With a Clearing-Out of the Coaching Staff, Cubs Offseason is Underway

[Matthew Trueblood]

One secondary cost of signing a free-agent manager at the last moment, last winter, was that the Cubs didn't get to build the coaching staff their new skipper might want in the long run. Now, they've cleared their path to doing so.

Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-Imagn Images

On the day after the end of the season, the Cubs dismissed coaches Mike Napoli, Jim Adduci, and Darren Holmes--among others. Jesse Rogers of ESPN reported that the firings also included strength coaches, on the heels of a season in which injuries were a significant hurdle to success.

The early indications, ahead of Jed Hoyer's season-summarizing press conference Tuesday morning, are that the rest of the staff is likely to remain intact. If anything, it might be more surprising that there haven't been more dismissals, but the team believes strongly in--and Craig Counsell worked well and established rapid rapport with--Ryan Flaherty, Tommy Hottovy, and others.

Last November, the team surprised everyone--including, in some senses, itself--by firing David Ross and replacing him with Counsell. It gave them what they viewed as a newfound competitive advantage, because Counsell is arguably the best skipper in baseball. However, changing managers relatively late in the game's annual hiring cycle made it difficult for the team to make more than cosmetic changes to the staff working beneath Counsell, and the positions they did turn over had to go to whoever was available.

There will be more time, more latitude, and more leverage for the team this time. They might or might not pry away some of the coaches with whom Counsell worked during his tenure with the Milwaukee Brewers, like Chris Hook, Ozzie Timmons, Jim Henderson, Quintin Berry, or Walker McKinven. Even if they can't or don't want to do so, though, they'll be able to chase the best possible coaching talent. The market is not as dried up, not as constrained as it was last fall.

Coaches, of course, are not wizards. The Cubs' problems this year--maybe even the ones that aren't explainable by their talent shortfalls, the ones that seemed to come from maddening failures of approach or preparation--can not necessarily be solved even by superb coaching, and since hiring coaches is an inexact science, we can't even really know whether the Cubs will end up with a better staff than they had this past season.

That said, they never believed they had the right, final, permanent mix in the coaching staff they pulled together for Counsell's first season. And while it's important not to oversell the extent to which their underachievement on the field was attributable to coaching, it's equally important to understand that great coaching is a force multiplier, helping teams get more out of their talent, rather than less. Organizationally, the team has viewed a few changes to this staff as a critical step in an offseason that will need to include a lot of change, and this barrage of dismissals lays the groundwork for the transformations they've been envisioning.

A manager is an extremely valuable member of a big-league organization. Some fans and analysts don't believe that, but plainly, the Cubs do. That's why they ponied up for Counsell. However, in the job title of the manager, you can sense what's really going on. A manager's effectiveness and their impact are bounded by the talent with which you surround them, including player talent and coaching talent, and by their familiarity and ability to work with all that talent. The Cubs will have a manager who's had more time to get familiar with and more chances to shape his own staff next season, and that should be substantially valuable. It doesn't diminish what they need to do to upgrade their roster, but it's still an important development at the front end of their offseason.

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[Bertz]

It says a lot about Craig, in a good way, that he didn't push Hottovy and Kelly aside just for the sake of finding his own guys.  

[Transmogrified Tiger]

27 minutes ago, Bertz said:

It says a lot about Craig, in a good way, that he didn't push Hottovy and Kelly aside just for the sake of finding his own guys.  

It's not unexpected given what we know of Counsell and Jed, but also nice that they didn't reach for the easy button of firing Kelly given the external headwinds on the offense.

[Tryptamine]

All I can say is Jed had better not be in hibernation until nearly January again this offseason. 

[We Got The Whole 9]

42 minutes ago, Tryptamine said:

All I can say is Jed had better not be in hibernation until nearly January again this offseason. 

Jed was right to wait out the reliever market. It's always a ****** market to play in anyway and like 80% of them went on to have crappy years vs expectations. He hung in there for Ohtani which was the biggest farce of a FA whale in our lifetimes, went and got a plug-and-play TORP and a 1B who finished top 10 at his position, above the Polar Bear guy some people clamored for. If anything he should have stuck to his intuition and said we don't horsefeathers need Hector Neris even if it is just a 1-year deal, and to keep developing our own guys. Maybe Hodge gets a shot sooner and runs with the job.

 

You basically have to use some serious cherry picking and hindsight to declare what he missed out on while waiting to make his move. Shota and Busch were a couple of the best moves league-wide.