Cubs Video
There is an infamous quotation ascribed to the French revolutionary leader (not that French Revolution; no, not that one, either; the Revolution of 1848) Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Although briefly the chief champion of the proletariat during that mid-century uprising, he failed to provide decisive leadership at the crucial moment of that would-be bloodless coup, and when the working class was thwarted, Ledru-Rollin became largely unwelcome both among that constituency and among the empowered nobility from which he had emerged and with which he clumsily sided, late in the going.
"There go my people," Ledru-Rollin is purported to have said when the action began to percolate. "I must find out where they are going, so I can lead them."
It's almost certainly an apocryphal quote. In the latter decades of Romanticism in Europe, hard facts weren't as important as finding just the right way to capture the soul of a moment. The reason we still hear this not-quite-factual quasi-aphorism, though, is that its inventors nailed it. They nicely encapsulated the odious thing about Ledru-Rollin, in the view of the general public, in two pithy sentences. He was meant to be a leader, and he let a whole lot of people down because he turned out not to understand what it was he was meant to be leading, or to have the courage and competence to lead it successfully.
There are 15 days left before the 2024 MLB trade deadline. That's all the time Jed Hoyer has to separate himself from Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Right now, he's right on the precipice of being buffeted right into a corner by his own "people," the team of which he is the president of baseball operations, for the second year in a row.
You can't adequately substitute any other trait for decisive leadership, and you can't fake it, either. Hoyer was dealt a tough hand last season, when the Cubs scuffled badly until the All-Star break, only to go on such a torrid streak that he had virtually no choice but to make buyer-like moves at the trade deadline. Yet, those moves didn't make the team clear favorites for anything, and indeed, they missed the playoffs altogether. Nor did Hoyer elect to let that season's momentum build by making big splashes on the player talent market over the past offseason. Nor did he use their September stagger as pretext to seriously reorganize the roster.
A year later, he's overseen a team with a new manager but most of the same old faces, and a combination of insufficient star power, insufficient depth, and plain old bad luck put his club behind the 8-ball entering July. Then, over their final week and a half before the All-Star break, they got pretty hot again. They won eight of their final 11 before this four-day summer interstice.
"It's not the road you want to travel," Hoyer said about the way the season has gone, during an appearance on the Marquee Network game broadcast last Saturday. "Last year, we almost felt like we were going day to day, which you never want to do, but we were sort of day to day thinking about which direction we were going to go in." He admitted that that's basically what the team is doing this season, too.
That is, on its face, a recipe for persistent failure, not just on a single-season basis but in the great project that should be building the Cubs into a dynastic force in the NL Central. If Hoyer wanted either the 2023 or the 2024 teams to be genuinely good, he should have invested more in them before Opening Day and been more proactive in his problem-solving once their flaws became glaringly obvious in the early going.
He's missed those chances. There's every chance that, left to their own devices, the Cubs will come out of the break by winning five of their first nine. That would put them at 52-56, and it would probably have them within three games of the third Wild Card berth in the National League. With two days before the deadline, at that point, would Hoyer shift into buy mode? Could he possibly rebuild the entire lousy bullpen, make up for the faltering depth of the rotation, and add the missing dynamism to the lineup in those two days? No chance.
If Hoyer is just trying to preserve leverage in trade conversations by playing up the possibility of a surge, or if he's playing a public-relations game and actually intends to sell aggressively, we'll know it soon. Right now, though, he sounds like Ledru-Rollin. He got this job because his longtime boss and mentor had enough of a halo around his head to handpick his successor as he walked out the door, and that halo was made from a reputation for clear-eyed, aggressive leadership. Hoyer's letting that halo clatter to the ground, a tarnished and ungrasped brass ring.
Standing pat looks like the most likely scenario for the Cubs over the next fortnight. It would be a calamitous one. They are a team paralyzed by its own okayness, with a core not good enough to do what this franchise ought to be dead-set on doing, lurching toward old age and immovable contract status. They have a strong farm system, but not a generational or transformational one. They should be tenacious in their pursuit of young talent, even if it costs them young talent. The best thing Hoyer has done since taking over the team was the Michael Busch trade, and while that was an opportunity not entirely of his own creation, the lesson from it should be to try more things like it.
The Cubs aren't a playoff team this season--at least not in any valuable sense of that term. They're not especially close to being one in 2025. Their leader needs to lead them, rather than waiting to see in which direction his collection of people confusedly run over the next two weeks. If he does that, he might still not get the pleasure of seeing the fruits of the seeds of change he plants. (He can ask a handful of other leaders, from other French revolutions, all about that.) But he would, at least, be planting seeds the fruit of which will be worth seeing, instead of preciously tending a garden that will never yield more than a few stew-grade tomatoes.
Recommended Comments
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now