Jed Hoyer Has Concept of Plan as Cubs Look to Create Economy Based on Win
The Cubs generate revenue at a level most MLB teams can only dream of, but it’s based more on legacy and a semblance of plausible competitiveness that keeps lifelong fans and baseball tourists invested. The longer their mediocrity on the field persists, the harder it will be to maintain that base, let alone grow it. Marquee Sports Network is having a hard time with carriage deals and season ticket sales are so stagnant they’re forced to market to people who aren’t on the waiting list.
I just canceled my Marquee subscription for the offseason because, with all due respect to friends who work there, it’s now worth $20/month if the Cubs aren’t playing games. To be fair, it wasn’t worth that cost for much of the time they were playing. As he heads into his final season under contract as the team’s baseball baron, Jed Hoyer may want to consider getting a little more aggressive in the pursuit of success.
“We’ll have an economy based on win,” Hoyer said in a recent press conference. “I never understood win. I know winmills very much, I’ve studied it better than anybody. It’s very expensive. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe.”
Sounds batshit insane, right? Hoyer didn’t actually say that, of course, but it’s only three letters removed from recent words uttered by another fairly prominent public figure who is also adept at saying a whole lot just to say nothing. During his actual comments shortly after the close of the season, a “disappointed but optimistic” Hoyer lamented how the weather at Wrigley hurt the Cubs’ performance and laid out the concept of a plan to have players outperform projections.
I wonder if Tom Ricketts has any ideas about installing a phalanx of energy-generating turbines along Waveland and Sheffield. Not only would it allow them to keep the lights on if Marquee has further issues, it would alleviate the gull problem that grows worse late in each season as more and more fans dress up as seats.
Anywho, let’s bring this back to what the front office must do to turn the Cubs from also-rans into contenders. The first is by adding enough top-end talent to ensure they’re not simply relying on 90th-percentile outcomes from everyone else on the roster. Injuries and underperformance are inevitable, so you can’t plan on threading the needle and having positive outlier seasons make up for losses. What’s more, you need players whose overperformance is meaningful enough to affect the overall record.
The Cubs have proven adept at finding reclamation bullpen arms on the cheap, some of which is a matter of volume, but a passable medium-leverage reliever is getting you less than one win. Michael Busch proved to be a really solid player and his improved defense at first base was a revelation, but he generated only 2.3 fWAR and figures to max out around 4.0 if his power ramps up pretty significantly. Not a knock on Busch at all, just a reality check.
Without a really big addition like, say, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the Cubs are going to have to get incremental improvement from several different players. Dansby Swanson rode a very strong finish to 4.3 fWAR, a little over half a game worse than last year. He earned his current contract thanks to a 6.6 season with the Braves in ’22, but I think we can all agree he’s probably capped at 5-ish wins above replacement. Nico Hoerner‘s lack of power plants him in the 4-4.5 range, then Ian Happ is just below that.
Seiya Suzuki could be limited by his role moving forward, as his suspect glove in right field made him the primary DH down the stretch. While he may be able to better his 3.5 fWAR from this past season, I’d say the delta is pretty narrow. Cody Bellinger was hampered by injuries for much of the season and posted 2.2 fWAR over 130 games, exactly half of his production in the same number of games last year.
Maybe Hoyer is looking at this differently, but I have to think the Cubs are hoping Bellinger sees enough of a market for his services that opting out of the final two years and $52.5 million of his deal makes sense. Unless you believe a return to 4+ fWAR is in the works, and it’s not if those weak batted-ball results face anything close to the same weather next year, Bellinger is another decent player at best.
Guerrero put up 3.0 wins over the last two months of the season alone, more than all but four Cubs generated the whole season. The Blue Jays slugger won’t turn 26 until March and is projected to earn around $30 million in his final year of arbitration, so he’d cost a haul in terms of both prospect return and an extension, but he’s probably the next best thing to Juan Soto this winter. The Cubs can’t just keep avoiding the addition of superstar players just because their value-model algorithm doesn’t like them as much.
If you have a chance to add a potential superstar with big power, excellent OBP, and a low strikeout rate, you do it. The Cubs have a good problem with too many top prospects ready for MLB action and not enough room to play them regularly, so failing to pull off some kind of big trade this offseason would be a tremendous failure. Or at least that’s how I see it. Even landing Vladito would leave them with plenty of flexibility to target one of the pitchers the Rays figure to move.
The bottom line is that the Cubs need to add wins and can’t just rely on internal improvements to do so. I guess we just have to hope operating without the safety net of an extension makes Hoyer more aggressive on that front than we’ve seen to this point.