Matthew Trueblood

The Cubs have a solid, veteran outfielder who doesn't fit into their long-term plans, at least as a regular starter. Should they trade him, though, or is the value he'd command outstripped by what he means to the existing team? Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports For the second straight season, Mike Tauchman has been a pleasant surprise amid a roster full of disappointment. He's roughly a league-average hitter, with on-base skills making up the huge majority of his value. He's a fine outfielder, a bit below average in center field but a bit better than average in either corner. He's also a stolid, respectable presence in the clubhouse and on the team, and his approach is a great example to young players, even if they're not all able to emulate him. If things were better on the North Side, it would be a no-brainer to keep Tauchman. Craig Counsell was quick to promise him a roster spot this spring, because he identified him as a valuable piece of a winning club. Tauchman is batting .246/.343/.358, even amid a 2-for-20 struggle since returning from the groin strain that sidelined him for a month. He's a local product, and the fans appreciate the way he goes about his business. After this season, the Cubs will still have two years of team control on him. Even for a team with nothing to play for in August and September, Tauchman isn't without value. On the other hand, the playing time Tauchman soaks up is necessarily at the expense of someone (be it Pete Crow-Armstrong, Christopher Morel, Michael Busch, or a young player for whom there's not even room on the roster while he's around) whom the team would like to evaluate and develop down the stretch. There's also an opportunity cost to keeping him. Though a late bloomer without the power that teams value above all else in the modern game, Tauchman has some trade value. His team control might not be priced in the way one would like, but that's because he might also not be a player the team wants to retain for the long haul, anyway. He'll turn 34 years old this winter. Given all that, maybe the best and noblest course is to trade Tauchman this week. He won't fetch much, but even a far-off project or a depth piece could be a nice addition to the organization, and it's hard to envision him being an especially helpful piece beyond this season. The Cubs traded Joc Pederson to Atlanta in July 2021, getting only forgettable first base prospect Bryce Ball in return, and they wouldn't get much more than that type of player for Tauchman. However, they could also further burnish their reputation as an organization that does right by players, by giving Tauchman a chance to play meaningful baseball and (perhaps) earn both some extra money and some well-deserved glory by contributing to a team chasing a championship. It's a dilemma. It's a reflection of how frustrating and sad this season has been, because neither keeping nor trading Tauchman feels very good under these circumstances. Then again, there's some reason to feel good, too. Tauchman has had a solid year and a half playing in front of hometown fans, coming up with big hits and making big plays in the outfield. There will be pleasant memories of him even if his Cubs career is nearly over, and if they do retain him, he'll make the team more respectable and more watchable down the stretch. Tauchman is a good story, even nestled into a rather sad one. Whichever way the organization decides to go in the coming days, they've gotten good value from a minor-league signing, and there's upside in either course of action. View full article

With just a fistful of days left before the MLB trade deadline, the direction and a few constraints are clear. The 2024 Cubs aren't good, and Jed Hoyer has helpfully acknowledged that he won't trade for players who only help this season's team. With a robust farm system and a pressing need to be better next year, though, could they pry loose a star-caliber contributor with significant team control? Image courtesy of © Andrew Dieb-USA TODAY Sports That Hoyer and company understand their situation better than to try to make short-term upgrades is encouraging. The next logical question they face, though, is an equally important one: how do you go about acquiring players who represent long-term upgrades, and who can help you avoid the grisly fate of being this forgettable again in 2025? The obvious answer is to be patient, develop what is one of the league's stronger farm systems, and make a splash or two in free agency this winter. But what if the right opportunity is out there right now, rather than later? The Cubs aren't the only disappointed club looking to build for the future this month, and they're much closer to contention than a few of the others, like the Athletics, Angels, White Sox, and Rockies. (Hey, that almost sounded like a carefully chosen list!) Some of those other teams have great players under team control beyond 2025, who could be part of the Cubs' next winning window--but they also have significant motivation to move those guys now. Waiting until this winter (let alone next summer) might not be an option. So, which guys are good enough to justify paying a high price in young talent right now (even though it includes the cost of their contributions for the balance of 2024, which won't matter), to position the Cubs as a championship-caliber team for the next half-decade? Luis Robert Jr. Robert isn't as young as he might feel. He'll turn 27 just after the trade deadline. He's also vulnerable to lots of whiffs, and as he's tried to tone down his aggressiveness and accept some walks this season, he's seen his strikeout rate spike to the north side of 33%. There are also major durability questions, given that last year was the only one of his career in which he's played anything like a full season. Those are the downsides, and they're familiar refrains to most Cubs fans, because Robert plays right across town and the mounting frustration for Sox fans is well-known. The upsides make up for all that. Robert doesn't hit for power as consistently as you might like or expect, given his tools, but last year was the breakthrough in that regard, as he hit 38 homers and 75 total extra-base hits. When he's been on the field this year, it's been the same story. Built like a strong safety, Robert is going to keep popping plenty of homers, and his speed translates to plenty of stolen bases and some strong defense in center field. He's under contract through 2027, if whichever team controls that contract exercises each of their options, and will only cost $55 million in total over the next three seasons. Trading with a team with whom you share a city is tough, but we know the Cubs and Sox are capable of it. Hoyer has a farm system strong enough to put together a leading offer for Robert, and few players with any degree of availability are capable of transforming the Cubs lineup the way Robert could. Garrett Crochet Speaking of the White Sox, of course, Crochet is making huge headlines. If he weren't on an innings limit for this season, he'd be a very legitimate AL Cy Young Award contender, with power stuff that has translated surprisingly smoothly to starting after an early career spent in the bullpen. The caveat in that sentence looms large for contenders who are interested, though, because his usage limitations will cap his impact on anyone's World Series aspirations for 224. Though four years Justin Steele's junior, Crochet is actually a year closer to free agency. His fast track to the big leagues and subsequent injury troubles have shaped one of the strangest career arcs in recent memory. He's under team control for just two more seasons after this one, but an acquiring team would be in a decent position to negotiate an extension with him. Even without one, he'd be such a high-impact addition that it's tantalizing. Brent Rooker Injuries and the pandemic distorted the early career of Rooker, too, making a player whose profile made him a good candidate to bloom late all along guaranteed to do so. He's bloomed in extraordinary fashion since the start of last season, though, with 30 homers in 2023 and 23 already this year, all playing his home games in Oakland. A take-and-rake pull-side slugger, Rooker could hit 35 or 40 homers in a good year at Wrigley Field. He strikes out a ton, but also draws plenty of walks, and would be the traditional cleanup man the team has needed for at least three years. Rooker will turn 30 this November, but still has three seasons of team control remaining after this year. He's not likely to be good much longer than that, but the Cubs wouldn't need him to be. They could pay the price to get him, and slot him into their lineup right away, with increased confidence that 2025 will find him anchoring a more powerful offense. He'll get expensive in arbitration after that, but not prohibitively so, and for a team desperately needing pop, he's an obvious target. Logan O'Hoppe This is a bit of an out-there idea. O'Hoppe, 24, is under team control four more years after this one, and he's a career .262/.321/.472 hitter. He's a slightly below-average pitch framer but a strong controller of the running game, and his reputation as a game manager and handler of pitching staffs is strong. He's a budding star behind the plate. Here's the thing: catchers all have short shelf lives, and the Angels aren't very close to contention. Nearly every day brings new evidence that that front office doesn't really know what it's doing. Swooping in and simply stealing a player as good as O'Hoppe isn't possible, but prying him loose from them might be easier than it would be from another organization that was a bit less of a mess. The prospect package it would take to bring in O'Hoppe would be truly staggering, but the Cubs don't have to pay for him solely with prospects. It's possible they could get involved in a three-way trade in which Justin Steele goes to a high-level contender, and both the Cubs and the team acquiring Steele send prospect talent to the Angels in a huge package. Steele's value to a contender right now might be higher than O'Hoppe's, despite the latter being five years younger and under team and cost control longer. Therefore, the Cubs might get some small secondary piece in the deal, too, without giving up much more than Steele. The Angels have some interesting arms under long-term control, but whom they haven't had success developing yet. Ryan McMahon The Rockies sound a bit more like a rational organization, lately, which means they might be more open to trading a player like McMahon than they have tended to be in the past. According to one report, they've told McMahon he's not going anywhere, and he did sign a long-term extension with them in 2022, but if they're realistic and ready to be proactive, they have to see that keeping him would be foolish. Left far behind by the rest of their division, they're just now getting better at scouting and player development, in ways that might pay off in half a decade. McMahon is only under control through 2027, and will cost $44 million over the final three years of the deal. His timeline doesn't match theirs, and he's not the same face-of-the-franchise star that Troy Tulowitzki, Carlos González, or even Trevor Story were, anyway. However, McMahon should appeal quite a bit to the Cubs. He's a left-handed hitter with ample power (though more in the form of doubles than over the fence, much of the time), and he's taking walks at an excellent rate this year. He's also one of the best defensive third basemen in baseball. He'd answer a lot of questions about the long-term alignment of the Cubs infield, just as they're pondering creating more such questions by trading Nico Hoerner. Farm depth like the Cubs' is valuable in two ways. It can yield huge on-field value, directly, by having those players develop into homegrown stars. However, it can also return value by turning into trade value, and bringing back players like these. If the Cubs can consolidate some of their organizational depth this week, create more flexibility, and start to put cornerstones in place for a winning window they hoped would open this year, they'll be in much better position next July than they're in right now. View full article

In a de facto trade deadline preview episode of This is Not a Rebuild, four Cubs heads try to figure out what this team thinks it should be, and how they'll get from where they are to that destination. Image courtesy of Matt Trueblood via Spotify for Podcasters It's been a few weeks since our last episode, but all the important facts of Cubdom remain unchanged. Jed Hoyer is ready to acknowledge that this team can't be a trade-deadline buyer, but it's not yet clear whether he understands that they need to be sellers. More importantly, it's hard to figure out how this team can best be a seller, given how they're built. We parse takes from outsiders about the egregiousness of the Cubs ever being sellers; weigh the team's options with Justin Steele and Jameson Taillon; try to convince ourselves to feel encouraged about the recent developments in the bullpen; and nerd out a little bit on the subject of close plays requiring a tag at home plate, and how a catcher should set up for one. Speaking of catchers, we also try to guess how and on what timeline the Cubs will heal the scar that has been that position this season. It's going to be a slow process, at this point, but Moises Ballesteros makes it a fairly promising project--if his tiny, round self can stick at the spot. We close with some musings about whether it would be a good prank to tell a solid, respectable veteran player they were traded to the White Sox this week. Enjoy. Apple Podcasts: Spotify: We'll be back next week, with a comprehensive review of the team's activity at the trade deadline. Tune in then! View full article

If their best relievers had stayed healthier throughout this season, the Cubs might be in position to act as buyers at the upcoming MLB trade deadline. That dream is long dead, but the way they're getting healthy just days before the deadline could still be a boon to the team's ongoing rebuild. Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports For a while there, Craig Counsell was trying to hold together a bullpen on a team aimed at contention without the services of any of the four best pitchers in that bullpen, as of a year ago: Julian Merryweather, Adbert Alzolay, Mark Leiter Jr., and Drew Smyly. The team had to make do, for long stretches, without at least two or three of those four, plus lesser contributors for whom hopes had been high, like Daniel Palencia. Injuries to the starting rotation, too, weakened the pen, pulling pitchers like Javier Assad, Ben Brown, and Hayden Wesneski away from potential roles as key relievers. Not all of those problems have been resolved, and sadly, they've become irrelevant. The 2024 Cubs aren't good enough to win anything worthwhile, and even a fully healthy and overachieving bullpen the rest of the way wouldn't change that. There's very good news, though, and here it is: the return of Merryweather, a couple of encouraging outings from Leiter, the expected rebound from Héctor Neris and the sustained excellence of Tyson Miller has created an opportunity for the team to get a bit aggressive at this trade deadline, even if they lack the self-awareness or risk appetite to trade players slotted into larger roles for multiple seasons. First, let's establish the key premise here: Almost no relief pitcher has any value beyond the season in which they're having success. This is why, even when the season looked salvageable, the Cubs would have been foolish to trade the haul of talent Oakland will demand if they move Mason Miller this summer. It's also why the team happily traded Scott Effross for Wesneski two years ago. Service time is only a remote, secondary consideration for relievers, whose overall value has a low ceiling and who can experience huge variance from year to year in that value, even if they stay healthy--which is far from a sure thing, of course. Therefore, it doesn't make any sense for the Cubs to hold onto Neris, Smyly, Merryweather, Leiter, or Miller. It's impractical and out of the question for all five of them to be traded in the next week, but the team should shop them all, and trade as many of them as have any trade value. It will be ancillary pieces. It might amount to nothing. Then again, they've gotten Wesneski, Brown, and Palencia in the last three years by being willing to trade lots of relievers when they were of no real use to them. It's possible none of those three are ever meaningful contributors to a good Cubs team, because of Wesneski's insufficient stuff, Palencia's insufficient control, and Brown's dubious health, but it's still possible one of them is a long-term helper. Brown, especially, has had a tantalizing 2024. Ultimately, the Cubs won't escape their cycle of mediocrity until they make bigger changes, but the positive trends in their bullpen make it possible that they could add some valuable pieces to their organization even if they don't yet have the guts to do so--or if Tom Ricketts doesn't want Jed Hoyer to be the one to clean up the mess he's made. Trading any or all of these relievers is the kind of work Hoyer has proved very trustworthy on, and there's little to gain by holding onto them. This is an opportunity the team should seize with both hands. View full article

Just before the All-Star break, the Cubs got their erstwhile utility pitcher back from the injured list, where he'd been shelved with a forearm strain in late June. He pitches again Monday night, and is one of the North Siders most worth watching for the balance of this season. Image courtesy of © Jeff Le-USA TODAY Sports It's profoundly unlikely that Javier Assad will be traded in the next week, because of all 30 MLB organizations, the one who is likely to value him most highly is the one for which he already toils. He's been shuttled to the bullpen more than once in his young career, and nearly got the same treatment again this spring, but every time, he ends up being needed in the rotation again--and he keeps producing competitive, even impressive starts. As fans well know, though, Assad doesn't throw hard or miss many bats, by modern standards. He's hard to trust as a durable ace, though increasingly trustworthy as anywhere from the fourth- to the sixth-best starter on a playoff-hopeful team. He's a kitchen sink guy, using a fastball, cutter, sinker, changeup, curveball, and slider to make up for his lack of raw stuff or any one killer offering. In the last few starts before he hit the injured list, and in the one abbreviated one before the break, we saw him make a change to one of those pitches. It's not the out pitch he's been missing, but could it be the next way he discovers to stay just ahead of hitters' adjustment curves? Nominally, Assad has never thrown a sweeper. He's gone through a few versions of his breaking stuff, but the one on which he settled early this season was a sweepy offering. It wasn't a sweeper, but that was roughly the shape it took. Here's his overall pitch movement chart for this season. Notice, though, that there are two slider clusters here. That's because, starting in mid-June, Assad switched to a different type of slider. It's a harder, tighter offering, with less sweep and less velocity variation from his array of fastballs. Here, you can see the difference on a zoomed-in basis, with the color of the points indicating velocity to illustrate that aspect of the change. You can certainly see the change in the data. Let's compare a couple of offerings on video, to get a physical sense of it. Here's Assad throwing a sweepier slider to the back foot of Jack Suwinski, in May. Assad in May.mp4 Here's a firmer, tighter, much more vertical slider to Matt Chapman, on Jun. 17. Assad on Jun 17.mp4 Aesthetically, functionally, statistically, these are distinct pitches, and he switched pretty neatly from one to the other in mid-June. Assad is doing something different with his slider now. So, we should ask the natural question: is this slider better than the old one? So far, the answer is clear: no. It's not. Despite not having the pitch sweep off the plate with horizontal movement as much, Assad isn't throwing more strikes with the new shape on that pitch. He's not getting more chases or more whiffs. When batters connect, they're hitting it hard. No measurement you would use to evaluate the two versions of the slider says the new one is superior. Yet, it could eventually be better, either on its own or as part of that deep and varied arsenal. If he sets it up right, this version of the slider should eventually get more swings, and if he can command it, it should get more ground balls. If he can throw the slider for strikes, it should increase the effectiveness of all three of his harder pitches, as hitters are forced to become a bit more defensive. Pinned down and forced to choose, I would say the new version of the slider is the better one, or at least that it has a much higher ceiling in terms of impact on his overall approach. It just isn't achieving those things yet. Going forward, this is just one of many things to watch closely whenever Assad pitches. Maybe, in a huge surprise, some team will step forward and make the Cubs an offer they can't refuse for the stability and impressive results Assad has provided for much of the last two years. It's more likely, though, that they'll trade another starting pitcher before the deadline and that Assad's role will only become more important down the stretch, with an eye toward 2025. He won't even be arbitration-eligible this winter; the team has all kinds of time with him. If he can really find something with this slider, maybe he can become a true mid-rotation starter, even for a team with high hopes for the near future. In any case, it's an interesting thing to watch. The Cubs need more of those, amid a season in which they have too often been unappealing or lifeless. Assad is a competitor, a FIP-beater, and a feather in the cap of a pitching development infrastructure still trying to prove itself good enough. This change to his mix is a fun wrinkle and further evidence that he and the team are still trying to find creative solutions to some of their problems. View full article

It's not that they suck. It's that they don't seem to understand that they suck. Image courtesy of © Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports Any clear-eyed decision-maker came to the conclusion that the Cubs need to be sellers at this trade deadline three weeks ago. Some of the world's most hopeless optimists (equal emphasis for each word in the phrase) root on the North Side Nine, though, so even entering the All-Star break, there were those who thought this team might reprise the success they had in the second half of last July, saving their season and forcing the front office to become trade-deadline buyers. That was an indefensible position, but we all hold some of those. Hopefully, even those folks had the scales fall from their eyes this weekend. The Cubs eked out one more win than they deserved in a three-game home series against a solid but unspectacular Diamondbacks team, which is to say, they won one game. In the three contests, they scored four total runs, two of them after the first of their two losses was essentially decided. Too little, too late has been this team's secret motto since roughly the 2018 All-Star break, so it would be unreasonable to feel surprised about it, but eventually, this pattern has to spur action designed to interrupt it. Right? We can all picture an early, almost throwaway scene in one of those romantic comedies from the peak years of that genre (around the turn of the century), where a frustrated girlfriend stomps out the door and shouts over her shoulder something like, "Give me a call when you grow up!" It's a wake-up call, lobbed rudely but righteously at a 20-something man who truly does need to make huge changes in his life, but who isn't yet ready to see it that way. He comes around over the next 90-100 minutes, of course, and the couple often reunites, but the point is what the line establishes: there's an immaturity at work here. It's a waste of the departing girlfriend's time, and even of the audience's, to watch this reasonably handsome, vaguely promising dude do nothing worthwhile with himself. That's how I feel about the Cubs at this point. It's not clear to me what they're doing that is worth anyone's time, or why anyone should pay attention to them until they demonstrate not only an openness to change, but the real beginnings of it, and a good-faith intention to do more of it. Shota Imanaga had another stellar start Sunday. Nico Hoerner continues to heat up in July, and Seiya Suzuki came up with a big hit. This team is vaguely promising, for a list of reasons much longer than those three players. They're also not going anywhere, until they grasp the magnitude of the change required here. They're going on six years as a dysfunctional offense, with two different cores of key contributors and plenty of money being spent on those six years' worth of lineups. Do they need to totally overhaul their organizational hitting development? Do they need to fire their hitting coaches (yet again)? Do they need a major overhaul of the player personnel, because something is wrong with the chemistry of this group? Maybe the answer to all of those is no, and they need to find yet another explanation. More likely, the answer to all of them is yes, but incompletely so, and they need to figure out how much weight to give each problem and potential solution. At any rate, the uninspiring series loss this weekend was just the latest in a long line of them, and the only remarkable thing about it is the number of fans and organization members who persist in the expectation that something else will happen, without some pain. The Cubs have seven more games before the trade deadline, but not one of them matters. Nor did these three. If they don't undertake some form of serious and significant change, nothing they do on the field for the final two months will matter, either. The team is so far behind so many teams relevant to their short- and long-term prospects that they can't reassert themselves as an entity worthy of our attention until they decide to become that kind of relevant team. Yes, that does mean seriously considering trading Justin Steele, despite his multiple remaining seasons of team control. Yes, it means listening open-minded and open-eared on Hoerner, and yes, it means trading Ian Happ if you can find somewhere he's willing to go. It means a lot of uncomfortable change, because while even Jed Hoyer now understands that his team is not a playoff-caliber one, there's a more important truth that doesn't seem to have settled into the minds of either Hoyer or many Cubs fans: the team isn't even close to being a serious contender for anything worth winning. Thus, they need to be thinking the same way they were at the 2021 and 2022 trade deadlines, even though (or specifically because) they don't want to end up on as long and dispiriting a competitive timeline going forward as they were on in 2021 and 2022. This roster wasn't built to sell, and isn't well-positioned to do it, but that's because the front office was drastically wrong about the quality of the team it had assembled and developed. They're in a tough position from which to sell, but an even worse one from which to do anything else. They need to grow up and face some tough realities about their own unseriousness. View full article

I like that thought too. Catcher feels like an area of need, dunnit? Mo Baller probably isn't a true backstop.

Yeah, second is the only place where Morel has looked comfortable, right? I would slot him there and see whether the reduced pressure and increased comfort got him back in touch with his offensive talent. In the meantime, I'd probably prep Shaw as a third baseman, understanding that his overall athletic profile would probably make second a natural fit if and when that turned out to be the best place for him.

Though a fan favorite and a player under team and cost control for two and a half more seasons, the Cubs' second baseman might be the best realistic trade chip for the team this month. Four contenders, especially, stand out as potential partners. Image courtesy of © Jeff Le-USA TODAY Sports It's been without power, but in the first half of July, Nico Hoerner has appeared to come around a bit at the plate. He's not ever likely to blossom into a powerful hitter, and he seems to be at his best when he understands and embraces that reality, using the whole field and keeping a sound plan at the plate. When pitchers work him away and he can stroke a line drive toward right-center field, he's the best form of himself. This month, Hoerner is batting .296/.344/.352, and if you go back 30 days, it's .282/.345/.379. That's not as valuable as the .375ish OBP he ran for the last three months of 2023, but it's a dramatic improvement from how he played for much of May and early June, when he seemed hampered by injuries he was electing to play through. Hoerner will be the Cub most worthy of careful watching coming out of the break, because if he's rested and healthy and maintains the approach we've seen lately, he might really take off. Should that happen, Jed Hoyer will find his phone ringing fairly often over the next 10 days, as he and his staff plot their course toward the trade deadline. Hoerner is a great defender and baserunner. He's 27 years old. Under the terms of the contract to which he and the Cubs agreed last spring, he'll make $23.5 million over the course of 2025 and 2026. He's a valuable middle infielder, though not quite the star the Cubs hoped they could help him become. There are three playoff-hopeful teams in desperate straits when it comes to second base, and one more who badly needs a shortstop. If they come calling about Hoerner, there might be a fit worth exploring. Seattle Mariners This one is already in the streets, as it were, though it got there by way of a fairly speculative report from Jon Morosi. The Mariners have a broad-spectrum need for more offense, but they're also not getting the defensive work they hoped for from offseason import Jorge Polanco. The switch-hitting veteran is a good cautionary tale for lovers of Hoerner, in that he had every tool but true power at his peak, but has not aged gracefully. Like Hoerner, Polanco is a former shortstop whose dearth of arm strength and the loss of half a step has forced him to move to second. This year, as he's turned 31 years old, he's hitting just .206/.302/.326, and he's struggling to stay on the field. Polanco is on a contract almost exactly as rich as Hoerner's, with a team option attached for 2025. Presumably, the Mariners want out from under those obligations. The Cubs and Seattle could swap the two players, keeping the cash essentially neutral and ensuring the best possible return for Chicago. The Mariners have a roughly average farm system, weighted toward players who are young and far from the big leagues, but they and the Cubs could still match up nicely on a trade. Colt Emerson, whom the M's took 22nd overall last summer, is one name worth watching in such a move, but so is Brody Hopkins, whom they took much later and who converted from the outfield to the mound after transferring during college. Hopkins is a high-ceiling arm who could move quickly through the farm system, and would have to appeal to a Cubs organization still building up its pitching depth. Boston Red Sox If possible, the Sox are even more destitute at second than Seattle, with a mélange of bad options through which they've shuffled hopelessly this season. They're in the unique spot of being weak on both sides of the keystone right now, and while their farm system holds hope for those positions in the medium term, new Boston boss Craig Breslow (the erstwhile Cubs guru) didn't acquire those guys, and might not be enamored of those possibilities. Either way, in the meantime, the Sox have possession of a Wild Card berth at the moment, and would surely be willing to swap a little bit of the last front office's farm system for the chance to secure that spot, even as they build toward a more robustly competitive future. Kansas City Royals You can't deny it: Hoerner just feels like a Royal. The biggest surprise contender of the season to date, Kansas City has tried a large number of players at second base, but none of them (not Michael Massey, not Nick Loftin, not (unsurprisingly) Adam Frazier) has brought both the caliber of defense they demand and any level of offensive competence. Hoerner could be a salve for that problem. He'd be a nice medium-term double play partner for the more explosive Bobby Witt Jr., and the kind of buttress they need in the lower portion of their lineup. He'd also thrive in the big spaces of Kauffman Stadium, on a team that loves to steal bases. The Royals' farm system is weaker than most, but it's trended in the right direction this season. Carter Jensen, whom they drafted out of high school in 2021 and have brought along slowly to ensure he sticks at catcher, is hitting .271/.384/.436 in the Midwest League, and should be promoted to Double-A roughly any minute (be it by the Royals, or some acquiring team). Atlanta Finally, there's the preseason NL East favorites, who suddenly find themselves lagging well behind the Phillies and who have a hole at shortstop. They're getting a very rude reminder of why Orlando Arcia was so willing to sign a very team-friendly contract extension, as he's hitting .211/.244/.333 this year. Arcia's not going to recover or improve. The team isn't much invested in him, but nor do they have another viable option at the moment. Hoerner would be a huge upgrade for them, and he would essentially be a time-release replacement for the man who bumped him off shortstop a year and a half ago. Atlanta's farm system is better than it has any right to be, given how consistently excellent and aggressive they have been under Alex Anthoupolos. The question is whether they would view Hoerner as a sufficient step up to justify depleting their depth at the top. The Cubs shouldn't trade Hoerner to Atlanta without getting one of Nacho Alvarez, AJ Smith-Shawver, Spencer Schwellenbach, or Hurston Waldrep, but those four are all either in Triple-A or the majors already. Alvarez is a shortstop, but really only profiles at third base in MLB, and would be an OBP machine but one without power. He's blocked by Austin Riley. Atlanta might be open to moving him, but whether they'd do so for Hoerner probably depends on what they think they could get out of him, above and beyond what the Cubs have. The other three are potential mid-rotation starters, and are all very close to being so in the big leagues. It's hard to let such players go, when you're in the middle of a long winning window and intend to win another World Series soon. Trading Hoerner, like trading Justin Steele, would be part of a multi-faceted maneuver aimed at restructuring and reloading an organization that can't currently compete with the likes of the Brewers--let alone the titans on each coast. Sending him out would allow them to plan for Matt Shaw or Christopher Morel at second base in the next year or two, and perhaps for much longer. Getting a great arm for him might make it easier to trade Steele for the kind of major offensive force missing from the system, and having such a player under cost control (while getting out from under their eight-figure annual obligations to Hoerner) would make it easier to go replace Steele or land a lineup anchor via free agency. Things would have to come together nicely, but the Cubs have already taken some calls on Hoerner, and those won't stop until the deadline comes--unless they move him first. View full article

Before swallowing the bitter pill of trading a beloved left-handed starter with a bulldog mindset and an ever-improving track record, the Cubs would have to be convinced that doing so was netting them a transformational talent. There might be a perfect storm brewing, though. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports After this season, the Cubs will still control the rights of Justin Steele for three more years, assuming they don't trade him first. Steele reached arbitration as a Super Two player last winter, and is making $4 million this season. He's going to get expensive over the next few years, but everything about his performance over the last two calendar years suggests he'll be worth it. Since Jul. 19, 2022, only one pitcher with at least 250 innings pitched has a lower ERA than Steele's 2.70 is impending free agent southpaw Max Fried--and he's at 2.68, in about 45 fewer innings than Steele has thrown. As discussed yesterday, though, Fried is one of a small but exciting cadre of pitchers set to hit free agency this winter, and since Steele won't be cheap over the course of his arbitration years anyway, maybe it makes more sense to invest in one of those guys--if you can get a player who alters the future of your franchise on the positional side, in the process. It's very rare that any team will let go of such a player in this cost-conscious, youth-oriented sport, but Steele is the kind of player who compels teams to do so. Three and a half years of team control is a lot, and we're talking about one of the game's best starters. In the heat of a pennant race and having made an unfortunate habit of battling injuries in their starting rotations, three teams stand out as having both the young talent and the motivation to make a big move. Baltimore Orioles It's no secret that Baltimore has the deepest, scariest collection of young hitters in baseball. The trick is getting prospect-hugging executive Mike Elias to let go of any of them. He's right to cleave to these types of players, whose value doesn't diminish much until you have a truly embarrassing surfeit, and the Orioles are trying to establish themselves as perennial powers in the AL East, just like the Yankees. The team is inching toward that spot where they do need to move a young hitter or two, though, if it means capitalizing on the opportunity in front of them and leavening long-term fan engagement by making a deep run in October. They traded from their depth to add Corbin Burnes this winter, but Burnes will be a free agent at season's end, and he's not going to give Baltimore any kind of discount to stay put. A longer-term answer and a complement to Burnes atop the rotation would secure the Orioles' place as the favorites for the junior circuit's pennant, this year and into the future. Jackson Holliday is probably out of reach, even for a player with long-term control, like Steele. His rude introduction to the big leagues notwithstanding, Holliday is still one of the five or six best prospects in baseball. Not far behind him, though, are slightly less balanced sluggers Coby Mayo and Heston Kjerstad. Mayo is a Christopher Morel-esque third baseman, which is to say that his future is probably in right field or at DH, but unlike Morel, he seems to have an optimized approach and the ability to lift the ball consistently to left field. He could be a perennial 30-homer threat (with 40-bomb upside) in the middle of the Chicago batting order, with an above-average OBP to boot. Kjerstad is a bit more likely to work as an outfielder in the long run, though he'd be harder to pry away, too, since (unlike Mayo) he has already shown the ability to hammer big-league pitching and is on their big-league roster. He and Mayo are good echoes of the Michael Busch situation from this winter, though: extremely talented players blocked within a great organization, to whom the Cubs might provide the crucial opportunity. The Cubs could only get one of them for Steele, of course, and they'd have to be right about which one, but they'd also land some secondary piece in the trade. Los Angeles Dodgers Hey, speaking of the Busch trade, maybe the Cubs could revisit that very well. It's not clear when Yoshinobu Yamamoto will be ready to take the mound again for the Dodgers. Dustin May just had his annual season-ending surgery. Walker Buehler isn't himself anymore, and whenever Clayton Kershaw returns from his own offseason surgery, it might be to make his last ride with the team of whose excellence he's been the biggest symbol for the last 15 years. There are holes in this rotation, and there's a deep hunger in this fan base for a championship in a season that counts. They still haven't won one since 1988. After signing Will Smith to a 10-year deal (even if it's not really a 10-year deal) this spring, the Dodgers have another prospect with plenty of pedigree who doesn't have a clear path to playing time. Dalton Rushing is batting .266/.377/.459 in the Double-A Texas League, as the team brings him along slowly in the system. Rushing, 23, is a lefty batter and a no-doubt catcher who's not going to have to move to first base or DH. He'd almost certainly be in Triple-A for any other organization, and in many, he'd already be starting at catcher. Rushing isn't the only enticing player the Dodgers have, either. Josue de Paula is an outfielder who's not even 20 yet, and who has real star potential. As Kevin Alcántara's prospect star dims, de Paula is a player with the same kind of upside that excites so many about Alcántara. The comp illustrates the risk with such a player, but don't lose sight of the reward that comes with that, if the player pans out. The Dodgers also have such an impressive pitching pipeline that rounding out a trade package would be easy and fun. Maybe the Cubs could get Jackson Ferris back. Minnesota Twins One of these things is not like the others, right? The Twins are neither a financial behemoth nor a lauded producer of superstar prospects. Yet, they're marching toward what would be their fourth division title in six years (although one was in that season that doesn't count), and quietly, they've become one of the deepest organizations in baseball. They have three different players who could headline various versions of a very intriguing Steele deal. Walker Jenkins would probably be the toughest to peel away, and he's also the furthest from the majors. For those reasons, maybe he's the least likely or important of the trio. He might also have the highest ceiling, though, with a chance to be a plus-hit, plus-power, plus-glove outfielder who goes to multiple All-Star Games. The funny thing is, Emmanuel Rodriguez has that potential, too. Though just 21 years old, Rodriguez already has 167 plate appearances at Double-A Wichita, and he's batting .298/.479/.621 there. That OBP is not a typo. Rodriguez has 42 walks in that short time, which is typical of him: he's one of the most patient hitters in professional baseball. He also has speed and power, and will stick in center field until he's 30 if he doesn't end up on a team that also has Pete Crow-Armstrong. Rodriguez is on a rehab assignment in the Complex League right now; injuries have been the only thing capable of slowing his ascent to the majors. He'd be a marvelous headliner in a trade, though. So would Brooks Lee, whom the Cubs could have taken instead of Cade Horton in 2022--but who signed for about $1.2 million more than Horton did, when the Twins took him right after Horton. He's now with the Twins' parent club, and looks like a star-caliber second or third baseman who would be able to plug and play at either spot for the Cubs. The Twins would be loathe to let him go, of course, but with Willi Castro, Carlos Correa, Royce Lewis, José Miranda, and Edouard Julien, they have so much depth across the positions Lee plays that they might surrender Lee for the affordable control and playoff upside of Steele. Mayo, Kjerstad, Rushing and Rodriguez stand out, especially, as prospects who match proximity, impact potential and attainability, and who could anchor a trade package for Steele that would have to at least get Jed Hoyer talking. As the Cubs make what Hoyer has termed "tough decisions" over the next 12 days, they have to think about whether keeping Steele and paying him handsomely for the next three years is the most sensible course--or whether it would be wiser to add a potentially elite position player with more team control to their mix. View full article

We're inside two weeks until the 2024 MLB trade deadline, and the Chicago Cubs need to be sellers during that time. They have a variety of options, though, and choosing which to pursue is a matter of sifting through both internal and external talents with an eye on 2025 and beyond. Image courtesy of © Thomas Shea-USA TODAY Sports The particular shape of the Cubs' frustrating first half has closed some doors for Jed Hoyer and company. At the outset of the season, names like Pete Alonso (a free agent at season's end) and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.(a costly potential trade target) were high on the wish lists of many Cubs fans. Now, they should almost be completely eliminated from those fans' thoughts. Michael Busch has been one of the best stories of the team's season, and the team needs to save either first base or DH for him for the foreseeable future. Since it also doesn't look like Seiya Suzuki is a viable big-league outfielder, defensively; or like Cody Bellinger will be opting out and heading back to free agency; or like Christopher Morel can play third base, it doesn't make sense to wedge an extremely expensive Alonso or Guerrero into the team's plans for the second half of this decade--let alone to give up major young talent, as they would have to do to acquire Guerrero. Let's talk, then, about the five high-profile players hitting free agency this fall who should occupy fans'minds, and whose impending availability should inform the front office's strategy over the next fortnight. Juan Soto, RF While he's only a slightly better positional fit than Alonso or Guerrero (in that he's only marginally better in the field than is Suzuki, and might not be any better, were he tasked with playing the tough sun in right field at Wrigley Field on a regular basis), Soto is a special category. He's one of the four or five best overall hitters in baseball, with those skills heavily weighted toward things (power and plate discipline) that will age exceptionally well and port across a change in environment. He's very nearly as good as Aaron Judge, but is hitting the market a half-decade younger than Judge did. For all those reasons, Soto is likely to sign for more than half a billion dollars, and therefore, he's overwhelmingly likely to sign somewhere other than the North Side. Still, he belongs to an echelon of talent the Cubs need to start pursuing. They don't develop players of this caliber. They don't draft high enough to get ahold of players this talented through pure scouting. They have to at least take a serious look and make a good-faith offer every time someone like Soto hits free agency. It only happens a few times per decade, anyway. In the short term, that means clearing a path. With Bellinger likely to be back next year, it becomes more urgent than ever to trade one of Ian Happ and Suzuki, clearing some space in both the payroll and the positional picture for the next few years. Though it already looks like the Cubs are just below the first luxury-tax threshold, it's also crucial to ensure that they stay that way, because their taxpayer status will affect the penalty they pay if they sign a player of Soto's caliber this winter, and signing him would mean being a taxpayer for the next few seasons, at least. You want to be starting from the non-payer level, going into such a deal. Alex Bregman, 3B It's clear that Morel isn't the third baseman of the future. Maybe Cam Smith is, but that's a little ways off. Matt Shaw is a fine player with a bright future, but it's more likely to be at second base than at third. His bat might not profile well at the hot corner, and even if it does, his defensive skillset might better align with the demands of the keystone. Counting either Shaw or Smith as a hatched chicken would, in any case, be the kind of foolish error the Cubs have made too often over the last several years. They have to stop thinking of themselves as an elite player development organization, unless and until they actually become one, so they can operate in a clear-eyed, non-delusional way. One thing that means is ardently pursuing a player like Bregman, who is batting .256/.316/.414 in his age-30 season but will surely finish the season with his metronomic .800+ OPS. Since the start of 2022, his OPS before the All-Star break is under .750, but after the break, it's just a hair shy of .900. Bregman is an exceptionally tough out, and would be the consistent, high-floor hitter missing from this lineup full of streaky sluggers. He's going to be expensive too, but age and a less obviously elite profile will reduce his asking price a little bit. The Cubs should be in heavily on him, and the move to set that up is obvious: trading Nico Hoerner for the solid young talent he should command, to clear second base for Shaw or Morel, making it possible to land Bregman and slot him into the everyday lineup. Corbin Burnes, RHP Illustrating how much work the Cubs have to do, it still feels like the Brewers won the trade they made with the Orioles this winter, even after Burnes started the All-Star Game Tuesday for the American League. Milwaukee got budding star infielder Joey Ortiz, potential long-term bullpen weapon DL Hall, and the 34th overall pick in this week's Draft, with which they selected college bat Blake Burke and were able to further goose a generous bonus pool. They're going to win the 2024 NL Central, and they look very nicely set for 2025 and beyond, too. That said, Burnes's season is important, because it reaffirms his status as one of the game's best and most durable aces. Craig Counsell knows him, and has gotten the best out of him. His approach mirrors what the Cubs like their pitchers to do, and as the manager gets more chances to shape his staff and filter his preferred messages out to players, that figures to hold true. Burnes will be a candidate to get $300 million on a single deal, as only two other pitchers ever have, but no matter the exact price tag he eventually commands, he's going to be the top pitcher on the market this winter. Starting pitching has been the strength of this year's Cubs, but maybe it's a strength from which they need to trade, in order to build the best possible club in 2025. With Soto and Bregman the only positional free agents with any meaningful profile who will move the needle for next year's team, maybe the move is to swap Justin Steele, Jameson Taillon, Shota Imanaga, or Javier Assad (whichever turns out to yield the most value in return, based on what the Cubs project each to actually do in the next few years) for a position player-centric package, akin to what the Brewers just did with Burnes--and then splash money around this winter in the deeper pitching market, be that on Burnes himself or on someone like... Max Fried, LHP Whereas Burnes is as good a bet to take the ball and work deep into the game every fifth day as any starter in baseball, Fried is a health risk. He doesn't strike out as many hitters as Burnes does, either, and is more vulnerable to the odd blowup start. When he's right, though, he's even more dominant than Burnes. With a deep arsenal and a diverse skill set, he induces ground balls at one of the best rates in the league; limits walks; and keeps the ball in the park. He could be a very simple 1-for-1 replacement for Steele or Imanaga, although a more expensive one. This is one of the ways the Cubs could (by being less risk-averse and more willing to spend like the big-market behemoth they ought to be) attempt a lateral move on the pitching side and get more young positional talent in the process. Jack Flaherty, RHP Fried, Burnes, Soto, and Bregman are all going to be given a qualifying offer on their way into the free-agent pool. That means each will cost the Cubs a draft pick, should they manage to sign them. Flaherty, Fried's high-school teammate, is an exception. The Tigers will trade him before the end of this month, and once they do, he'll be ineligible to receive a qualifying offer. Whichever team signs him this winter, all they'll have to give up for him is cash. It'll be a lot of cash, because Flaherty has made some overdue and vital adjustments this season. In the wake of them, he's striking out over 32% of opposing batters, and walking fewer than 5% of them. If he can sustain the slider command he's shown this season, Flaherty is going to remain an ace, and he has good enough control to pitch deep into games, too. The Cubs front office needs to think like a chess player over the coming weeks and months. Each move they make (or don't make) will have short- and long-term ramifications. As they choose from their menu of possible pursuits at the deadline, they have to think about how each would set up another move this fall or winter. It's important that they make some moves, but the risk of making the wrong one is clear and present. These five players should loom over each course they choose, because of the way each could change the organization and reshape their needs. View full article

The erstwhile Cubs starter has one of baseball's most interesting pitch mixes. He throws one changeup to left-handed batters, and another to righties. The latter is an especially fascinating, almost unique flavor of the cambio. Image courtesy of © Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports It's not just that Kyle Hendricks throws two distinct versions of his changeup. It's also extremely unusual that he throws one of them the way he does. Changeups come in all shapes and velocities, and some cut toward the glove side, in an absolute sense, while others have a crazy amount of arm-side run. By and large, it depends on the overall movement profile of the pitcher--how his arm works, what kind of spin he imparts, and which grip he employs for the change. The harder, faster rule, though, is that you can safely make a directional prediction about changeup movement based on fastball movement. Some pitchers have a high-rise changeup with virtually no vertical separation from the fastball, whereas others have diving, downhill splitter-style pitches. Some have huge run to the arm side, and some stay in the same lane as the fastball, depending on a slight fade and a significant velocity differential. What hardly any of them have is cutting movement, relative to that pitcher's fastball. The changeup Hendricks throws to right-handed batters is an exception. (In this image, I removed Hendricks's curveballs, which are not relevant to this particular study.) As you can see, Hendricks leans heavily on his sinker against righties, and his changeup moves more to the glove side (away from a righty batter) than the sinker does. It also moves more in that direction than his seldom-used four-seamer, on average. It even resists gravity a bit more than the sinker, and thus appears to rise relative to it. How rare is that? Well, 80 right-handed pitchers have thrown at least 25 changeups to right-handed batters this season, and of them, only four share this characteristic. No one quite matches Hendricks, but to say just how unusual his cut-change action is, let's dig in a little bit on each of the other three who have a significant amount of cut-change, themselves. Logan Webb Like Hendricks, Webb is a sinker-and-changeup star, and throwing a sinker does make it slightly easier to achieve a cut-change effect. If your sinker has considerable run, and your change is more about velocity separation than movement, you can have that pitch stay over the heart of the plate to induce chase below the zone, whereas you want the sinker to run to the inside edge and generate weak contact. Plainly, though, that's nothing like Hendricks's six-inch difference in average movement, and unlike Hendricks's, his change dips lower than his fastball, the way you'd expect it to. All that heavy action is what makes Webb one of the league's premier ground-ball guys, and it's what's missing from Hendricks's these days, as he becomes more homer-prone. Pedro Avila Though a little-know long reliever, Avila (whom the Guardians snatched up from San Diego in April amid a desperate need for healthy arms) has been valuable this season, with a 3.51 ERA in 41 innings of work. He uses both a four-seamer and a two-seamer against righty batters, but the changeup has cut action relative to each--as well as a huge vertical movement disparity. The combination of offerings flummoxes hitters, and while right-on-right changeups are rarely standout pitches in terms of results, Avila's is an exception. He gets chases on 44 percent of the changeups he throws to righties outside the zone, and the whiff rate on the pitch is just under 33%. The only (understandable) bad news is that he finds the zone with that pitch just 46 percent of the time. Tayler Scott In what has been an up-and-down season in Houston, Scott has been a much-needed bullpen stabilizer. He's primarily a sweeper artist, eating right-handed batters up with the breaking ball that runs far away from them. He sets that pitch up with two different fastball looks, though, and when hitters sit on those primary offerings, he drops a vertically-oriented changeup in under their reaching hands. Yes, then, there are a few pitchers who have a cut-change, so Hendricks isn't totally alone in having one... but in a very real sense, he's alone. Not even the small group of other pitchers who have a pitch that technically fits into the same category do things the same way Hendricks does. His balloon-ball changeup, floating away from a righty against a sinker that seems to veer down and toward them at the last moment, is a whole different thing than the league's other cut-changeups. There's one more person we might compare him to, though: his past self. Over time, Hendricks's vertical movement on the sinker against righties has gotten heavier, as he tries to tilt the pitch for more horizontal wiggle. As he's undergone that change and accentuated his cut-change, though, he's just now found a major cut-change interaction between the heater and the cambio over the last two years. Obviously, it was a wildly successful adjustment in 2023, but so far in 2024, the results have been ugly. It might be that hitters have adjusted and compensated for this innovation, and that to stay viable in the big leagues, he has to find the next one. Maybe his ramped-up curveball usage is that very innovation. Maybe there's still a trick or two in his bag. Even if he doesn't figure it out from here, though, and if The Professor's tenure is winding down, it's fun to note that he truly has been unique--not only in what he does, but in how he adjusts and alters what he does when the feedback from his opponents demands it. View full article

Jed Hoyer recently lamented, in public comments, the way his teams have made it difficult for him to focus on a trade deadline strategy in successive seasons. Maybe he needs to be reminded whose job setting that direction is. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports There is an infamous quotation ascribed to the French revolutionary leader (not that French Revolution; no, not that one, either; the Revolution of 1848) Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Although briefly the chief champion of the proletariat during that mid-century uprising, he failed to provide decisive leadership at the crucial moment of that would-be bloodless coup, and when the working class was thwarted, Ledru-Rollin became largely unwelcome both among that constituency and among the empowered nobility from which he had emerged and with which he clumsily sided, late in the going. "There go my people," Ledru-Rollin is purported to have said when the action began to percolate. "I must find out where they are going, so I can lead them." It's almost certainly an apocryphal quote. In the latter decades of Romanticism in Europe, hard facts weren't as important as finding just the right way to capture the soul of a moment. The reason we still hear this not-quite-factual quasi-aphorism, though, is that its inventors nailed it. They nicely encapsulated the odious thing about Ledru-Rollin, in the view of the general public, in two pithy sentences. He was meant to be a leader, and he let a whole lot of people down because he turned out not to understand what it was he was meant to be leading, or to have the courage and competence to lead it successfully. There are 15 days left before the 2024 MLB trade deadline. That's all the time Jed Hoyer has to separate himself from Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Right now, he's right on the precipice of being buffeted right into a corner by his own "people," the team of which he is the president of baseball operations, for the second year in a row. You can't adequately substitute any other trait for decisive leadership, and you can't fake it, either. Hoyer was dealt a tough hand last season, when the Cubs scuffled badly until the All-Star break, only to go on such a torrid streak that he had virtually no choice but to make buyer-like moves at the trade deadline. Yet, those moves didn't make the team clear favorites for anything, and indeed, they missed the playoffs altogether. Nor did Hoyer elect to let that season's momentum build by making big splashes on the player talent market over the past offseason. Nor did he use their September stagger as pretext to seriously reorganize the roster. A year later, he's overseen a team with a new manager but most of the same old faces, and a combination of insufficient star power, insufficient depth, and plain old bad luck put his club behind the 8-ball entering July. Then, over their final week and a half before the All-Star break, they got pretty hot again. They won eight of their final 11 before this four-day summer interstice. "It's not the road you want to travel," Hoyer said about the way the season has gone, during an appearance on the Marquee Network game broadcast last Saturday. "Last year, we almost felt like we were going day to day, which you never want to do, but we were sort of day to day thinking about which direction we were going to go in." He admitted that that's basically what the team is doing this season, too. That is, on its face, a recipe for persistent failure, not just on a single-season basis but in the great project that should be building the Cubs into a dynastic force in the NL Central. If Hoyer wanted either the 2023 or the 2024 teams to be genuinely good, he should have invested more in them before Opening Day and been more proactive in his problem-solving once their flaws became glaringly obvious in the early going. He's missed those chances. There's every chance that, left to their own devices, the Cubs will come out of the break by winning five of their first nine. That would put them at 52-56, and it would probably have them within three games of the third Wild Card berth in the National League. With two days before the deadline, at that point, would Hoyer shift into buy mode? Could he possibly rebuild the entire lousy bullpen, make up for the faltering depth of the rotation, and add the missing dynamism to the lineup in those two days? No chance. If Hoyer is just trying to preserve leverage in trade conversations by playing up the possibility of a surge, or if he's playing a public-relations game and actually intends to sell aggressively, we'll know it soon. Right now, though, he sounds like Ledru-Rollin. He got this job because his longtime boss and mentor had enough of a halo around his head to handpick his successor as he walked out the door, and that halo was made from a reputation for clear-eyed, aggressive leadership. Hoyer's letting that halo clatter to the ground, a tarnished and ungrasped brass ring. Standing pat looks like the most likely scenario for the Cubs over the next fortnight. It would be a calamitous one. They are a team paralyzed by its own okayness, with a core not good enough to do what this franchise ought to be dead-set on doing, lurching toward old age and immovable contract status. They have a strong farm system, but not a generational or transformational one. They should be tenacious in their pursuit of young talent, even if it costs them young talent. The best thing Hoyer has done since taking over the team was the Michael Busch trade, and while that was an opportunity not entirely of his own creation, the lesson from it should be to try more things like it. The Cubs aren't a playoff team this season--at least not in any valuable sense of that term. They're not especially close to being one in 2025. Their leader needs to lead them, rather than waiting to see in which direction his collection of people confusedly run over the next two weeks. If he does that, he might still not get the pleasure of seeing the fruits of the seeds of change he plants. (He can ask a handful of other leaders, from other French revolutions, all about that.) But he would, at least, be planting seeds the fruit of which will be worth seeing, instead of preciously tending a garden that will never yield more than a few stew-grade tomatoes. View full article