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Two winters ago, Jed Hoyer and his staff brought in Marcus Stroman and Seiya Suzuki on multiyear deals. Last winter, they signed Dansby Swanson and Jameson Taillon. In each offseason, they also made smaller, shorter-term, supplemental moves, like signing Mychal Givens and David Robertson before 2022 and bringing in Cody Bellinger and Michael Fulmer (while also re-signing Drew Smyly) before 2023. While those moves were (obviously) insufficient to turn the Cubs into a playoff team in either campaign, I counted both as successful offseasons.
As much as every fan base wants their teams to acquire one or three of the top five free agents in any given winter, the reality is that that's possible only in one of every two or three winters, and then only for certain teams. To be sure, the Cubs are among the teams for whom that should sometimes be possible, and we've discussed the possibility that Jed Hoyer's aversion to long-term deals with superstars will be a lasting problem at some length here. However, as I've tried to shape a consistent standard by which to distinguish successful winters from failures, I've circled back repeatedly to a very simple one: Every winter, a team should be acquiring more than one player they project to be above-average and who are under team control for multiple seasons. They should also be acquiring more than one additional player who makes them better for the coming season, without regard to whether they're a star or whether they'll be around beyond that campaign.
By that reckoning, this, too, has been a successful winter. Shota Imanaga and Michael Busch were each solid, valuable additions at non-premium prices, and the Cubs can keep them around for up to five and six years, respectively. Bellinger, Héctor Neris, and Yency Almonte are each likely to be shorter-term members of the team, but they all make the Cubs more robust for 2024, and all three could end up being around for 2025, as well.
That, obviously, does not mean that the Cubs shouldn't go make another late addition to their roster. They could use a better left-handed reliever, and they could absolutely use Jordan Montgomery or Blake Snell, as I wrote yesterday. Understanding the team's desire to maintain a balance between its present and future, though, I think the above markers are the right ones by which to judge every offseason for them, and since they checked both boxes this time around, they've had a successful winter.
Very often, especially in the modern sports media culture, we allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good. That the Cubs didn't sign Shohei Ohtani or Yoshinobu Yamamoto this winter is undeniably disappointing, because those are generational talents who would have transformed the franchise in a way that none of the players they've brought in (or brought back) do. It's also mildly frustrating that the team didn't cash in some of its trade capital for Juan Soto or Pete Alonso. Notice, though, that each of them would have fallen into the second, lesser bucket of winter acquisition anyway, and recall that the team did use a significant amount of prospect capital to land Busch, and those misses feel much more palatable.
There were enough open avenues to asserting themselves as NL Central favorites this winter that the Cubs do have to answer for the fact that they haven't done so. On balance, though, they've checked the right boxes for a third straight offseason. Do that two more times in the winters ahead, and they'll begin to see some of the longer-lasting, sustainable benefits that come from the approach, the way the Yankees, Dodgers, and Cardinals have done over the years.
As we turn our eyes away from the winter and toward Opening Day, how would you grade the Cubs' offseason? Why? Comment below.
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