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

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.