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Little mystery remains, because the choices the front office made this winter amounted to running back the same roster that won 83 games last season after a miraculous July turnaround that made them into contenders until the bottom fell out in September. The sample with which the Cubs front office can and should evaluate their own team is not half a season, but a season and a half, and that needs to be enough for them to see the obvious: they're not going anywhere with this group.
That's not to cast aspersions on any of Nico Hoerner, Justin Steele, Ian Happ, Seiya Suzuki, Cody Bellinger, Jameson Taillon, or even Dansby Swanson, individually. That group just doesn't add up to an adequate core around which to build a legitimate or long-term winner, given the shape of the rest of their roster and aging curve's gravity beginning to tug some of them in the wrong direction. They're a very good supporting cast waiting only on the superstar around which the whole thing can revolve, but because this front office is eternally, deleteriously conservative, they aren't getting that player. They missed two chances to acquire such a player this winter, and the evidence that they even tried especially hard is mixed, at best.
Jed Hoyer does not have it in him to add the kind of talent missing from this team, and despite so many revampings and reallocations that we've all lost count, the organization remains unable to develop their ostensibly promising young players into that kind of talent, either. The success stories (Ben Brown, Javier Assad, Jordan Wicks, Hoerner) all have to be qualified and caveated, while the failures (Hayden Wesneski, Miguel Amaya, Pete Crow-Armstrong) feel and appear abject. There's still time for all of those players, and a dozen others who have yet to debut, to take big steps forward, but the consistent improvement and the occasional breakout that good development organizations get from talented young players remain elusive for the Hoyer-run Cubs, as they were for the second half of the Theo Epstein Era.
This weekend, the team needed to look no further than into the other dugout to see the team they have wanted (and, perhaps, ought) to be. The Brewers are multi-talented. They've been nimble and opportunistic, picking up Willy Adames and William Contreras in trades when hardly anyone else even realized they were available; Christian Yelich in a blockbuster trade the likes of which the Cubs last attempted with Nomar Garciaparra; and Rookie of the Year candidate Joey Ortiz in a trade for a player they had under team control for one more season. They've developed relief pitchers as successfully as the Cubs did for the decade prior to this season, but whereas the Cubs do it by finding guys with funky secondary skill sets and little velocity, they do it with guys who then strike out 30% of opposing batters and throw in the upper 90s.
Most of all, because the Brewers not only have a fecund farm system but turn players who were not premium or high-bonus prospects into potential stars, they have a few of them on very team-friendly long-term deals. Freddy Peralta is still under team control on two team options after this season. Jackson Chourio, 20, could be retained at reasonable salaries until he's 30, if the Brewers want him for that long. They've done excellent scouting and player development, good coaching, and most importantly, proactive, fearless front-office work, across two and a half regimes. They're miles ahead of the Cubs, and not just in the 2024 NL Central standings.
The Cubs, of course, had plenty to hold their attention in their own dugout Saturday, when the latest defensive calamities from a team theoretically built around defense prompted Justin Steele to explode into an expletive-laden exhortation as he stomped down the steps after a two-run inning. In that frame, Hoerner failed to execute a rundown properly, but Christopher Morel ensured the miscue would cost the team an out by flubbing his reception of Hoerner's tardy throw. Pete Crow-Armstrong didn't quite make a play that would have been extraordinary from an average center fielder, but which a player who had a .395 OPS for the month of June had better make in order to be a big-leaguer.
Steele was right to be upset, but any satisfaction Cubs fans could find in his release of an emotion many of them have been feeling for weeks was extremely short-lived. On Sunday, another out-not-made by Morel (not an error, not quite even a misplay; just a ball that an above-average third baseman makes into an out, but on which he was nowhere close to doing so) and a fly ball Happ followed around the world but never could catch helped seal Kyle Hendricks's miserable fate, as the magic of Hendricks's June un-swoon faded and the Brewers crushed two home runs against him.
It would be excruciating for the Cubs' decision-makers to have to lean into another rebuild, but they would be foolish not to sell--and sell aggressively--before this month ends. This would require a lot of proactivity and cleverness, and it's not clear that Hoyer is any more capable of that than he was of building a winning team. His only successful sell trades were, ultimately, reactive, and despite the ugly standings, these would have to be proactive.
Already, we've brought you pieces advocating trading one of Happ and Suzuki; dealing Hoerner; or even getting value for Steele, while they can. Expect us to continue discussing those topics throughout the next 30 days. We'll also muse about whether the team can get any value in exchange for Héctor Neris, Drew Smyly, Mark Leiter Jr., or Tyson Miller, or even escape part of their financial obligations to one of the first two; what trying to trade Bellinger (with his complicated, player-friendly deal) would look like; and who should get the playing time trading any of those players might create. The team needs more information to make better decisions about key players for their future, so they had better make sure that those players have room in the lineup, rotation, or bullpen down the stretch.
Most of those players are under team control well beyond this season, though, and a few of them have contractual situations that will make moving them difficult. The best guess is that Hoyer won't do very much, but it is the official editorial position of this website that he had better do so. The Cubs are bad in 2024. They probably won't be especially good in 2025, but there's still some room to make progress toward that goal by being aggressive immediately. If they sit on their hands and hope for things to get better, things will, instead, get much worse. There is a perfectly good chance that the next good Cubs team is five or six years away, and unless the front office wakes the [pick your word] up, that chance will only increase over the coming months.
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