Who to fire?

[CubColtPacer]

CCP, Don't you think 2 and 3 in your 2006 breakdown also point to Hendry? He's ultimately responsible for those, IMO. Particularly hiring and keeping Baker (I want to say he hired him, yes?).

 

Yes, I would. I meant to make that more clear in my initial analysis. With all of those together, Hendry definitely deserved to be fired for his first 4 years on the job. He did some excellent and some bad in his actual building of the team, but it was the other things that he failed to oversee well that really hurt the club long-term.

 

Since then though I believe is a different story. I don't think most GM's could have taken that 2006 team and made it a winning team in one offseason. Free agents cleaned up that offseason and a lot of teams have scars from that. Hendry picked good talent and got the club back into the playoffs. I also like that in all of the spending, he never got desperate enough to send the farm away. He's stuck to the course even while being told to win and given rapidly expanding resources to do so. He also has shown a willingness to go after different types of players than he would in the past.

 

Yes, there are some players that are overpaid. I don't think Hendry is ever going to get away from that. But as long as he continues to do a good job of picking the right ones who can contribute, then it doesn't matter as much. It matters right now because so many members of the club had to come from free agency. It won't matter nearly as much when the farm system starts producing its fair sure of contributors. And that becomes more and more likely as the months go on. At that point the big thing will become making sure your big free agent acquisitions are not complete duds, and the Cubs have done better than most at that.

[Guest]

CCP, Don't you think 2 and 3 in your 2006 breakdown also point to Hendry? He's ultimately responsible for those, IMO. Particularly hiring and keeping Baker (I want to say he hired him, yes?).

 

I think part of his point is that he's fixed those things since they caused the events leading through 2006.

 

So...he was bad but he's improved type of thing? I mean, that's oversimplifying what he's saying, but that's sort of what it sounds like. He put the people in place that made those mistakes and let things decline for three years before he acted.

 

 

Yeah, I think that's what he's getting at, that Hendry messed things up and then fixed them for the most part. I can agree that he's fixed those particular problems, but on the whole I can't follow that thinking, especially with how he misspent prior to that 2007 season, and how some contracts since then(Kosuke, Dempster) have little margin for error in being worth the money.

[soapy]

Well CCP, I think you give him far more credit than I would for the 2006 to 2007 turnaround ($$$$), but you make some other reasonable points. I'm still not convinced he should keep his job (it doesn't really sound like you are either), but thanks for getting into it.

[CubColtPacer]

Well CCP, I think you give him far more credit than I would for the 2006 to 2007 turnaround ($$$$), but you make some other reasonable points. I'm still not convinced he should keep his job (it doesn't really sound like you are either), but thanks for getting into it.

 

In any normal offseason I would agree with you. But the 2006 offseason was a special one.

 

For example, I'll show the starting pitchers who got multi-year deals. I'm not going to put any names, just contract length, contract dollars, and ERA+ for 2007-2009 (I realize the flaws in ERA+ but just for a quick analysis it should be ok..I'm also excluding 2010 for this analysis because of the lack of data so far.):

 

Pitcher

A: 3 years, 25: 102, 68, 108

B: 3 years, 24.5: 73, 76, 57

C: 2 years, 12: 116 (retired after 1 year)

D: 5 years, 20 (25 million posting fee): 73, 36 (not in majors right now)

E: 4 years, 40: 121, 113, 145

F: 3 years, 21: 100, 102, 113

G: 6 years, 52 (51 million posting fee): 108, 160, 82

H: 5 years, 55: 125, 110, 87

I: 2 years, 13: 37, 48

J: 2 years, 23: 88, 132

K: 3 years, 33.75: 79, 94, 100

M: 3 years, 47: 71, not in league, 72

N: 4 years, 42: 96, 85, 76

O: 2 years, 12.5: 84, out of league

P: 7 years, 126: 99, 86, 108

 

There aren't that many combinations of pitchers that would have given the Cubs good shots at the playoffs in 2007-2008. Picking B, D, I, M, N, or O would have disastrous. P and G would be Soriano like contracts. C was unavailable to the Cubs (Orlando Hernandez who resigned and then retired one year later). K is a really bad contract. J, H, and A would have been ok but not great.

 

Hendry probably picked the best two contracts out of that mess (E and F are Lilly and Marquis).

 

The same was true at 2B where Lugo was given his awful contract that Boston is still paying for on his 3rd city now. Kennedy, Durham, and to a lesser extent Iwamura were also given multi-year contracts and were all less productive than DeRosa.

 

Soriano was a terrible contract but there were very few good ones out there. That was also the year Gary Matthews Jr. got his terrible deal. The Cubs chose not to resign Pierre and he got his awful deal. Drew was the only deal that Hendry really missed out on that offseason (Carlos Lee would have been a slightly less horrible deal than Soriano).

 

The Cubs had lots of money that year, but that year is also the one that fans around the league shudder about because it brought horrible contracts to so many teams. For the Cubs to come out of that spending all that money with only Soriano as a problem is a huge coup. They picked up many of the best players of the free agent class and those were often not nearly the highest money getters at their positions.

 

And no, I'm not convinced Hendry should keep his job. But I do think he's done a pretty good job these last 4 years building us out of that mess. Now he needs to continue to change gears and keep building a more long-term solution.

[soapy]

Oh I certainly have no issues with either the Lilly or the Derosa signing (though I was skeptical about both at the time, I was wrong). In fact, I think they're both very good deals in retrospect. Soriano is the only really bad contract that year.

 

However, I think the only reason he was able to correct or maybe cover some of the previous mistakes was the huge bump in payroll. The payroll in 2005 was $87 million. In 2010 it is $146+ million. Hendry was given an enormous amount of payroll fexibility starting in 2006 and that's what allowed him to turn that team around quickly. Now (perhaps) some of the big dollar contracts given out over that time (be it deserved or not) may be coming home to roost as some of those players are getting older. One can argue that he had a window in which that big budget could "buy" him a championship and that window is now closed.

 

Basically, he may not have over-spent for any particular players but he still handed out contracts that are now possibly hampering the team (at least in the near future) because the team (operating under his leadership for the previous three years) was in a position where it had to spend that money on FAs to compete. Having said that, I don't think it's a huge long-term problem that they can't get out of in a few years.

[CubColtPacer]

Definitely the team needed money if they were going to compete. You either need to have a good farm system or need to spend if you're going to win. The Cubs did very little of either in that first 4 year period of Hendry's tenrue. The good thing was that the Cubs didn't have that much unwise spending on their roster so they still had the spending option available to them. But spending your way to a good team from a terrible team over a 1-2 year period is not easy. You have to make very few mistakes and Hendry did just that. Most GM's probably couldn't have built the 2008 team so quickly from what they had to work with in 2006. Money was definitely necessary, but picking the right players was just as necessary and not as easy as choosing the ones who were considered to be the best at that time (if the Cubs did that, they probably would not have won any division titles).

 

But obviously spending as the path to victory has its huge flaw which is that the margin for error is so thin. The better path is to develop the farm system but that takes time. The Cubs are finally getting there with their farm system and now are starting the transition. The trick is going to be to unwind the contracts in such a way that keeps the Cubs competitive but also gives the young players the chance they need to learn and grow at the major league level.

 

And I don't really think the Cubs contract situation is prohibitive. The bomb that could always go off is Soriano. As long as he is productive, his contract is not that bad of a problem. When he becomes clearly not worthy of a roster spot it becomes a big problem. Hopefully the Cubs can get another year or two out of him and trade him but it will probably turn ugly before the end.

 

The other contracts I'm not worried about at all. With the Cubs starting to need to fill less spots with veterans, having overpaid players with such a large payroll is not a big issue. Again for me, it's as long as they are productive and deserve their starting spot, and pretty much all of them (maybe not Silva if he implodes) do. And most of the contracts are not all that long so there isn't that much risk left in them.

 

I am concerned about Hendry doing the balancing act correctly and would not be sad about somebody else doing it instead. But slowly transitioning to a more farm system based team does seem to be the plan even from ownership and Hendry has done a good job of executing the plan the last few years. I think he has the skills to keep following the plan and I feel he is a potentially good option to pick the right veterans to go along with the youngsters as the team goes forward.

[hardcorecubfan]

I'm curious to see the reasoning for people who chose "neither".

 

I agree with nut that Lou will walk so get rid of Hendry, but people may put niether because Hendry is the most successful GM in Cubs History (which is sad to say for history of Chicago)