Cubs' Utter Lack of Homegrown Talent from Latin America Remains a Glaring Problem

Jorge Soler?

I think the article is generally correct in its point and way overly dramatic in its title. There is a dearth of impact players from Latin America for the Cubs. But there is not an "Utter Dearth of Homegrown Talent".

Alzolay and Amaya are completely home grown. Palencia, Canario and Alcantara were developed here (to the same extent as Oneill Cruz for the Pirates).

Insufficient? Absolutely.

"Utter Dearth"? Way over the top drama.

Blaming a team for not having an Acuna or a Tatis level player is, frankly, silly.  Those are pure lottery tickets, and it's especially clear when you see they got 6 figure deals instead of top of the market bonuses that even the teams had no idea.  Further, very good IFA teams like the Yankees and Astros have not produced guys like that in my adulthood.

To the topic broadly, it's clear that the team was extremely good at the IFA piece during the first half of Theo's tenure.  Soler, Torres, Jimenez, Assad, Amaya, etc., etc. 

It's clear that something broke in approximately 2016, because the back half of the Theo tenure is bleak.    I might be missing a reliever or something, but it looks like the only guys with even a chance at MLB time still are Kevin Made, Pablo Aliendo, and Richard Gallardo.  Likely bit players even in the unlikely event they make it.  And what's most notable. and needs to be kept in mind during these types of conversations, is we had ZERO idea st the time that the worm was turning.  We were all riding high with Gleyber and Eloy and reports that guys were signing with us because Javy was so gosh darn popular.  But things were broken and it took ~3 years for it to become obvious publicly.

In that vein, the Jed era is too early to say.  Sans those super duper mega stars like Acuna, you're usually looking minimum 4-5 years between signing and debut.  We know the front office was largely overhauled in 2019.  The IFA classes from '20 on still look pretty good, though everyone besides Ballesteros is in A ball or lower still.  But Cristian Hernandez, Jefferson Rojas, Alfonsin Rosario, Pedro Ramirez, plus generally strong reports out of the complex leagues makes it feel like that LatAm pipeline is functioning properly again. 

It's odd to me that an article on this topic appeared to cherry pick individual success stories instead of doing a team-by-team comparison.  Don't get me wrong, it's infuriating how certain teams like the Brewers and Rays seem to churn out these sorts of guys on a regular basis despite operating on significantly lower budgets than the Cubs.  It also feels like a stretch to attribute Oneil Cruz's success to the Pirates when the Dodgers were the team who originally scouted and signed him, plus he had spent time in the Dodgers' system before being traded.

However, there is the matter that developing 16 and 17 year old international prospects can be a long, long, long road.    Cristian Hernandez is 20 years old.  The Cubs signed Cristian Hernandez back in January of 2021, and only recently did he finally produce at a meaningful level, and even he is still at least three years away from being ML-ready.  Guys like Valdez and Cruz may not see the majors for another 5-6 years within reasonable expectations.  It seems criminally unfair to penalize and criticize guys for not producing as superstars when they've just been teenagers for most, if not all, of their tenures with this team.

MLB's changes to international signings beginning in 2017 also need to be taken into account.  The CBA completely undercut a team's ability to consistently out-spend other teams on a year to year basis with international players, as there has been a hard cap on what teams can spend on a year basis, with penalties assessed for teams exceeding the cap.  This evened the playing field, but it definitely hurt the Cubs, who were big players even before Theo took the reins.  It's disingenuous for someone to claim the Cubs should be spending big on international players when they simply cannot do that the way they did pre-2016 CBA.

In summary, this article reads like a conclusion in search of facts. 

So, with all that said, what I want to know is, where do the Cubs stack up relative to all other MLB teams over the last decade in terms of international youth signings and development?  Rather than focus on an individual success story or two, how do the Cubs stack up overall against their division rivals, and against the rest of baseball overall?  My suspicion is they are likely middle of the pack, but, if there is evidence that the Cubs produced poorly relative to all other teams, I am willing to listen and discuss what they need to do to fix it.

I'd be very surprised if they haven't been bottom 10 post-Eloy and Gleyber. That may change soon but the results have been pretty poor over that period. The biggest thing is they don't seem to have any high ceiling IFA bonafide SP. It seems like most orgs always have 1 or 2 of thse guys in the top 10.

Something that *feels* true to me but I don't know for sure that it is: IFA has become less successful in recent years league-wide.  

For a quick point of comparison, this year there were 38 pitchers age 25 or under that reached at least 1 fWAR(reachable for swingmen and good relievers).  By my count 5 of them were IFA(13%).  If I turn the dial back 5 years to 2019, there were 33 such pitchers and 9 of them were IFA(27%) by my quick check.

That seems to correlate to both the CBA changes and the rise in teams being able to teach 'stuff'(which is the differentiator for a lot of IFA) via pitch dev, so it makes sense to me as an explanation.  Not sure if that would hold true for hitting as well(where teaching tools has been less rapid) or if there's other factors, but useful to think about when comparing across those eras just for the Cubs.

10 minutes ago, Transmogrified Tiger said:

Something that *feels* true to me but I don't know for sure that it is: IFA has become less successful in recent years league-wide.  

For a quick point of comparison, this year there were 38 pitchers age 25 or under that reached at least 1 fWAR(reachable for swingmen and good relievers).  By my count 5 of them were IFA(13%).  If I turn the dial back 5 years to 2019, there were 33 such pitchers and 9 of them were IFA(27%) by my quick check.

That seems to correlate to both the CBA changes and the rise in teams being able to teach 'stuff'(which is the differentiator for a lot of IFA) via pitch dev, so it makes sense to me as an explanation.  Not sure if that would hold true for hitting as well(where teaching tools has been less rapid) or if there's other factors, but useful to think about when comparing across those eras just for the Cubs.

92 current prospects on Fangraphs are rated as a 50 FV or better, 26 were IFAs (28.3%).  In the earliest list they have on The Board, 2017, it appears to be 41 out of 133 (30.8%).

I don't know if that 2.5% difference in makeup between draft IFA feels meaningul to me, but I will say nearly 40% fewer IFAs overall in those impact grades certainly does.

One of the things I absolutely loved about the Cubs' approach to IFA prior to the 2016 CBA was the attempts at making inroads in places like Korea, Taiwan, Europe, and Australia. They ultimately didn't get a whole lot to show for their efforts (Hak-Ju Lee and Hee Seop Choi being the notable exceptions), but it seemed like there was a fair amount of untapped potential in those markets. It also felt like other teams were more active in those markets pre-CBA with names like Liam Hendriks and Max Kepler sticking out to me.

I'm frankly racking my brain trying to come up with IFAs from those markets who've signed and come to prominence in MLB in recent memory.

13 hours ago, Bertz said:

Blaming a team for not having an Acuna or a Tatis level player is, frankly, silly.  Those are pure lottery tickets, and it's especially clear when you see they got 6 figure deals instead of top of the market bonuses that even the teams had no idea.  Further, very good IFA teams like the Yankees and Astros have not produced guys like that in my adulthood.

To the topic broadly, it's clear that the team was extremely good at the IFA piece during the first half of Theo's tenure.  Soler, Torres, Jimenez, Assad, Amaya, etc., etc. 

It's clear that something broke in approximately 2016, because the back half of the Theo tenure is bleak.    I might be missing a reliever or something, but it looks like the only guys with even a chance at MLB time still are Kevin Made, Pablo Aliendo, and Richard Gallardo.  Likely bit players even in the unlikely event they make it.  And what's most notable. and needs to be kept in mind during these types of conversations, is we had ZERO idea st the time that the worm was turning.  We were all riding high with Gleyber and Eloy and reports that guys were signing with us because Javy was so gosh darn popular.  But things were broken and it took ~3 years for it to become obvious publicly.

In that vein, the Jed era is too early to say.  Sans those super duper mega stars like Acuna, you're usually looking minimum 4-5 years between signing and debut.  We know the front office was largely overhauled in 2019.  The IFA classes from '20 on still look pretty good, though everyone besides Ballesteros is in A ball or lower still.  But Cristian Hernandez, Jefferson Rojas, Alfonsin Rosario, Pedro Ramirez, plus generally strong reports out of the complex leagues makes it feel like that LatAm pipeline is functioning properly again. 

What he said. 🙂

17 hours ago, Transmogrified Tiger said:

Something that *feels* true to me but I don't know for sure that it is: IFA has become less successful in recent years league-wide.  

For a quick point of comparison, this year there were 38 pitchers age 25 or under that reached at least 1 fWAR(reachable for swingmen and good relievers).  By my count 5 of them were IFA(13%).  If I turn the dial back 5 years to 2019, there were 33 such pitchers and 9 of them were IFA(27%) by my quick check.

That seems to correlate to both the CBA changes and the rise in teams being able to teach 'stuff'(which is the differentiator for a lot of IFA) via pitch dev, so it makes sense to me as an explanation.  Not sure if that would hold true for hitting as well(where teaching tools has been less rapid) or if there's other factors, but useful to think about when comparing across those eras just for the Cubs.

Tom mentioned it but I think BA (or Athletic?) had an article about how down IFA is across baseball since there were only 10-15 IFAs in their top 100. One of the reasons given was the end of short season ball disproportionally hurting players signed at 16 and 17.

The biggest surprise to me was that there were only 2 IFA pitchers in the top 100 and they both got 7-figure bonuses.

When it comes to 20-year old Venezuelans doing well at AAA: