Front Office Thread

[Andy]

The front office chose a plan and within that plan they have done a good job.

 

Maybe another plan would have been better. But we'll never know, so we might as well see how this one goes. Anything else is just pissing in the wind. The end.

This is about where I am. Not the biggest fan of the plan but thanks to nailing several of the moves it's worked pretty well.

[UMFan83]

The front office chose a plan and within that plan they have done a good job.

 

Maybe another plan would have been better. But we'll never know, so we might as well see how this one goes. Anything else is just pissing in the wind. The end.

 

Exactly. Does theo deserve praise? His goal, and the reason for sacrificing 3 seasons was to build a team of young cost controlled stars that makes the playoffs most years. Well he's built a team of young cost controlled players that is in the thick of the playoff hunt, and probably a year earlier than originally outlined. So if you measure the job the FO is done based on the results, he's on his way to looking pretty successful. Like I said earlier I think it's fair if you reserve judgment and praise for 3-4 more years to see how many times they make the playoffs/World Series. Because yes it is a big gamble to punt 3 years to execute the plan. If they only make the playoffs 1-2 times and most of the young players are a bust, then yes Theo failed imo.

[jumbo]

I don't even think Epstein's doing an unquestionably bad job. I just think the idea that he's doing unquestionably good one is based in ordinary fan exuberance and nothing more, even in a place that thinks of itself as being smarter than the average fans.

 

This is reasonable/fair.

 

I think fans are ready to credit Theo for this team because they believe the plan he has been executing is starting to produce results. It's hard not to speculate that things are on the upswing and the team is destined for repeated playoff appearances. Obviously how the future plays out answers the question.

 

Out of curiosity, rather than just say "let's see what the results are to judge Theo," how many playoff appearances do you expect for the Cubs from 2016-2020? I know you could say, I'm not going to guess at numbers, but based on what you'e seen and your overall impression what is your answer?

[Backtobanks]

The front office chose a plan and within that plan they have done a good job.

 

Maybe another plan would have been better. But we'll never know, so we might as well see how this one goes. Anything else is just pissing in the wind. The end.

 

Exactly. Does theo deserve praise? His goal, and the reason for sacrificing 3 seasons was to build a team of young cost controlled stars that makes the playoffs most years. Well he's built a team of young cost controlled players that is in the thick of the playoff hunt, and probably a year earlier than originally outlined. So if you measure the job the FO is done based on the results, he's on his way to looking pretty successful. Like I said earlier I think it's fair if you reserve judgment and praise for 3-4 more years to see how many times they make the playoffs/World Series. Because yes it is a big gamble to punt 3 years to execute the plan. If they only make the playoffs 1-2 times and most of the young players are a bust, then yes Theo failed imo.

 

I agree with you, but I do have higher expectations. My expectations are at least a WS appearance, if not a WS win in the next few years. I know this gets us into the "playoffs are a crapshoot" conversation, but squeaking into the wild card once or twice wouldn't be worth 3 years of punting.

[hawkeyecub]

 

We've got one elite prime hitter, one elite young hitter and hopefully a second in Schwarber. Jorge Soler is 23 and hasn't shown himself to be anything more than below-average so far. Even with normal improvement (not a given with his K problems), he would still top out at an average starter. That's the strength of our organization, and it is strong: 2-4 young or young-ish hitters.

 

Meanwhile, Baez, Alcantara, and Castro have all pooped the bed spectacularly. Our minor leaguers in general have not had a particularly impressive year. Vogelbach is all BABIP and still doesn't look like a guy who will hold a major-league starting job once you strip that way. Gleyber Torres is a million years away. Almora is hoping to maybe become CF Darwin Barney. Edit: Glossed over McKinney, a useful guy who doesn't project to anything special.

 

Am I missing Addison here?

[Guest]

I think it's a bit of revisionist history to say the plan was to suck hard for three years.

 

2012 they were pretty limited (or needed to divert more upfront capital to long term farm enhancements) but looked fairly dual fronts with the DeJesus and Maholm signings. 2013 they allocated a lot more resources to the immediate club, they just flopped on a lot of it. 2014 they were basically only willing to add to immediate needs on one guy, who they missed on, so they were willing to tank.

 

Had 2013 worked out better maybe they don't sell again and are more aggressive in 2014. Or maybe they just didn't like the 2014 class.

 

I'd give them a pass on 12, a failure on 13, and disagree with the plan in 14, but they executed their path well.

[BigSlick]

I didn't realize there were people other than David Haugh and the whole Sun-Times sports staff that really disliked the job Theo has done.

 

I'm incredibly pleased and the team is more competitive this year than I had any expectations for. I'm excited for the next 5 or so years of Cubs baseball including watching Kris Bryant, Jorge Soler, Addison Russell and Kyle Schwarber, who have all been bonafide major league players and have tons of room to grow. I guess I'm somewhat concerned about pitching and the lack of talent on the farm side of things but, ah well.

 

At no point did Hendry field a team that had a shot at sustained multiple year success that could replace talent in-house, which is what Theo is on the verge of doing. I wanna be the Cardinals, basically. And the infrastructure is there for that possibility.

[Guest]

I think there is room to question both the strategy and the execution of this front office. Being baseball, it is impossible to be perfect. But they have misread a couple of markets, not judged a few players correctly and blown a couple of opportunities here and there.

 

Overall, I feel they've been very good and I'm still happy to have them. But I'm not sure they are heads and shoulders above the rest of the front offices out there. I think there's room for both praise of them and questioning of them.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

I don't even think Epstein's doing an unquestionably bad job. I just think the idea that he's doing unquestionably good one is based in ordinary fan exuberance and nothing more, even in a place that thinks of itself as being smarter than the average fans.

 

This is reasonable/fair.

 

I think fans are ready to credit Theo for this team because they believe the plan he has been executing is starting to produce results. It's hard not to speculate that things are on the upswing and the team is destined for repeated playoff appearances. Obviously how the future plays out answers the question.

 

Out of curiosity, rather than just say "let's see what the results are to judge Theo," how many playoff appearances do you expect for the Cubs from 2016-2020? I know you could say, I'm not going to guess at numbers, but based on what you'e seen and your overall impression what is your answer?

 

To answer your question, I think 3 out of 5 is a good over/under.

 

I think the upswing thing is the appeal of narrative. We love to explain our sports teams in terms of stories, and the "We were bad, then we were patient, then we got better, then we got great" is an easy story to understand.

 

Getting better, or more importantly getting great, for 2016 and 2017 looks pretty tough to me. Not impossible. It's pretty easy to see how it could happen. All you need is a couple of breakout offensive seasons from our ubertalents and the top half of the pitching staff to stay healthy.

 

But I think the downside is real too:

 

On offense, the only guy who is young enough to make me really sure he'll be noticeably better in 2016 is Russell. The rest are in that iffy range of just barely pre-prime where the median of the curve is not much improvement left at all.

 

For the pitching, I think the question is just how often are you going to get 150+ healthy, productive innings from your top 4? It's not something that's going to happen every year. And we're going to need it to, because there is just stone cold nothing coming up the pipe. The first wave of pitching prospects was supposed to be ready by now, and it's looking like a pretty substantial bust.

 

In the meantime, the Cubs have been one of the most overachieving teams in the league by Pythagorean Wins, and there's two *really* good teams in the division that have pretty good cases to still be pretty good next year.

 

The narrative says the Cubs are betting on the future in 2016. We've seen what betting on the future looks like this year: it's a messy, unpredictable affair. Sometimes it shows up as Kris Bryant playing at a 5-fWAR pace, and sometimes it's thinking you've got the middle infield settled with double redundancy only to have three of your four highly talented young guys become sub-replacement simultaneously.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

At no point did Hendry field a team that had a shot at sustained multiple year success that could replace talent in-house, which is what Theo is on the verge of doing. I wanna be the Cardinals, basically. And the infrastructure is there for that possibility.

 

We were talking about this in another thread the other day: I think that there's more evidence that we're a souped-up version of the Brewers (stocking up for years for a golden generation and riding it to a few years in the sun) than we are becoming the Cardinals.

 

If you want to be the Cardinals, you have to hit on your small-time IFA investments, your non-top-10-overall picks, your prospects that you didn't trade premium MLB talent to get. Have we really been doing that? I don't see it.

 

The Cardinals already have 6.2 bWAR from their 2012 draft class and ours is looking awfully iffy.

[Derwood]

The good news about it being difficult to be "great"'is that there aren't really many great teams in baseball. Greatness isn't required to win it all

[Backtobanks]

For all of the avid supporters of Theo and his plan, I find it interesting that people still need to bring up Hendry's name 4 years later in a discussion of the FO.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

For all of the avid supporters of Theo and his plan, I find it interesting that people still need to bring up Hendry's name 4 years later in a discussion of the FO.

 

It was the detractors who brought it up this time.

[SpongeWorthy]

On offense, the only guy who is young enough to make me really sure he'll be noticeably better in 2016 is Russell. The rest are in that iffy range of just barely pre-prime where the median of the curve is not much improvement left at all.

 

For the pitching, I think the question is just how often are you going to get 150+ healthy, productive innings from your top 4? It's not something that's going to happen every year. And we're going to need it to, because there is just stone cold nothing coming up the pipe. The first wave of pitching prospects was supposed to be ready by now, and it's looking like a pretty substantial bust.

 

Improvement/full time play from Schwarber + marked improvement from Russell + tangible improvement from Bryant and sign a TOR starter. Turn SS (or MI void created by moving Russell to SS) from a dumpster fire into somewhere within shouting distance of average. Easy-peasy.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

Improvement/full time play from Schwarber + marked improvement from Russell + tangible improvement from Bryant and sign a TOR starter. Turn SS (or MI void created by moving Russell to SS) from a dumpster fire into somewhere within shouting distance of average. Easy-peasy.

 

is that like the improvement we were going to get from Soler, Castro, Rizzo, Baez and Alcantara this year?

[jumbo]

I don't even think Epstein's doing an unquestionably bad job. I just think the idea that he's doing unquestionably good one is based in ordinary fan exuberance and nothing more, even in a place that thinks of itself as being smarter than the average fans.

 

This is reasonable/fair.

 

I think fans are ready to credit Theo for this team because they believe the plan he has been executing is starting to produce results. It's hard not to speculate that things are on the upswing and the team is destined for repeated playoff appearances. Obviously how the future plays out answers the question.

 

Out of curiosity, rather than just say "let's see what the results are to judge Theo," how many playoff appearances do you expect for the Cubs from 2016-2020? I know you could say, I'm not going to guess at numbers, but based on what you'e seen and your overall impression what is your answer?

 

To answer your question, I think 3 out of 5 is a good over/under.

 

I think the upswing thing is the appeal of narrative. We love to explain our sports teams in terms of stories, and the "We were bad, then we were patient, then we got better, then we got great" is an easy story to understand.

 

Getting better, or more importantly getting great, for 2016 and 2017 looks pretty tough to me. Not impossible. It's pretty easy to see how it could happen. All you need is a couple of breakout offensive seasons from our ubertalents and the top half of the pitching staff to stay healthy.

 

But I think the downside is real too:

 

On offense, the only guy who is young enough to make me really sure he'll be noticeably better in 2016 is Russell. The rest are in that iffy range of just barely pre-prime where the median of the curve is not much improvement left at all.

 

For the pitching, I think the question is just how often are you going to get 150+ healthy, productive innings from your top 4? It's not something that's going to happen every year. And we're going to need it to, because there is just stone cold nothing coming up the pipe. The first wave of pitching prospects was supposed to be ready by now, and it's looking like a pretty substantial bust.

 

In the meantime, the Cubs have been one of the most overachieving teams in the league by Pythagorean Wins, and there's two *really* good teams in the division that have pretty good cases to still be pretty good next year.

 

The narrative says the Cubs are betting on the future in 2016. We've seen what betting on the future looks like this year: it's a messy, unpredictable affair. Sometimes it shows up as Kris Bryant playing at a 5-fWAR pace, and sometimes it's thinking you've got the middle infield settled with double redundancy only to have three of your four highly talented young guys become sub-replacement simultaneously.

 

I think three is a very fair response. I'm somewhat of an optimist, so I'll be truly disappointed if we don't take the over on that. It's easy to ignore the downside risk. I agree that Russell is by far the most encouraging player this year as far as future breakouts go. Soler hasn't shown the discipline he was reported to have had. Castro is not the perennial all star he once was and may be jettisoned. Bryant, Schwarber, Rizzo at least appear to have rock solid futures (positional concerns notwithstanding). Baez is not the high risk high reward example that everyone thinks he is, there is much more downside risk with his contact issues. But the big four/five/six are a pretty terrific core to build around.

 

As far as the pitching staff goes, I'm less concerned than you are. Yes, there will be injuries and unexpected failures in the pitching staff, but many teams don't have a good option at four or five. I think free agency has always been the plan for short term starting pitching, despite the draft strategy. Lester, Arrieta, Hammel, Hendricks are pretty solid for 1-4 for the next few years. Even with injuries, the FO has shown pretty good ability to identify plug & play starting pitching, and I think they'll make a significant addition this offseason to bolster the depth so that only a #5 is needed to be added down the line.

 

Bullpens are such a crapshoot that I am comfortable sticking with Strop, Grimm, Ramirez, Rondon and adding to them with a solid FA piece and then whatever may come from Black, Edwards, Rivero, Rosscup, Johnson, Paniagua, etc to fill out the group, along with whatever retreads they pick up year to year.

 

It may seem like success seems to come to easily, but I'm just not going to sweat the 6th and 7th guys in the bullpen, fifth starter, twelfth and thirteenth bench options. The bulk of a successful team is there and anyone could fill in around that.

[BigSlick]

I'm not so confident that Lester, Arrieta, Hammels and Hendricks form the pitching core we can depend on for "years". Both Lester and Arrieta will be heading into their 30s, and I don't trust both of Hammels and Hendricks to continue sustained success with their stuff. And it's safe betting there'll be a catastrophic injury of *someone* during that time. You have to over prepare for pitchers exploding and there's unfortunately not much pitching talent ready to fill gaps when stuff goes wrong or we wouldn't be playing Hot Potato with Richard-Beeler-Wada this year.

[illiniguy]

I like how we are positioned for the next five to ten years. I also thnk Bryant makes a Rizzo like jump soon. Possibly this year.

 

I dislike we did not make a bigger splash at the deadline.

 

I like watching the cubs again.

[itisallpartoftheplan]

Judging Theo by win/loss before this year is ridiculous. He had a plan we all knew it. Whether you are/were on board is up to you. This is the first year that we are actually trying to contend.

 

How I feel about 12-14 will forever be tied in how the next 5 years go and the players we got based on how Theo has decided to go about building this team.

[Guest]

Judging Theo by win/loss before this year is ridiculous. He had a plan we all knew it. Whether you are/were on board is up to you. This is the first year that we are actually trying to contend.

 

That doesn't suddenly mean that he gets a pass for being awful for those 3 years. You obviously don't view the W-L of those years through the same lense as you do now, but they have to be good enough to justify it going forward.

[davell]

If I were trying to come up with 5 criticisms of this FO, I think I'd go this way.....

 

1) They very possibly broke Starlin. I think most would have tried to get him to show more patience, but it's still their job to know whether or not a guy has the makeup to do it.

 

2) The Almora pick. Hard to argue with Kyle's "CF Darwin Barney" comp. A hit with that pick and we'd be in that much better shape.

 

3) Lack of pitching from the draft. Probably too early to use this as a definitive, but drafting hitters lends itself to developing pitching that's not quite as talented. It's yet to be done with youngsters, even though I think it's fair to say they've excelled with older guys.

 

4) The IFA class from this season looks awfully weak for a team that's gone way over budget. Could be they fell in rankings from less looks after committing long ago, could be we flat out mis-judged them. At any rate, it's obviously way too early to know. But initial reports seem to support the former.

 

5) Edwin- No explanation necessary.

 

They've obviously done a bunch right. I do think they're an elite FO. But I'm of the mindset at this point, there's not a huge discrepancy between the elite and the average. The only discrepancy falls with the Amaro and Stewart types.

[KingCubsFan]

I don't even think Epstein's doing an unquestionably bad job. I just think the idea that he's doing unquestionably good one is based in ordinary fan exuberance and nothing more, even in a place that thinks of itself as being smarter than the average fans.

 

This is reasonable/fair.

 

I think fans are ready to credit Theo for this team because they believe the plan he has been executing is starting to produce results. It's hard not to speculate that things are on the upswing and the team is destined for repeated playoff appearances. Obviously how the future plays out answers the question.

 

Out of curiosity, rather than just say "let's see what the results are to judge Theo," how many playoff appearances do you expect for the Cubs from 2016-2020? I know you could say, I'm not going to guess at numbers, but based on what you'e seen and your overall impression what is your answer?

 

To answer your question, I think 3 out of 5 is a good over/under.

 

I think the upswing thing is the appeal of narrative. We love to explain our sports teams in terms of stories, and the "We were bad, then we were patient, then we got better, then we got great" is an easy story to understand.

 

Getting better, or more importantly getting great, for 2016 and 2017 looks pretty tough to me. Not impossible. It's pretty easy to see how it could happen. All you need is a couple of breakout offensive seasons from our ubertalents and the top half of the pitching staff to stay healthy.

 

But I think the downside is real too:

 

On offense, the only guy who is young enough to make me really sure he'll be noticeably better in 2016 is Russell. The rest are in that iffy range of just barely pre-prime where the median of the curve is not much improvement left at all.

 

For the pitching, I think the question is just how often are you going to get 150+ healthy, productive innings from your top 4? It's not something that's going to happen every year. And we're going to need it to, because there is just stone cold nothing coming up the pipe. The first wave of pitching prospects was supposed to be ready by now, and it's looking like a pretty substantial bust.

 

In the meantime, the Cubs have been one of the most overachieving teams in the league by Pythagorean Wins, and there's two *really* good teams in the division that have pretty good cases to still be pretty good next year.

 

The narrative says the Cubs are betting on the future in 2016. We've seen what betting on the future looks like this year: it's a messy, unpredictable affair. Sometimes it shows up as Kris Bryant playing at a 5-fWAR pace, and sometimes it's thinking you've got the middle infield settled with double redundancy only to have three of your four highly talented young guys become sub-replacement simultaneously.

That was a pretty long-winded way to say that baseball is very random. I think we can all agree.

[itisallpartoftheplan]

Edit: My phone was dumb. Edited August 3, 2015 by itisallpartoftheplan

[itisallpartoftheplan]

Edit: My phone was dumb. Edited August 3, 2015 by itisallpartoftheplan

[itisallpartoftheplan]

Judging Theo by win/loss before this year is ridiculous. He had a plan we all knew it. Whether you are/were on board is up to you. This is the first year that we are actually trying to contend.

 

That doesn't suddenly mean that he gets a pass for being awful for those 3 years. You obviously don't view the W-L of those years through the same lense as you do now, but they have to be good enough to justify it going forward.

 

Whether he gets a pass is tied into the future of this team.

As of right now it's a huge incomplete.