Jed Hoyer Remains Terrible at Building Benches

Jed Hoyer has been in charge of building the Chicago Cubs roster since late 2020, when Theo Epstein resigned and Hoyer was promoted to president of baseball operations. The 2026 campaign, then, will be his sixth as the architect of the club. He's 0-for-6, so far, when it comes to building a solid bench.

This year, the glaring, flashing beacon of Hoyer's annual failure is Scott Kingery. Set to turn 32 next month, Kingery has 1,156 career plate appearances and a .227/.278/.382 batting line. He's a solid but unremarkable defender at any of a handful of positions. He is, by any definition, below the replacement level for a team with any semblance of developmental competence or resources to spend. By now, though, Cubs fans have become accustomed to having someone essentially unplayable keeping a portion of the bench warm each spring.

In 2021, Eric Sogard played 78 games for the Cubs, despite batting .249/.283/.314 and being unimpressive at each position where David Ross played him. In 2022, the team tried out Jonathan Villar, Michael Hermosillo, and Clint Frazier in stints of varying lengths. Those were rebuilding years, but those weren't players who came in via July trades; they were the team's Plan A for bench spots. 

Nor did things improve as (in theory) the Cubs pivoted toward contention in 2023. That was the year of Trey Mancini, Eric Hosmer and Edwin Rios, Though the 2023 Cubs' failures of depth were responsible for their missing the postseason, Hoyer learned nothing. In 2024, he brought back all three of Patrick Wisdom, Miles Mastrobuoni, and Nick Madrigal, when even a generous assessment and an optimistic vision would only have justified keeping two of them. He also sought a mulligan on his repeated failures at first base by signing Garrett Cooper. In 2025, having failed spectacularly again, he invested more resources in addressing the bench—but came up just as empty, because Justin Turner, Gage Workman and Vidal Bruján were uncannily, unaccountably similar to the players who had flopped in their very roles over the previous three years.

This winter, though, Hoyer did nothing better to deepen his positional roster. He's falling into a pattern that stretches across his tenure as the leader of the team: paying strict attention to detail in choosing big moves and mostly getting them right, but neglecting the bench or making the same mistakes there over and over. In fact, his approach to the bench has been very similar to the one he takes with the bullpen. It's worked like a charm for the relief corps, which might be giving the team false confidence about applying the same plan to the bench—where they've had no success whatsoever.

Under Hoyer, the Cubs have signed major free agents (Seiya Suzuki, Dansby Swanson, Cody Bellinger and Alex Bregman) and extended key contributors (Ian Happ, Nico Hoerner, Pete Crow-Armstrong). They've done well with those moves, and they build a solid starting lineup almost every year. But their lower-level moves have missed much more often than they've hit; the only mild exceptions are catchers Yan Gomes and Carson Kelly. 

This winter, Hoyer signed veteran slugger Tyler Austin, who was penciled into one spot on the bench. After he was hurt early in camp, though, the team scrambled a bit. They scooped up Michael Conforto, to complement the winner of a competition between minor-league signees Dylan Carlson and Chas McCormick for the fourth outfield spot. If Austin had been the team's only spring loss, they might have slotted Matt Shaw in as their backup infielder, but once Suzuki went down with a sprained PCL, the path opened for an extra infielder, with Shaw getting more time in right field.

Thus, Kingery will sponge up a spot on a team with playoff aspirations, for the first time in his entire career. He was once a moderately hyped prospect, but he was a bust, and his only significant playing time since the pandemic came with last year's Angels. It's a galling error in team-building to have Kingery on the roster, even if it's only for a fortnight. It's a stark reminder of Hoyer's consistent inability to keep up with (among others) the rival Milwaukee Brewers, who perennially find lots of value at the bottom of their roster and with low-level pickups. That's why the Brewers have run circles around the Cubs for the last half-decade, and if they beat Chicago out for a fourth straight division title in 2026, it will be for the same reason. 

Kingery didn't even play well this spring, except by drawing a fistful of walks and stealing some bases once he got on. He's on the roster solely because, when two players were hurt in the preseason, Hoyer's creaky construction of the roster was immediately exposed. It shouldn't be long before Kingery is pushed out, but even once he is, Conforto and Carlson will have relatively safe jobs—and neither is an especially good bet to have a good 2026. The Cubs must do better at this, but they extended Hoyer last summer, so the decision-maker will remain the same. Hoyer needs to do some serious self-evaluation and improve as a reinforcer of his positional core, but it's already too late to put the pieces in place as well as he should have for this year.