'We've Come a Long Way': Jed Hoyer Sees Progress, But Does He Hear That Ticking?

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Cubs' chief baseball decision-maker believes his team is creeping steadily toward contention. If only that was how this worked.

Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports

Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer discussed the state of the franchise Monday, and while he fell in line with the tone of urgency and needed improvement set by manager Craig Counsell over the weekend, he framed it more optimistically.

“We talk about the gap, I think that we’ve come a long way, and I feel really good about the position we’re in, but there’s still a gap, and that last stretch, that’s what we have to make up," Hoyer told reporters. "We have a lot of room to get to those 90-win teams that we need to have."

Hoyer's hurry to highlight the team's closeness to genuine contention is a little bit self-serving, but it's also not unwarranted. After all, the Cubs are going to have a second straight winning season, after two straight lousy ones. Their run differential in each season will end up suggesting they're more like a 90-win team, just underachieving. They have steadily built up their farm system. What Hoyer sees is a team with a lot of pieces in place for the medium term, a lot of young talent rising through the ranks, and a defensible case as a co-favorite in the NL Central going into 2025--even as both he and Counsell acknowledge that the gap between the Cubs and the Brewers is real and persistent.

Whether the reality of the situation is more fairly described by the team's run differentials or their records, their fundamentals or their place in the standings, is up for some debate. It's an important question, too, since if you choose to focus on the Cubs' failure to keep up with Milwaukee in either of the last two divisional races and their having missed the postseason both years, you're likely to prescribe an active and fairly bold winter. If, on the other hand, you think this is a team that could as easily have won the division either of the last two years as not, you're likely to agree that the gap is closing and want to keep the train more or less on the tracks.

They're kind of boxed into it, but Counsell and Hoyer seem to be walking both sides of that fence. They have to believe, with separate parts of their own brains, that they're already making major progress, but also that they have a long way to go. It's the only way they'll find both the confidence and the urgency to do what needs doing.

I want to focus on one element that Hoyer seems to me to be overlooking or underrating, though: time. When Hoyer talks about closing that gap, he's talking about the last four years. He's talking about a series of trades that offloaded veterans en route to free agency and brought in youngsters. He's talking about an upward trajectory in win totals, starting around the middle of 2022 and continuing through the last two full seasons. He's seeing trend arrows pointing upward.

The problem with building great baseball teams, though, is that entropy acts on the process. It exerts a huge amount of drag on the process. Hoyer sees himself as building a team that can sustain competitiveness across half a decade or more. He might be right. He's rolling the dice, though, because it might turn out what he's building is going to erode faster than he can rebuild and refuel it.

Seiya Suzuki, Ian Happ, and Dansby Swanson are all 30 years old. They're key cogs of this team--arguably, its three best position players, and inarguably its three highest-paid. It's unlikely that any of them will be shipped out this winter, but it's also unlikely that any of them will be as good next year as they were this year, and they weren't good enough this year.

Hoyer can, and almost must, go out and usurp that trio by acquiring a position player better than any of them, but if he's thinking in incrementalist, sustainability-focused terms, he's unlikely to do so. He's much more likely to count on a collective improvement from the younger half of his positional corps, in Miguel Amaya, Nico Hoerner, Isaac Paredes, and Pete Crow-Armstrong, plussed up by the imminent arrivals of Kevin Alcantara, Matt Shaw, Owen Caissie, James Triantos, and Moises Ballesteros.

Maybe that will play out just as Hoyer expects, but there's risk in the approach. An accelerating decline by one of Swanson, Suzuki, or Happ is well within the realm of possibility. An injury or a failure to sustain linear developmental improvement from any of the younger players could also derail the plan. More importantly, keeping three guys in the lineup--including at shortstop, with Swanson--who are 31 years old means putting a certain cap on your team's defensive excellence. The Cubs need to be an elite defense to have an above-average run-prevention unit, because their pitching isn't likely to be at that level on its own.

Jameson Taillon, Shota Imanaga, Javier Assad and Justin Steele gave the team about 620 innings at an aggregate ERA around 3.10. Given the ages and health histories of those four guys, they're not likely to give them that much value next year. They might get considerably more value from Ben Brown, Cade Horton, and Jordan Wicks to balance things out, but then again, they might not. None of those hurlers have proved durable or established an ability to thrive in the big leagues across a full season of work.

Already, there's a story making the rounds that the Cubs will spend big on a frontline starting pitcher this winter. That's a good idea, but it will tie up resources. The team has to both score more runs and better prevent them next year, and the age, health, and performance profiles of the roster Hoyer has assembled make it hard to see how they'll do so. 

His methodical approach has been Hoyer's way of trying to survive the difficulty of getting better by the margin required. He knows attrition and aging will erode this core, which never got quite good enough to do anything satisfying, anyway. Building up the farm system and resisting the temptation to splurge on a superstar are supposed to give the team sufficient reinforcements when that happens, as long as Hoyer can keep finding values he likes on medium-term free-agent deals, like those he's recently handed out to Imanaga, Taillon, and Cody Bellinger. 

Now that he's locked into another half-decade with Swanson and two more years each with Suzuki, Happ, Bellinger, and Taillon, though, Hoyer has a bit less flexibility than he might have hoped. He's at some risk of having the core erode faster than expected, without getting the boost he hoped for from young talent. The way to make up for that is to find more of those good values he likes than usual this winter, bringing in high-impact free agents both for the pitching staff and for the positional group. The problem with that strategy is that finding those good values is hard.

At some point, Hoyer probably needs to break out of that value-focused mode of thought and splurge, after all--be it in the form of money or a trade from his prospect depth, or both. He needs to push in more chips and try harder to win in 2025, not because the team is perfectly positioned to do so or in order to trade the future to make the present better, but because the present isn't going to get good enough to make anyone happy unless he does so, and in that case, the future he envisions might never come.

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[Bertz]

One of the things that's ironic about this winter is that, sans context, it's actually a good time for Jed to hang out and let the winter come to him. The team is going to end up at about 83 wins this season, and before we have projections in hand I'd guess looks at about that same level heading into the winter.  With ~$50M to spend, or ~$75M without Bellinger, it's pretty straightforward to sign a couple short term contracts and buy your way to 88-90 wins. 

An 88 win caliber big league club, an absolutely loaded Iowa roster, and only one long term contract on the books is actually kind of a sweet spot for a value/process oriented GM like Jed.

But there is that context.  The last two winters Jed has stopped a move or two short of a slam dunk offseason because he spent all his cash and, Busch/Ferris swap aside, refused to meaningfully dip into the farm.  That plus the unfortunate shape of the playoff odds graphs the last two years make just coasting into '25 feel like a non-starter.  I don't think e.g. the moral victory of exciting Cade Horton and Kevin Alcantara rookie campaigns will keep Jed employed if the team misses the playoffs by a game again.

I will say I don't think an AJ Preller type offseason is totally necessary.  I think a typical Jed offseason with one somewhat painful prospect trade on to of it feels like enough.

[Soul]

Pretty good article Matt.  The biggest question to answer in this “gap” scenario is whether Jed is the right guy to take us from 80-something to 90-something.

To me the answer is clearly no.  If he really doesn’t understand the entropy concept that you laid out, I’d say that just further solidifies my opinion.

[CubinNY]

20 hours ago, Soul said:

Pretty good article Matt.  The biggest question to answer in this “gap” scenario is whether Jed is the right guy to take us from 80-something to 90-something.

To me the answer is clearly no.  If he really doesn’t understand the entropy concept that you laid out, I’d say that just further solidifies my opinion.

Jed is the perfect fit for the owners. He may get fired or leave at the end of the next season but we can rest assured that they will find another just like him. They have their idea of how to build a winning team and a financial limit they will not stray much past. They have their championship and will now and forever be counting coin. 

Edited September 26, 2024 by CubinNY

[Billy62]

     Excellent observations Matt!

[Soul]

4 hours ago, CubinNY said:

Jed is the perfect fit for the owners. He may get fired or leave at the end of the next season but we can rest assured that they will find another just like him. They have their idea of how to build a winning team and a financial limit they will not stray much past. They have their championship and will now and forever be counting coin. 

Jed's payroll keeps increasing though.  It seems like his seat should be red hot right now.