The Cubs Are Zagging, Just Like Everyone Else In Baseball, & That's A Problem

[matto1233]

Despite no major moves being made, it was still a jam-packed first week of the offseason for the Chicago Cubs and Major League Baseball as a whole.

Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

Cody Bellinger will be back with the North Siders for the 2025 season. Kyle Hendricks is now an Angel. Roki Sasaki will be posted and made available to MLB teams. 

Those all generated fairly major headlines. However, if you blinked, you might have missed this news, courtesy of Sahadev Sharma and Patrick Mooney at The Athletic: the Cubs will be making major structural changes to their scouting department. 

I’d recommend reading the whole article, but I’ll list some notable quotes here—the first being areas the Cubs will be expanding.

Quote

“More than ever, the Cubs will rely on data, video, and models to evaluate players. The Cubs are actively interviewing prospective candidates and looking for new talent in spaces such as R&D and player development, on top of the investments and hires already made in their efforts to find and develop international talent.”

That, at face value, is good! This is something that good teams do. The Cleveland Guardians, Milwaukee Brewers, and Tampa Bay Rays are all known as heavy analytics teams, and they have all had much more success than the Cubs since 2016. But, of course, there is a trade-off.

Quote

“While some areas have seen growth, others are being scaled back due to the Cubs’ shifting emphasis. In the amateur scouting department, one high-level scout was laid off, while two others left the organization and weren’t replaced. In player development, the Cubs axed a group of five senior staffers who had combined for roughly 200 years of experience in professional baseball. The biggest change has come in the Cubs’ pro scouting department, which has been drastically reduced.”

This comes pretty close to confirming a Bob Nightengale report from a couple of months back that “the Cubs told their scouting department that they no longer will scout games at any level except the complex league and the Dominican Summer League.” Yikes!

On one hand, I get it. Many teams feel that technology can fill the role in baseball that scouting has done for years. Why do I need a scout to tell me that Aaron Judge hits the ball hard when Statcast can just definitively tell me that he hit the ball harder, on average, than any other major leaguer this season?

On the other hand, though, this doesn’t feel like a decision that the big-market Chicago Cubs, the fourth most valuable team in Major League Baseball, should have to make. Two more lines from Sharma and Mooney’s article particularly bug me:

Quote

”In pursuit of what Hoyer has dubbed ‘The Next Great Cubs Team,’ most of these recalibrations amount to leaning further into a rational, emotionless strategy that relies on an analytics-based model to evaluate players. It’s a model-based approach that the Cubs have drifted toward in the aftermath of 2016.”

Newsflash: the aftermath of 2016 has not been particularly successful! The Cubs had a disappointing regular season in 2017, which was salvaged by a run to the NLCS. They have since made the playoffs only twice, no times in the past four seasons, and are 0-3 in those two playoff appearances. They consistently chase the small-market Milwaukee Brewers in the NL Central standings. To be clear, this is no dirt on Sharma and Mooney, who do great work. They even mention skepticism about this strategy, given the lack of results so far. 

Quote

“And, in a sense, it is a step away from clubs like the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, who use their financial might to combine their analytic models with robust scouting, even at the highest levels of the sport. The organizational changes, Cubs officials maintain, have been the product of carefully considered deliberation. From afar, Hoyer has long admired how the Guardians operated and understood how its model held more sway than traditional scouts.”

Let me get this straight: We acknowledge that the Yankees and Dodgers, who just played each other in the World Series, combine analytics and scouting. For some reason, the Cubs are not striving for that. Instead, they admire the Cleveland Guardians—the same small-market Cleveland Guardians that consistently run a payroll half that of the Cubs and have a valuation between three and four times less than the Cubs'. 

I recently had the pleasure of reading Future Value by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel. Ironically, I finished it the night before this article by Sharma and Mooney was published. It is a fantastic read, and I would suggest that any hardcore baseball fan check it out. They blend scouting stories with information on how the job is done and ultimately make a compelling case for keeping scouts around on some level. There is one quote from late in the book that I want to focus on in regards to so many MLB teams trimming their scouting staffs in favor of technology and analytics:

Quote

”If you’d read this whole book and think that, in this tech-saturated future, there isn’t value to zigging when people are zagging, then you haven’t been paying much attention… There will always be room for every spot on the spectrum if done effectively, and arguably most so when it appears that approach has been invalidated.”

Not only are the Cubs trying desperately to imitate teams like Cleveland or zagging while everyone else is zagging, but they’re most likely late in doing so anyway. In the same way, if someone tells you that there is some stock that you should invest in, you’ve most likely already lost your chance to make money on that stock. I’m sure the Guardians are constantly innovating and finding new ways to improve their models. I worry that by the time the Cubs even catch up, the Guardians will already be on to something new. 

Which isn’t to say that the Cubs shouldn’t even try. You have to start somewhere. But for a big market team that has money to spend, cutting your scouting department to save a buck feels like a really bad sign. Instead of cutting costs, the Cubs should look for ways to implement their resources and utilize a vigorous scouting staff and a full analytics department. Go out and create something better than Cleveland has; don’t imitate it. Because you’re the Chicago Cubs. Not the Cleveland Guardians. 

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[Transmogrified Tiger]

Some folks are so eager to be upset about bits of news that we end up with contradictory sentiments like the Cubs are doing what everyone else does(not true) while foolishly departing from what many other good organizations do.  Also the rush to label this about stats vs scouts is exhausting and oversimplified.

[NorthsideAvenger]

7 hours ago, TomtheBombadil said:

Maybe my favorite is, under the cult of neoliberalism, everyone thinking and acting the same (for someone else’s profit of course) is them just expressing how free and unique an individual they are