrigley Field — emptied what had been Baseball America’s No. 1 farm system heading into the 2015 season. Around the same time, insiders believe the Cubs took a “heavy-handed” approach to incorporating R&D into their draft evaluations, struggling to find the right alignment between different elements of the front office and the scouts on the road, particularly when it came to identifying pitchers’ potential. Amid the World Series hangover, an industry source said, the Cubs “created a monster” and “neutered” the coaching staff, stunting the development of their young players.
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“When it’s all going good and you’re winning and you’re in the heart of it, you think those times will never end,” Hendricks said. “We’ve just reached a new chapter.”
Chicago’s charter NL franchise finished its 147th National League campaign with Wednesday’s 15-2 win in Cincinnati, leaving them with a 74-88 record, some momentum to carry into the offseason and more questions about how to proceed. Even amid injuries to key players and subtractions at the trade deadline, the Cubs went 39-31 after the All-Star break. Marcus Stroman and Seiya Suzuki — two players in whom the Cubs invested roughly $170 million — performed as expected in Year 1 of their contracts. Ian Happ earned his first All-Star selection while Nico Hoerner and Justin Steele established themselves as building blocks for the future. Keegan Thompson, Hayden Wesneski, Javier Assad and Brandon Hughes made strides within a pitching infrastructure that contributed to the team’s 3.27 ERA in the second half of the season. The Cubs, however, are still evaluating whether David Ross’ entire coaching staff will return next year.
The Cubs must also show that their new initiatives in scouting and player development — some of which are experimental and based more on theoretical concepts than well-established practices — will have lasting effects. Just as Epstein’s warning of a “year of reckoning” reverberated throughout the organization in 2019 — when the talent gaps at High A (55-81) and Double A (58-81) became glaring — the farm system’s overall performance this season signaled changes. If not proof of concept, there were encouraging signs when Myrtle Beach qualified for the Carolina League playoffs, High-A South Bend won a Midwest League title and Double-A Tennessee advanced to the final game in the Southern League championship series.
“Winning — you just don’t turn that switch on at a certain point,” Hoerner said. “It will be different people, but I do think there’s a blueprint of things to remember from groups that have been here before.”
By the end of this winter, the headcount in baseball operations is expected to return to the pre-pandemic-layoffs level, according to a source with knowledge of the team’s staffing outlook. The Cubs are also working on a facilities plan to upgrade both their academy in the Dominican Republic, which opened in 2013, as well as their Arizona complex, which opened in 2014. Those plans envision new pitching and hitting labs at the Dominican academy, investments to mirror the team’s setup in Mesa and streamline approaches in player development. The Cubs recently promoted Dustin Kelly to field coordinator while elevating Pollakov and Rachel Folden to co-hitting coordinators, recognition for their work with a rising group of young hitters.
The Cubs are expanding their innovative offseason-long program for prospects at the Mesa complex, inviting roughly 60 players and covering the costs of housing, transportation and meals. That line item is projected to be north of $1 million, according to a source familiar with the budgeting process. That is, of course, relative pennies for a multibillion-dollar franchise, but also reflective of the ownership group’s willingness to grant latitude to baseball operations and approve expenditures that are outside industry norms.
The Cubs are unbundling the “director of high performance” position once held by Adam Beard, who was hired away from the Cleveland Browns ahead of the 2019 season to oversee training, conditioning, mental skills, nutrition and sports science. After adding a head of strength, conditioning and nutrition with a more traditional baseball background, the expectation is that the Cubs will continue to hire more strength coaches with baseball-specific expertise. A restructure of their medical department this offseason is expected along with a reevaluation of how to handle mental skills, a complicated area for any organization.
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Progress has also been noticeable with the team’s internal database. One team source said the evolution “would be similar to a rotary phone and the latest iPhone model.” The database, nicknamed Ivy, had been created from scratch during the last rebuild. The team initially partnered with Bloomberg to build it. But when that relationship sputtered, it took several years to find the right fit and there were struggles to get buy-in from some within the organization. Now, Ivy is seen as strong as any database in baseball.
The Cubs’ research and development department also saw similar growth. The group is now overseen by assistant GM Ehsan Bokhari, who spent three years in various similar roles with the Astros after three years as an analyst with the Dodgers. Chris Jones, who has been with the team since 2014 and was elevated to director of R&D prior to this season, runs the day-to-day operations. The department has grown to 24 employees.
Hoyer knew the definition of a rebuild when he saw it in 2012, 2013 and 2014, the teardown years that produced 286 losses and gave him perspective while watching games this season from the suite level at Wrigley Field.
“Going through that with Theo, it was really challenging,” Hoyer said. “Sometimes, when you get past that, you have a lot of revisionist history about what it actually felt like when you were doing it. You can’t pretend that those first three years weren’t really difficult emotionally. Sometimes when something ends up being a real positive, you kind of sugarcoat what the experience was like.”
By the end of the 2018 season, it was clear to Epstein that changes needed to be made to improve the organization’s pitching development. Two years earlier, the Cubs had shifted their philosophy in the draft, allowing their scouts to be less rigid with how they evaluated pitchers and their deliveries and seek out more “stuff.” But some wondered whether the statistical models carried too much influence at times, and the consensus was the overall talent level was far from where it needed to be.
An internal study done after the 2018 season showed that the Cubs were among the bottom three organizations in baseball in velocity development in their farm system. Their pitching prospects were either plateauing velocity-wise, or in some cases regressing. While progressive organizations like Cleveland and Tampa Bay were consistently seeing gains in that department, the Cubs were stuck in the mud.
Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer in 2011 (AP Photo / Charles Rex Arbogast)Epstein once looked suspiciously at the methods espoused by Kyle Boddy and Driveline Baseball, but by this point Epstein’s stance was softening. Those ideas may have involved some injury risks — that is also the nature of pitching — but Boddy had a reputation as a disruptor whose philosophy was proliferating across the most thriving organizations in the game. Instead of making overnight changes, in January 2019 Epstein brought in Craig Breslow, who spent the year auditing the organization’s pitching development methods. By October, the overhaul became official as Breslow was named director of pitching and new hires began in earnest.
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There was plenty of pushback with the introduction of new methods to train their pitchers. Some believed that it would lead to far too many injuries, or that there was too much focus on velocity development and not enough on command. But Breslow sees pitching development as anchored by three pillars: velocity, pitch shape/movement and command. They start with velocity, and then move on to the other areas.
“Changing the infrastructure takes time. Period,” said Ross, who played with Breslow on Boston’s 2013 World Series team. “A lot of injuries came within some change, so (it was) getting guys back healthy and knowing how to train the right way. I think in change you find a lot of, ‘Oh, I like this. We’re doing this well.’ And there’s some things like, ‘Hey, you may have missed the boat on this. Let’s change how we’re doing certain things.’ I think that’s all growth. There’s going to be some good, some bad. You try to hold onto the good and get rid of the bad and find another way to do some other things.”
Despite concerns that too broad a style was being implemented, team sources maintain that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, each pitcher is presented with a specific, individualized plan and given detailed reasons for potential changes.
“There are a few realities that have come to pass over the last few years,” Breslow said. “One is that players are going to get information. If they don’t get it from us, they’re going to get it from elsewhere. It’s probably most disarming, most productive, if we can be the source of that information, so we’ve absolutely invested in trying to expose our coaches and our players to as much information as we possibly can.
“Putting my player hat back on, I thought about how players tend to be the most willing to take risks. Yet we offer them the fewest opportunities to take those risks, right? So I think we focused on providing recommendations, providing suggestions that are empirically based and data driven, giving players the opportunity to embrace them or not. Either way, we’re here to support them.”
For years, the major-league team and the minor-league affiliates essentially ran separate pitching systems, one club official said, but that gap has now almost disappeared as the two sides merged under the direction of Breslow, pitching coach Tommy Hottovy, bullpen coach Chris Young, assistant pitching coach Daniel Moskos and major-league pitching strategist Danny Hultzen.
After some injury setbacks in 2021 raised questions, 2022 is being viewed as a legitimate step forward. As a whole, the pitchers in the farm system finished top 10 in baseball in both ERA and strikeout rate. They were fifth in whiff rate, top three in both average fastball velocity and “stuff” grade, and nine pitching prospects made their big-league debut this season.
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“Intentionally, the last president was focused on position players, and pitching was less of a focus, if you could say that about Theo Epstein. I don’t know if there’s anything less of a focus (with him),” Ross said. “But I think he was deliberate about, ‘I’ll buy pitching and develop hitting.’ I think now ‘Bres’ has come in and researched what plays at the major-league level, and what successful organizations are doing around the league. You implement your version of that, and draft accordingly and develop accordingly. So you’re going to get more power stuff. You’re going to get more guys that probably have stuff over command, in some instances, and then hopefully they pick up command as they continue to develop. We’re getting more of those guys in the system. You just have to trust that they’ll continue to develop.”
While Epstein became the avatar for the Ivy League executives who overtook the baseball industry, what helped separate him as a leader was his ability to view all sides of each issue and communicate clearly — sometimes forcefully — with a sense of empathy. Once known as the youngest general manager in baseball history — some players on the 2004 Red Sox were older than him — Epstein turned into more of a godfather figure in Chicago, where he felt a deep connection to certain handpicked players. Epstein and Hoyer both attended Rizzo’s wedding in South Florida after the 2018 season, a sign of their exceptionally close relationships and the family atmosphere that the Cubs cultivated over the years.
When Epstein spoke at Yale College Class Day in 2017, he reflected on Game 7 of the 2016 World Series and how players like Heyward, Ross, Schwarber and Rizzo came together during that rain delay in Cleveland.
“Early in my career, I used to think of players as assets, statistics on a spreadsheet I could use to project future performance and measure precisely how much they were going to impact our team on the field,” Epstein said. “I used to think of teams as portfolios, diversified collections of player assets, paid to produce up to their projections to ensure the organization’s success.
“My head had been down. That narrow approach worked for a while, but it certainly had its limits. I grew, and my team-building philosophy grew as well. The truth, as our team proved in Cleveland, is that a player’s character matters. The heartbeat matters. Fears and aspirations matter. The player’s impact on others matters. The tone he sets matters. The willingness to connect matters. Breaking down cliques and overcoming stereotypes in the clubhouse matters. Who you are, how you live among others, that all matters.”
The Cubs talked about culture so much during the run-up to that World Series — and the aftermath of that monumental victory — that the lack of organizational messaging during this rebuild is striking. It intensified the shock from the sell-off at last year’s trade deadline. It illuminates why Contreras — in his 14th year in the organization — talked about being “somewhere that I’m wanted” ahead of his final Wrigley Field homestand before becoming a free agent, how he planned to find “a place that appreciates what I bring to the clubhouse.”
(Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)Of course, the narrative changes if the Cubs don’t win that Game 7. Team chemistry can be highly overrated in a team sport based on individual matchups. But from a clubhouse perspective, there is a perception that the organization prefers to invest in gadgets and facilities rather than people, and a sense that after so many years together, the Cubs picked apart the minor flaws of their own players while focusing almost exclusively on the upside of new players like Suzuki and Stroman. It’s ironic that Epstein, whose success helped popularize the analytics movement that led to the proliferation of defensive shifts, platoon lineups and bulked-up bullpens, has become a driving force behind MLB’s rule changes. It’s noticeable that Maddon has railed against meddlesome front offices since getting fired by the Angels and beginning the promotional tour for his new book. But they are both right that the heartbeat does matter when so much will go wrong during such a long season.
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“Part of why I don’t think I can be a manager in today’s game is because a lot of that is now done on the computer,” Heyward said, reflecting on the intangible elements of the team that came back from a 3-1 deficit in the World Series. “You can’t measure that stuff. You can take a picture at the end of it and see what it looks like. You can tell people about it. But you have to have enough experience. You got to have guys that played in Boston that won rings. You’ve got to have guys like myself that came up in Atlanta and played in St. Louis for a season and came here and brought that. You got to have a Ben Zobrist. You got to have an Anthony Rizzo or a Javy Báez. Not their numbers. You got to have their personalities. Dexter Fowler being funny as hell every damn day, no matter what’s going on. You don’t even know when he’s serious, but when he steps in that box, this dude’s here to play.
“Those things are hard to duplicate. The game, I feel like, is getting tougher every single year, (but) history does repeat itself, in a sense. You look at the Yankees right now. You look at the Dodgers doing their thing. Some teams are going to come back around. Realistically, (the Cubs) have to figure that one out. I wouldn’t mind being a part of that. But what I do know is a big part of that is going to be – always and forever – this fan base. That’s something we love to enjoy on a daily basis with our group. Day games, night games, doubleheaders, whatever, we just made the best of our situation, because we knew that if we sparked up enough energy, the fans were going to be behind us. It was a party every day for us. Just a baseball party. Have fun playing the game the right way. If someone didn’t do something right, call them out on it, but you knew you were calling them out because we had somewhere to be.
“They got some work to do, but I will say again: I don’t think it takes as much as anyone thinks to have that happen here again.”
There’s a dehumanizing aspect to the game’s McKinsey & Company approach. Amateur scouts have voiced concerns that their work is not being valued enough and higher-ups have acknowledged that there’s a communication gap. One consideration is adding a more traditional voice to the leadership team in amateur scouting, but there’s an expectation that area could be addressed.
Hoyer believes any perceived differences in culture are the byproduct of working in a different era of baseball, and not necessarily unique to the Cubs. The Cubs are also working with a generational shift among prospects who have a sophisticated awareness of the game’s trends. They brought Blast motion sensors to showcases — to measure bat speed and swing paths — and came in with an understanding of launch angles and spin rates. Last weekend’s orientation sessions for a select group of prospects allowed them to interact with the major-league coaches and support staff, experience the Wrigleyville atmosphere on gamedays, and hear the roars from the crowd for Heyward and Contreras as they said their goodbyes.
“For players, the coaches room, our office, enjoying coming to work every day and believing in the place you work is deeply important,” Hoyer said. “Whether it’s playing on the field or working in the office, people are going to do better work if they’re happy and satisfied with the culture they’re in. I believe in that wholeheartedly. I want to be evidence-based in everything we do, but also never lose sight of the fact that people, whether they’re players or in the office, will do better work when they enjoy their workplace every day.”
Coming off five consecutive fifth-place finishes, the Cubs participated in a 2015 Bloomberg Businessweek cover story that featured a classic quote from president of business operations Crane Kenney, who told the magazine: “Basically, my job is fill a wheelbarrow with money, take it to Theo’s office, and dump it.”
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The Cubs entered this season with an Opening Day payroll ($143.4 million) that ranked 14th in the majors, according to the Cot’s Baseball Contracts database for Baseball Prospectus, lower than the Padres ($211.2 million) and White Sox ($194.8 million) and roughly half of what the Dodgers invested in their roster ($280.8 million). While the Dodgers deserve all the credit they receive for their relentless work in scouting and player development, an overlooked aspect is the commitment that Guggenheim Baseball Management made in its first year of ownership, absorbing roughly $250 million in salaries in a blockbuster trade with the Red Sox in August 2012, acquiring Adrián González, Josh Beckett and Carl Crawford to buy some time and credibility and help maintain a competitive baseline.
The Cubs and Dodgers, two big-market franchises, diverted after splitting the 2016 and 2017 NLCS. In a telling sign during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Dodgers finalized a 12-year, $365 million extension with Mookie Betts after the Cubs pulled a long-term contract offer to Báez. As an introverted personality who thrived on the energy at Wrigley Field, Báez predictably struggled in Detroit at the beginning of his six-year, $140 million contract (.671 OPS, 26 errors at shortstop), though his production picked up enough to still post a 2.6 WAR season (per Baseball-Reference). Bryant again struggled to stay healthy, playing in only 42 games in the first season of a seven-year, $182 million deal. Rizzo loves playing in New York and wearing the Yankee pinstripes, but the market showed that the Cubs didn’t exactly lowball him with their five-year, $70 million offer during spring training in 2021.
Jed Hoyer and David Ross (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)Of the 15 teams in the NL, only seven finished with winning records, and six qualified for the newly expanded postseason. While none of the four prospects the Cubs acquired in the Darvish trade played above the A-ball level this season, Darvish (16-8, 3.10 ERA) is in line to start San Diego’s first playoff game after throwing almost 200 innings. Applying the lessons he learned in Chicago, Schwarber helped lead the Phillies back to the playoffs for the first time in 11 years, blasting 46 home runs while keeping the clubhouse loose in Philadelphia.
The hard part is creating a dynamic, cohesive, major-league team after collecting all those prospects, as the White Sox demonstrated this year. But this should still be the fun part for the Cubs, the potential to be involved in any deal they want this offseason. Given the resources at their disposal, it really shouldn’t be that hard to put together a roster capable of winning 85 games and playing meaningful baseball next September. That may require trading some of those precious prospects and being a little more irrational in free agency.
“Theo was definitely more of a gunslinger,” said one source who has good relationships with Epstein and Hoyer. “Jed is more, ‘OK, take a step back, what’s the data say?’”
The Cubs will be all over MLB Trade Rumors this winter. Depth isn’t glamorous, but it allows a team to spend money on impact talent vs. filling holes in the roster. Instead of guaranteeing $10 million combined to Jonathan Villar and Andrelton Simmons — two infielders the Cubs released in the middle of the season — the Cubs can utilize role players such as Christopher Morel and Zach McKinstry while investing in an All-Star shortstop like Carlos Correa, Trea Turner or Xander Bogaerts. Young hitters like Brennen Davis, Matt Mervis and Owen Caissie aren’t that far off since they’re playing in the Arizona Fall League. The newfound supply of young pitchers with major-league stuff and minor-league options would be enhanced with a starter like Carlos Rodón at the top of the rotation. It’s time to bring the wheelbarrow to Hoyer’s office.
“Last summer was rough on everybody,” Ricketts said. “For every fan, including myself, that was a tough summer. We came off six great years in a row, five playoff appearances, the best stretch in team history. But it was time to make changes, and I give Jed credit for making those changes. It is about building the next winning team, not about what happened in the past.”
(Top photo: Associated Press / Paul Beaty)
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