Jed Hoyer and the French Radical

[Matthew Trueblood]

Jed Hoyer recently lamented, in public comments, the way his teams have made it difficult for him to focus on a trade deadline strategy in successive seasons. Maybe he needs to be reminded whose job setting that direction is.

Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports

There is an infamous quotation ascribed to the French revolutionary leader (not that French Revolution; no, not that one, either; the Revolution of 1848) Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Although briefly the chief champion of the proletariat during that mid-century uprising, he failed to provide decisive leadership at the crucial moment of that would-be bloodless coup, and when the working class was thwarted, Ledru-Rollin became largely unwelcome both among that constituency and among the empowered nobility from which he had emerged and with which he clumsily sided, late in the going.

"There go my people," Ledru-Rollin is purported to have said when the action began to percolate. "I must find out where they are going, so I can lead them."

It's almost certainly an apocryphal quote. In the latter decades of Romanticism in Europe, hard facts weren't as important as finding just the right way to capture the soul of a moment. The reason we still hear this not-quite-factual quasi-aphorism, though, is that its inventors nailed it. They nicely encapsulated the odious thing about Ledru-Rollin, in the view of the general public, in two pithy sentences. He was meant to be a leader, and he let a whole lot of people down because he turned out not to understand what it was he was meant to be leading, or to have the courage and competence to lead it successfully.

There are 15 days left before the 2024 MLB trade deadline. That's all the time Jed Hoyer has to separate himself from Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Right now, he's right on the precipice of being buffeted right into a corner by his own "people," the team of which he is the president of baseball operations, for the second year in a row.

You can't adequately substitute any other trait for decisive leadership, and you can't fake it, either. Hoyer was dealt a tough hand last season, when the Cubs scuffled badly until the All-Star break, only to go on such a torrid streak that he had virtually no choice but to make buyer-like moves at the trade deadline. Yet, those moves didn't make the team clear favorites for anything, and indeed, they missed the playoffs altogether. Nor did Hoyer elect to let that season's momentum build by making big splashes on the player talent market over the past offseason. Nor did he use their September stagger as pretext to seriously reorganize the roster.

A year later, he's overseen a team with a new manager but most of the same old faces, and a combination of insufficient star power, insufficient depth, and plain old bad luck put his club behind the 8-ball entering July. Then, over their final week and a half before the All-Star break, they got pretty hot again. They won eight of their final 11 before this four-day summer interstice.

"It's not the road you want to travel," Hoyer said about the way the season has gone, during an appearance on the Marquee Network game broadcast last Saturday. "Last year, we almost felt like we were going day to day, which you never want to do, but we were sort of day to day thinking about which direction we were going to go in." He admitted that that's basically what the team is doing this season, too.

That is, on its face, a recipe for persistent failure, not just on a single-season basis but in the great project that should be building the Cubs into a dynastic force in the NL Central. If Hoyer wanted either the 2023 or the 2024 teams to be genuinely good, he should have invested more in them before Opening Day and been more proactive in his problem-solving once their flaws became glaringly obvious in the early going.

He's missed those chances. There's every chance that, left to their own devices, the Cubs will come out of the break by winning five of their first nine. That would put them at 52-56, and it would probably have them within three games of the third Wild Card berth in the National League. With two days before the deadline, at that point, would Hoyer shift into buy mode? Could he possibly rebuild the entire lousy bullpen, make up for the faltering depth of the rotation, and add the missing dynamism to the lineup in those two days? No chance.

If Hoyer is just trying to preserve leverage in trade conversations by playing up the possibility of a surge, or if he's playing a public-relations game and actually intends to sell aggressively, we'll know it soon. Right now, though, he sounds like Ledru-Rollin. He got this job because his longtime boss and mentor had enough of a halo around his head to handpick his successor as he walked out the door, and that halo was made from a reputation for clear-eyed, aggressive leadership. Hoyer's letting that halo clatter to the ground, a tarnished and ungrasped brass ring. 

Standing pat looks like the most likely scenario for the Cubs over the next fortnight. It would be a calamitous one. They are a team paralyzed by its own okayness, with a core not good enough to do what this franchise ought to be dead-set on doing, lurching toward old age and immovable contract status. They have a strong farm system, but not a generational or transformational one. They should be tenacious in their pursuit of young talent, even if it costs them young talent. The best thing Hoyer has done since taking over the team was the Michael Busch trade, and while that was an opportunity not entirely of his own creation, the lesson from it should be to try more things like it.

The Cubs aren't a playoff team this season--at least not in any valuable sense of that term. They're not especially close to being one in 2025. Their leader needs to lead them, rather than waiting to see in which direction his collection of people confusedly run over the next two weeks. If he does that, he might still not get the pleasure of seeing the fruits of the seeds of change he plants. (He can ask a handful of other leaders, from other French revolutions, all about that.) But he would, at least, be planting seeds the fruit of which will be worth seeing, instead of preciously tending a garden that will never yield more than a few stew-grade tomatoes.

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[CubinNY]

Love it!!!!

[Bertz]

1 hour ago, Matthew Trueblood said:

The Cubs aren't a playoff team this season--at least not in any valuable sense of that term. They're not especially close to being one in 2025.

The Cubs have a higher projected RoS winning percentage than any other team in the central right now via fangraphs.  Their only outgoing FA of note is Bellinger.  They will, assuming Bellinger does leave, have ~$70M standing between them and the luxury tax.  They have 4-5 top 100 prospects with an ETA between now and this time next year.

The hole is probably too big in 2024, but writing off 2025 as a lost season does not hold up to any scrutiny, and it's only true if the team succumbs to the mystery box thinking being suggested and trades players for unnamed prospects just for the sake of having more prospects.

Edited July 15, 2024 by Bertz

[Transmogrified Tiger]

That's really the crux of the issue, do you think the Cubs can be competitive in 2025?  If not then you should probably fire Jed yesterday and let someone who doesn't need a 5 year timeline handle a teardown of the 2026 FAs.  But if you do, you should make moves with 2025 competitiveness in mind because the outlook is far from dire.

[We Got The Whole 9]

I think the 2025 Cubs are going to have a filthy pitching staff. The rotation is already well-stocked and we have reinforcements coming. I actually think they are set up to have their best pens in several years, one that will have one of the highest average velos in the league. My concern lies in the offense and to what extent Jed will be willing to go to fix it. The holes are obvious but at premium positions where there will be plenty of competition. I don't even consider us a Soto suitor because I'm just an automoton with a chip in my brain controlled by the Rothschilds. Being the last year of his contract, however, he should be turning over every stone (not letting a Murphy, Contreras get away without a glance) and has plenty of prospect surplus to make major upgrades in any way possible.

[squally1313]

I mean, filthy pitching staff plus best pen in several years plus the current offense, ranked 18th in baseball, is....a pretty good team on its own? Find a way to fit a premium bat around Busch/Happ/Dansby/Nico/Seiya, with PCA, Caissie, Shaw, Triantos, Alcantara, Ballesteros, etc all as either options or trade bait. 

[We Got The Whole 9]

1 minute ago, squally1313 said:

I mean, filthy pitching staff plus best pen in several years plus the current offense, ranked 18th in baseball, is....a pretty good team on its own? Find a way to fit a premium bat around Busch/Happ/Dansby/Nico/Seiya, with PCA, Caissie, Shaw, Triantos, Alcantara, Ballesteros, etc all as either options or trade bait. 

Yes, it would be. How many realistic options do you see at C and 3B, though?

[squally1313]

7 minutes ago, We Got The Whole 9 said:

Yes, it would be. How many realistic options do you see at C and 3B, though?

Fair. I think, to your point, it looks exceedingly difficult to take this core and turn it into a 95 win team without blowing it up, which is probably what OP was (poorly/badly) trying to say when he talked about 'valuable sense' of the term playoff contender. But if you were to just make our catcher and third base production 20th in baseball vs where it is now (30th and 28th), that's 3 more wins just so far this year. Can you build a monster team if you have Happ/Bellinger/Seiya/Dansby/Nico/Busch fairly locked into your lineup? Probably not. Can you build an 87 win team? Yeah, and you aren't that far off.

[Tryptamine]

18 minutes ago, We Got The Whole 9 said:

Yes, it would be. How many realistic options do you see at C and 3B, though?

Honestly the best option in FA, if you can deal with having a full time DH and have come to terms with no Soto, is probably JD Martinez. 135 wRC+ last year, 133 this year. In FA at 3B/C your best bat is Bregman who is coming off a 125 wRC+ and is sitting at a 107 wRC+ this year. 

[Tryptamine]

16 minutes ago, squally1313 said:

Fair. I think, to your point, it looks exceedingly difficult to take this core and turn it into a 95 win team without blowing it up, which is probably what OP was (poorly/badly) trying to say when he talked about 'valuable sense' of the term playoff contender. But if you were to just make our catcher and third base production 20th in baseball vs where it is now (30th and 28th), that's 3 more wins just so far this year. Can you build a monster team if you have Happ/Bellinger/Seiya/Dansby/Nico/Busch fairly locked into your lineup? Probably not. Can you build an 87 win team? Yeah, and you aren't that far off.

Not that I think they'll spend to do it, but I think if you add Jansen/Bregman to that line up it becomes a super deep  90+ win lineup. No elite mega mashers, but that's like half a dozen guys who will finish in the 115-130 wRC+ range and 3 others that will hover around 100.

Edited July 15, 2024 by Tryptamine

[squally1313]

13 minutes ago, Tryptamine said:

Not that I think they'll spend to do it, but I think if you add Jansen/Bregman to that line up it becomes a super deep  90+ win lineup. No elite mega mashers, but that's like half a dozen guys who will finish in the 115-130 wRC+ range and 3 others that will hover around 100.

Bregman scares me. There's the short porch in left in Houston, the pretty clear decline in surface level stats, the fact that he's just another 30 year old first division/non all star starter on what will inevitably be another $20m deal. Really, I just want Shaw or Caissie to blow up somehow, despite having no expectations that the Cubs can produce that kind of bat. 

[We Got The Whole 9]

1 minute ago, squally1313 said:

Bregman scares me. There's the short porch in left in Houston, the pretty clear decline in surface level stats, the fact that he's just another 30 year old first division/non all star starter on what will inevitably be another $20m deal. Really, I just want Shaw or Caissie to blow up somehow, despite having no expectations that the Cubs can produce that kind of bat. 

I think it needs to come via trade. Unfortunately I think Paredes is the only option and he will have a lot of suitors. Maybe Jonathan India and move him there? This is what I am saying, there's like 4 realistic upgrade options combined at those 2 positions. I guess going just for league average offense could work but I hope as a last resort.

[CubinNY]

18 minutes ago, We Got The Whole 9 said:

I think it needs to come via trade. Unfortunately I think Paredes is the only option and he will have a lot of suitors. Maybe Jonathan India and move him there? This is what I am saying, there's like 4 realistic upgrade options combined at those 2 positions. I guess going just for league average offense could work but I hope as a last resort.

India is a terrible defender. I'd rather take a gamble on Shaw at 3rd if he continues to hit for the rest of the year in AAA/Sept call up. 

[squally1313]

6 minutes ago, TomtheBombadil said:

Almost exactly the Brewers 2018-2024

 

That team plus Hendricks at $16m, Bote at $5.5m, Neris at $9m, Smyly at $8.5m, Gomes at $6m, Barnhart at $2.5m, Mancini at $7m (total of $55.5m for a combined -1 WAR for the Cubs this year) all coming off the books. 

[FormerNorthSider]

That's a bit harsh, Matthew. Though the historical context shows depth.

“Do you hear the people sing? / Singing the song of angry men? / It is the music of a people / Who will not be slaves again!”

To the ramparts, Cubs fans!

[Matt W]

On 7/13/2024 at 2:46 PM, Illiterate Scholar said:

What if I told you Seiya is at +4 DRS and -1 OAA in his last 1500 innings in RF. 

 

4 hours ago, We Got The Whole 9 said:

I think it needs to come via trade. Unfortunately I think Paredes is the only option and he will have a lot of suitors. Maybe Jonathan India and move him there? This is what I am saying, there's like 4 realistic upgrade options combined at those 2 positions. I guess going just for league average offense could work but I hope as a last resort.

You’r spot on. I’ve crawled down that rabbit hole and come up empty-handed. If the 3B & C options end up being less robust, offensively, than hoped for, may be forced to shoot the moon at other positions ( 2B?) and just shoot for a reasonably high floor at *all* positions. At C , could it hurt to try to poach someone like Cartaya and see if you can get him back on track?

[jersey cubs fan]

6 hours ago, squally1313 said:

Can you build an 87 win team? Yeah, and you aren't that far off.

[Nolansomebody]

Never thought I would see a baseball article mention a pseudo-quote from the late 1840s, but stranger things have happened.