Jed Hoyer Isn't Risk-Averse, He's Just Taking The Wrong Risks

The question to answer is whether his two high-profile misses will affect his ability to make the big swing needed to bring elite talent to Chicago.

The Michael Busch trade was a risk that has paid off; even though it cost newly minted top 100 prospect Jackson Ferris, it was worth it to solve first base finally. Shota Imanaga was a risk as well, but it has paid off. However, both risks would be considered minor; if Busch or Imanaga failed, the expense would not have been insurmountable. Jed Hoyer has shown adeptness in these types of transactions. Getting rid of Christopher Morel was also brilliant. Great moves, franchise-changing moves, and minimal downside compared to the upside.

Where Jed Hoyer has taken extreme risks, he has not had success. Hoyer's public messaging has been that he is risk averse. This is misleading; Jed Hoyer has not taken the long-term contracts and the risk associated with them in ten years, but this doesn't mean that his moves have been safe. In fact, two of them were all along incredibly risky and have not paid off that risk. This will affect Hoyer's future latitude and confidence in making these kinds of moves.

The first one is the drafting of Cade Horton at seven overall in 2022. Talent wasn't the issue; the real mistake was counting on a pitcher with only 53 innings to his name due to injury at the college level. There was nothing in his profile that suggested he would be able to sustain anything resembling a starting pitcher workload. Drafting Cade Horton was an unforced error.

The Cubs justified this pick with a vague notion of pool allocation, which should not have been a consideration as a large market team with a premium pick. With the seven picks coming from a teardown and multiple missed playoff seasons, Horton was precisely the swing the Cubs couldn't afford to miss.

With his recent shoulder injury, it's increasingly difficult to project Horton as a starter and even more so to project a meaningful role for him in 2025. There is simply no track record of sustained, healthy success. Even his lone college season was a slow ramp-up to his final six games, which were starts. Horton didn't eclipse seven innings until his final college game. In this ever-increasingly dangerous pitching injury environment, drafting Horton was not a safe choice to save some bonus pool money. It was an organizational flex designed to harness the power of the new pitching lab and develop a raw arm with great stuff into something sustainable. The risk was extreme all along, and 88 innings in one season, followed by a struggle in Iowa and an extended shoulder injury, put the exclamation point on this. Cade Horton was a huge risk disguised as "intelligent spending." The risk was baked into the price, making it seem less of a gamble than it actually was.

The second move discussed often on this site is the Dansby Swanson contract. When analyzing his deal, the online community immediately brings up WAR and how Dansby has more than Trea Turner, Carlos Correa, and Xander Bogaerts. The attempt here is to prove that Swanson was the safest choice of the four shortstops. The risk here should be obvious, however. Spending seven years and 177 million dollars on a defense-first player was a giant swing and a bet on the baseball acumen of the front office. The risk has been realized this year with Swanson being a negative value at the plate, so bad that he's in the bottom 15% of baseball.

Nobody was saying the Cubs absolutely had to get a shortstop entering 2023. Nico Hoerner manned the position capably. A defensive second baseman would not have broken the bank. But Hoyer and the Cubs saw something they loved in Dansby Swanson and rewarded him with the largest contract that any Cub would be projected to have for the seven years of his deal. At age 30, offensive slippage was always possible. Over the past two seasons, lower leg issues (knee, heel) have nagged Dansby into some really putrid stretches at bat. You simply cannot have your highest-paid player be a negative on either side of the field.

By signing the safest option for less money, Jed convinced himself and others that he was playing it safe with Swanson. In actuality, he signed an aging veteran coming off of a career offensive season to a very large contract. A player hitting seventh in a below-average lineup for 28 million dollars is no safe play. The Dansby Swanson contract was another massive risk that has not worked out.

With Jed Hoyer in the last year of his deal and this recent track record of misses on his biggest moves, one has to wonder if he will be reigned in this offseason. If his job is truly under scrutiny, he won't swim in the deep waters of Corbin Burnes or Juan Soto. He might not be anyway after demonstrating the ability to miss on major deals. He's taken many big swings; hopefully, these two misses don't hamper his ability to step up to the plate in the future.