NEWSLETTER
Chicago Cubs President of Baseball Operations Jed Hoyer is set to address the media at 11am CT, and I’ll be rolling out the updates as fast as I can type them below. I don’t expect anything earth-shattering, but sometimes there are snippets you can pick up that frame the front office’s thinking for what is to come in the next few months. You also sometimes get minor news updates, and organizational thinking on various topics.
The presser is supposed to be aired live on Marquee, and on 670 The Score, and is being streamed here by the Cubs:
What follows below are paraphrased comments from Hoyer as he makes them (and any commentary I might have along the way). Again, doing my best to keep up live for those of you who can’t watch, updating this post along the way …
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Jed Hoyer starts with an opening statement, asking his own question: is this season a success? No. I’m impressed by what the guys have done, but the internal expectations were to make the playoffs. When we were 10 games under, these guys still believed. They still knew they were a very good team. Begging me not to sell. And they went on a heck of a run, 10 under to 12 over. It was fun to watch. But we didn’t finish the race.
There are positives to take away at the big league level, but we’re stuck thinking about the painful last two or three weeks. Can’t call something that comes up short of your goals a success. It’ll motivate me and everyone else all winter.
Getting to the playoffs will require a lot of offseason work. Extra time here in October – unwanted – to plan. The shell of a really good team is here, but obviously we have to make additions and improve. Given where we were a year ago, I feel really good about the pieces we have in place so far.
As expected, all the praise for David Ross. Game-planning, keeping the clubhouse positive, etc. The nature of it is to question the moves; and yes, that also includes the front office sometimes – we have disagreements. But he’s open-minded to our feedback and trying to improve. Overall pleased with the job he did this year, and he should be proud of what he did with that group through the season.
From an org standpoint/farm system standpoint, it was a really positive season. We got rightful criticism in the past for not developing pitching, but this year we saw so many steps forward. Including big league impacts. We have a lot more coming. All credit to the player development staff – huge jump forward in our farm system ranking, and in the volume of players who can help us.
Yes, of course there are players in the system we’ll use in trade to acquire big leaguers. But having a huge volume of guys internally is key. The energy. The performance. The cost-control. The league is very young when you look around. So it’s not JUST about using farm system players to go out and make trades.
We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how things went wrong at the end. We’ll spend a lot more. Part of it was fatigue. Part of it was regression. Part of it was a beat up bullpen. Part of it was not performing in the clutch. Part of it was defense. But how do you portion that out? It’s all of them. So we have to put it under a microscope and try to tease out exactly what happened.
Unfortunately, the end looked a lot like May. Didn’t win close games. Bullpen was not defined. Struggled in every kind of clutch situation. Critical mistakes. Giants series seemed to feature the last really big moment, and that was what, a few weeks ago. We just stopped having those moments. Stopped shutting down opposing rallies. We were 2-8 in one and two-run games in that stretch, and there are always so many things you could point to in those close games.
We blew teams out well this year – great record in blowouts, but not so much in close games.
Cody Bellinger was a big part of the offensive success. Felt like during the great run in the summer he bailed out again and again. We had a long conversation on Sunday. He loves Wrigley and the fans. A fantastic experience on both sides. We’d love to have him back, but there’s a process that’ll play out over a long period of time. It’s rare for a guy to come in on a one-year deal and have that kind of connection with fans. (This is all just tone reading, but it didn’t FEEL like Hoyer was trying to express confidence about being able to re-sign him. He wasn’t negative about it either. Just kept it really neutral, in terms of tone on confidence/eagerness/etc.)
I think we have a lot of good arms coming for the bullpen, but the transition to the big leagues is not easy. We also lost a lot of guys we were counting on this year, and you have to anticipate that attrition. We just need to build up more depth.
Next year will be important, to build on the momentum of this year. Big strides in the organization, and you have to build on that.
Ross is not a new manager anymore. He has matured in the job, and he wants to continue getting better every year. He’s going to spend the winter thinking about how he could have done things differently. Just how he is. You want people who are accountable. I feel accountable for what happened. Carter Hawkins feel that way. The players feel that way. Everyone is thinking about what they could have done differently. And yes, next year is a very important year for Ross, as well as all of us. (That was initially the question.)
I thought Kyle Hendricks’ season was exceptional, given how much we didn’t know what he was going to be able to do. But Hendricks was confident all along, and he really backed it up. He’s been one of my favorite Cubs players to be around since I’ve been here. Hard to imagine a better teammate. Not gonna negotiate publicly, but we want to keep him as a Cub for next year and beyond. (Wonder if the Cubs are hoping they can get a two-year deal done, instead of just picking up the $16 million option for 2024.)
Players play very hard for David Ross. They want to play hard for him. That’s just part of who he is. Players can sense when a guy isn’t real.
Marcus Stroman is a really good pitcher – second half of 2022 and first half of 2023 were exceptional – and you can never have too much pitching. Felt like after London he just couldn’t get it back, even as he tried. He and his agent have a decision to make (on the opt-out), and he’ll let us know after the World Series.
Everyone saw what Seiya Suzuki can be in those final couple months, after the break to clear his head. He was one of the best hitters in baseball.
About the missed catch, he’s obviously very upset at himself for it and apologetic. But it was one moment in a long run of bad moments for the team. No one can say that was the critical moment. It was bad. But we had a number of bad moments – even simple stuff like leaving a runner on third, making a more typical error, etc. Everyone in their own way probably did something they would want back. Part of how I know we have a good group is that, in Atlanta, one by one guys were going to him to try to pump him up. My hope is a moment he puts in the rearview, and the offense continues to carry forward.
So fun to watch Dansby Swanson every day, because that’s how you appreciate how good and steady he is on defense. He’s ultra self-critical. I know he regrets some of the at bats that didn’t work out. Maybe he wore down physically. But he’s always focused on the right things. He never stops thinking about winning. I truly believe he does not care about anything other than winning.
Another Cody question – we’ll be in communication, but if we are, I’m going to keep it as quiet as possible. You’re always trying to sell free agents on playing in Chicago, and it helps to have already had a year here. (Just would not get into anything at all. Doesn’t want to talk about timeline, etc.)
I love playing series against teams like the Braves, because you see the standard you need to set. Can we create that in one offseason? No. But the key is to build a team that gives you a chance to make the postseason – which is part of the reason it’ll hurt to watch the playoffs today – and then there are more steps from there. It takes time.
Swanson is going to be involved in the offseason discussions, because that’s just how he is. He’ll be in our ear, playing assistant GM. We may take some suggestions, may not take some others. We love that his heart is always in the right place.
It’s going to help Morel to get to one place defensively, because of, among other things, the arm work. His power is very real, and you want that in the lineup every day. We need to work to find one spot for him defensively.
So much of what we see in-season is borne out of work guys do in the offseason. Justin Steele is the perfect example, because we challenged him before last offseason to put himself in a position to be strong all year, deep into starts. What an exceptional season for him. Every time he took the mound, I thought we were going to win. The performance fell off a bit at the very end, but we’ll never know if that was just baseball happening or if it was fatigue. But he’ll put him even more work. Hoyer was effusive in his praise on Steele.
Hoyer’s answer on Taillon was almost to completely brush it off – not in a bad way, but just like “eh, he’ll be fine.” Taillon was good in the second half, has been good for a very long time, and he’ll be motivated this offseason because his results weren’t where he wanted them.
You can’t bottle up clubhouse chemistry year to year and ensure it’ll be the same next year. It always changes. But I feel really good about the core we have in place, and the standard they’ll set.
Pete Crow-Armstrong struggled at the plate when he was here, and I told him this on Sunday. I believe that’ll be the best thing that could have happened to him. He’s such an exceptional defender. He’ll refine his baserunning, too. He’s a good hitter, but he probably realized he has to make certain changes offensively. It’s key to realize that now. The pitching is just so different in the Major Leagues. I told him I watched Anthony Rizzo hit terribly for a long time when he was young, and we sat him down and said you saw what it was like, and you have to make changes. He showed up in spring training and he’d completely altered his swing because he knew there were pitches he couldn’t get to. He doesn’t make those changes if he doesn’t come up and struggle. It’s hard to go through those moments, but it can be such a good thing to happen to you long-term. (Man I loved hearing this. It’s something I talk about a lot, and it’s very real. The struggle is so valuable to the RIGHT players at the RIGHT time.)
Tom and Crane were aggressive with the payroll this year to try to compete, and that momentum is something we want to continue and capture. That was all Jed would say about payroll questions. We knew he’d say nothing.
It’s hard to know when young players are definitely ready – how do you compete at the highest level while also breaking guys in? Some guys come up and immediately put up huge numbers, without a struggle to adjust. But other times, very good players struggle, have to be sent down, adjust, and then come up. It’s almost impossible to know which group a player will fall into. You have to have a strong core in place, in part because it helps protect the young players from having to do too much at first. You need them to succeed to be a healthy organization, but it’s a real challenge to break them in while you’re also trying to win.
We will spend a LOT of time over the next month getting ready for the GM Meetings and the offseason, to make sure we know all the players, know all the buy-sell demands out there among teams, etc. You make the best plans you can, but of course they can fall apart quickly. Cody was our top target heading into last offseason, we thought he was going to be non-tendered, we focused so heavily on him at this time last year – and it all worked out. Sometimes it does. But you have to have Plans A through Z, because it doesn’t always work out like that.
There is a willingness to go over the luxury tax, historically, so we know it can happen. I don’t make that decision alone. You want to be strategic about it. There’s no organizational mandate against it.
I really liked the pairing of Yan Gomes and Miguel Amaya late in the year. Gomes was so clutch, but also his presence with the pitching staff – they practically see him as a player-coach. He’s a favorite among the other players and the staff for a reason. He was also really good at working with Amaya. Did not expect a year ago that Amaya would be up and provide as much as he did, given the injuries and missed time. Good years for both, guys we can think about moving forward.
Injury updates coming after tomorrow, because there’s an org medical meeting tomorrow.
And that’s it.
