The Cubs are Betting Big On Internal Improvements

After the signing of Shota Imanaga, the Cubs made another surprising move, trading tantalizing pitching prospect Jackson Ferris and toolsy teenager Zyhir Hope to the Los Angeles Dodgers for third baseman Michael Busch and reliever Yency Almonte.

Those were two savvy moves, as the Cubs got Imanaga on a four-year contract worth well below what he was projected to get, and in Busch, they plucked a top-75 prospect in all of baseball from a team with a surplus of corner infielders and power hitters. It fit perfectly into Jed Hoyer’s M.O., as the Cubs waited out the market to land talented players for relatively good prices.

The team will make more moves as the offseason progresses. Hoyer himself said this was just the “fourth of the fifth” inning of the Cubs’ offseason, and the roster will be fleshed out in greater detail than it is now. Plenty of free-agent targets still exist, like an expenditure on reliever Robert Stephenson or a reunion with Cody Bellinger. The trade market is bustling, too, as Cleveland, Miami, the White Sox, and others have attractive starters to dangle as trade bait. 

Whatever the Cubs do from here, though, they’ve already announced to their fans and to the baseball world that they’re comfortable slow-playing their rise to contention. Armed with a farm system most analysts agree is in the top three in the game and led by new manager Craig Counsell, the North Siders are betting big on their ability to develop players internally. 

It’s not a crazy concept, predicated on blind faith. In the 2023 season alone, the Cubs saw career seasons or baseline-establishing breakouts from Christopher Morel, Nico Hoerner, and Seiya Suzuki on the positional side. On the pitching front, Justin Steele became an All-Star; Javier Assad became an invaluable swingman between the rotation and bullpen; Adbert Alzolay firmly established himself as the team’s closer; and Jordan Wicks came up to the big leagues in September during a playoff race and performed admirably. 

The minor leagues have seen an even greater abundance of breakthroughs, as Pete Crow-Armstrong and Cade Horton have been joined by Kevin Alcántara, Matt Shaw, Owen Caissie, Ben Brown, Moises Ballesteros, and James Triantos on various Top 100 prospect lists around the baseball world. The trade for Busch (a Top 100 prospect in his own right) saw the Cubs deal out Ferris, a supremely talented left-handed starting pitching prospect. When was the last time the Cubs had such a surplus of young starting pitchers that they were able to consider it a position of strength for the organization?

Nevertheless, the Cubs were an 83-win team last year, falling a single victory shy of making the playoffs. The NL Central is as available for the taking as it's ever been, with last year’s champion, the Milwaukee Brewers, losing Counsell, Brandon Woodruff and more this winter. The Cubs’ willingness to let the big fish on the market swim by may keep the accounting books clean, but the team currently projects to finish in the same bracket of Wild Card contenders as last year, according to the recent 2024 ZiPS projections. 

Staking their season on the improvements of their in-house guys is both a show of faith in their coaching staff and players, and a commentary on the state of the league. The Dodgers and Atlanta Braves are the best teams in the National League, by a country mile. There is no move (or collection of moves) the Cubs could make in a single offseason that would put their roster on par with the NL East's and NL West's defending champions, at least on paper. Why shell out tens of millions of dollars and multiple top-100 prospects for a few players who wouldn’t push the needle beyond the Cubs’ current ceiling of being the NL’s three seed? 

Looking ahead to next season, Ian Happ, Hoerner, Suzuki, Dansby Swanson, and the catching tandem of Yan Gomes and Miguel Amaya are locked into everyday spots in the lineup. Steele, Imanaga, Kyle Hendricks and Jameson Taillon are locked into the rotation, while Alzolay, Assad, Julian Merryweather and Mark Leiter Jr. figure to be fixtures in the bullpen. That leaves four spots in the lineup (plus four additional bench slots), one rotation spot and half of a bullpen to fill out before Opening Day on Mar. 28. There are still signings and trades to come, to be sure, but most of those roster openings will be filled by players already repping a Cubs uniform. 

The Cubs won’t enter next season as a prohibitive favorite to win anything, barring a massive trade for Shane Bieber and Emmanuel Clase of the Cleveland Guardians that puts Chicago in the driver’s seat in the NL Central. However, the roster is already good enough to compete for a Wild Card, and the team is just an All-Star season from Wicks or an unexpected Silver Slugger-caliber campaign from Shaw away from prying their window of contention wide open.

Do you share the sense that most of the team's strategy for the coming year is to bank on internal progress? How are you feeling, four weeks out from spring training and with so much left unsettled?