2023 Team

[Butcher]

All is forgiven if he signs Correa, though. It's just hard to see it happening...

[rok]

I fully expect either the Giants or Dodgers to lock up Correa. No way Jed offers any player more than a 5 year deal.


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[Butcher]

And he’s off to the Giants. I don’t think there’s any way to salvage the off-season at this point. Just pack it in. What a joke this team has become.

[MrSheps]

13 years is pretty ridiculous, but it keeps the yearly price down, and it's not like you can't deal the dude at some point even with a no trade, it happens all the time. I'm mixed on this because he's always rubbed me the wrong way and so I think it's fitting he's going to go to the Giants where he'll get booed by Dodgers fans for well over a decade.

So Swanson. Here's the thing, had the Cubs just signed him at the winter meetings it probably would have been fine, but I'm just assuming they'll now be priced or "yeared" out of their of their comfort zone and that's such a self-own. Once it became clear CC wanted not just 10 but THIRTEEN freaking years, how do you not quickly sure up Swanson? I mean I guess it's good the Giants are now off the board, but doesn't this mean the Dodgers are probably now more motivated? And same for the Twins, etc.

The Cubs are incredibly profitable and while ownership may not be at Mets level, they're in the top tier of "rich" in the league. They need to do better.

[rok]

Are there ANY remaining free agents worth signing now? Jed is going to keep repeating his tired spiel about intelligent spending, call it an offseason and claim to still be lazer-focused on building the Next Great Cubs Team behind the scenes. Should be one helluva fine Cubs Convention next month.


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[1060Ivy]

It’s startling how bad Chicago sports teams have become. Bears, Bulls, Blackhawks, Cubs, and Sox are all faltering. What the hell has happened to these once storied franchises?

I’m used to having at least one Chicago team leading their division or at least making moves / “being in the news” since the 80’s that’s just not happening the last seasons. Probably the closest thing we have to national headline sports stories this year are the rise of Fields and the bafoonish coaching decisions of LaRussa / underachieving Sox.

[funkster]

Are there ANY remaining free agents worth signing now? Jed is going to keep repeating his tired spiel about intelligent spending, call it an offseason and claim to still be lazer-focused on building the Next Great Cubs Team behind the scenes. Should be one helluva fine Cubs Convention next month.


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I've been ranting about this for two days now, I dont want to hear SHIT about intelligent spending. Please STFU with that, since clearly all the term means to you is hoping some FA who is now garbage will cheaply get back to some value they once had. I've given them the benefit of the doubt, but my patience is at an end. Even if they sign Swanson at this point, they need so much more.

[1060Ivy]

Hey, Jed’s just keeping his powder dry for in season acquisitions.

[rok]

Swanson would be the exact opposite of intelligent spending. Hey, someone send Jed a pretty chart that shows a middle infield of Nico and Madrigal blows ass from $/WAR perspective.


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[rok]

From Sharma & Mooney this morning:

Even before the Carlos Correa news broke late Tuesday night, the internal tensions between the business and baseball sides of the Chicago Cubs organization had spilled into the open. With astronomical contracts resetting the market for top free agents, Cubs president of baseball operations Crane Kenney deflected the external pressure to do something onto Jed Hoyer, the No. 1 baseball executive at Wrigley Field. Hoyer believes publicly discussing payroll parameters puts the Cubs at a competitive disadvantage. Kenney, however, recently appeared on the team’s flagship radio station and again revealed that Hoyer’s group still has leftover money from last season’s budget.

“The business is still healthy and that left Jed with a lot of money to spend this year,” Kenney told 670 The Score. “Like last year, where he didn’t spend all the money he had. Last year, he just didn’t see transactions that made sense to him. I hope there are transactions that make sense to us this year to spend all the money he has.”

You can cross Correa’s name off that wish list after the All-Star shortstop reached an agreement with the Giants on a 13-year, $350 million contract, making it two consecutive offseasons that the Cubs whiffed on the generational talent who once drew comparisons to Alex Rodriguez during a dazzling predraft workout at Wrigley Field.

Kenney ostensibly joined The Score’s morning show last week to talk about the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum honoring Cubs radio broadcaster Pat Hughes with the 2023 Ford C. Frick Award. But after a frenetic Winter Meetings that saw the Cubs make deals with former National League MVP Cody Bellinger and starting pitcher Jameson Taillon, the questions inevitably turned toward what’s next for Hoyer’s front office and what’s possible under the directives from chairman Tom Ricketts and his family’s ownership group.

Curiously, the Cubs structured Bellinger’s one-year, $17.5 million contract with a $12 million base salary in 2023 and a $5.5 million buyout of a mutual option for 2024. Those financial maneuverings came at a time when the Phillies stretched Trea Turner’s $300 million megadeal over 11 seasons to reduce the contract’s average annual value for luxury-tax purposes. The Padres followed a similar strategy with Xander Bogaerts’ 11-year, $280 million deal, adding to a star-studded cast that already includes Manny Machado, Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Yu Darvish.

One by one, free agents the Cubs targeted are signing with other teams, narrowing the potential paths for an 88-loss club to make substantial improvements and reach the playoffs next season. If the baseball operations group has so much money to spend that the president of business operations is talking about it on the radio, why did the Cubs pass on Christian Vázquez and Kodai Senga? Vázquez, a potential replacement for All-Star catcher Willson Contreras, received a three-year, $30 million commitment from the small-market Twins. Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander weren’t enough for Steve Cohen’s rotation, so the Mets landed Senga with a five-year, $75 million contract, betting on the Japanese pitcher’s potential.

The rampant frustrations on Cubs Twitter made this a good time to run a multi-part mailbag/airing of grievances. Questions have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I was surprised by Kenney’s comments. Which of the two following scenarios do you believe is happening: Is ownership sick of being called cheap, and trying to pass the blame for no impact signing onto Hoyer? Or is ownership genuinely pushing Hoyer to sign a shortstop to a big contract and Hoyer is resisting? — Adam D.

It feels odd for Kenney to be so vocal all of a sudden about freedom to spend when the purse strings were tight the last few years. This seems like Kenney is trying to make Hoyer the fall guy if they don’t turn it around this year. Is there internal strife between Hoyer and Kenney or am I reading into it too much? — Brendan N.

Patrick Mooney: What might be unusual for most professional sports franchises is standard operating procedure in Wrigleyville. Kenney mentioned the rollover funds last summer during another appearance on The Score: “All the resources that weren’t used that would have pushed us up the ladder on the payroll chart this year will go into next year’s budget.” For example, the savings account that Theo Epstein once set up for baseball operations helped finance the Jon Lester contract after a failed bid to sign Masahiro Tanaka. It was also a customary practice for Epstein’s front office to set aside nearly $10 million for in-season additions around the trade deadline.

So are the Cubs carrying over money that could’ve been used to acquire a decent reliever or an impact player? Kenney, who will be entering his 30th season with the Cubs organization next year, is skilled in the art of workplace politics, rising from his position as a Tribune Co. lawyer to outlast changes at the ownership level and continue pitching big ideas to the Ricketts family. Kenney says things that make headlines, like the time that Bloomberg Businessweek quoted him saying: “Basically, my job is fill a wheelbarrow with money, take it to Theo’s office, and dump it.”

“There wasn’t a mandate,” Kenney told The Score. “The one beautiful thing about our ownership group is they don’t issue a lot of mandates. They urge and encourage us to think broadly, whether it’s about saving the stadium or building a better spring training home or improving what we’re doing in the Dominican or doing what we can with our media network to serve our fans better. But they’re not real big on mandates to do things. They leave that in our hands, mine on the business side and Jed’s on the baseball side.”

How much of the “intelligent spending” guidance is being driven by Hoyer? And how much is coming from Ricketts? Fair or not, it feels like the Cubs are the owners in a fantasy auction that is so focused on getting a good deal and good value that they end up missing out on all the best players. Sometimes, you’ve got to overpay, and it feels like thus far the Cubs haven’t been willing to be flexible in that regard. — Adam M.

It is frustrating to see other teams go all-in, even to the point of spending enormous amounts of money for redundancy at some positions. Was Hoyer’s front office thrown off by just how much “non-intelligent spending” has occurred during the offseason? Does “intelligent spending” need to be redefined, especially with teams like the Padres and Mets willing to spend whatever it takes to win? — Michael R.

Is there a disconnect between ownership and the front office in terms of available funds? — Chuck W.

Sahadev Sharma: This feels like a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Hoyer knows that he has a certain budget to work with and that his team isn’t just one or two players away. He seems more cautious about years than actual money. This team isn’t on the verge of greatness, but he’s also stated that he’s not interested in a long rebuild. So he needs to add players to get them close to contention. He then needs to trust that those players are still high quality when the team is supposedly great (2024? 2025?) or have them off or nearly off the books by then.

He has to think that way because he has an owner, like most teams, who isn’t going to spend nonstop to get whomever he wants. That’s not an excuse or a suggestion that more owners shouldn’t behave like Cohen, Peter Seidler and John Middleton have the last few offseasons. It’s just the reality of the situation. It seems like this is probably how Cohen will always act, but will Seidler or Middleton eventually stop spending so luxuriously? Perhaps. But they’re the main contributors to the current wild market, putting Hoyer in this situation.

But it’s not just on the Ricketts. Listening to him talk, it sounds like Hoyer values finding “intelligent” deals and believes there are certain times and certain players that you go out of your comfort zone for. There’s also the great Andrew Friedman quote that The Athletic’s Andy McCullough brought up the other day: “If you’re always rational about every free agent, you will finish third on every free agent.”

Hoyer can stick to his guns here. Maybe he’s waiting for his moment and doesn’t want to spend recklessly a year or two early. But there are some problems with that. One is that fans are going to be irate. Late in the summer and once again when the season was over, they were repeatedly told that building a competitive team for 2023 was the goal for this winter. That’s going to be hard to accomplish without a lot more movement.

The second issue, and a more important one (fans’ feelings matter, but they’re not what decides the team’s future performance): it’s terribly risky to assume that when you’re ready to spend, the players you want will be there. There’s a risk that you’ll get so bad that players won’t want to join your team unless you go even further out of your comfort zone with spending. There’s the risk that none of your prospects hit or they get hurt or take more time to develop.

That perfect time may never arrive. So perhaps it makes the most sense to act on what’s in front of you right now rather than hoping and expecting that just-right moment to arise.

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[funkster]

Another year being pissed down the drain. But hey, real excited to see Cody Bellinger tear it up.

[funkster]

Signing the disgusting red boil that is Justin Turner would be icing on the cake.

[rok]

He might be a great sign and flip candidate!! Seriously screw Jed.


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[1060Ivy]

Is there a solid explanation as to why Bellinger’s $17 MM one year deal is split over 2 years?

Cubs are no where close to luxury tax threshold. Yeah, I understand time value of money so it’s cheaper to the Cubs to pay over the longer period. Damn by appearances it seems like Cubs are cheap and / or finances just might not be as strong as Kenny and Tom are saying.

I’m still getting weekly calls and emails from STH and group ticket reps despite getting rid of all seasons over a year ago.

Still believe the Cubs print money but no clue what debt financing looks like or what other endeavors are backed by Cubs financial commitments. Again, no clue as to why team would say they’re planning to spend money then get shut out of Senga and Vázquez deals which appeared reasonable.

Grasping at rationales for how a major market team can lose their best hitter and staring at potential 100 loss roster and not be more active in free agency or trades. I’m not referring to Judges nor Correas premier free agents but solid defensive catcher and first baseman shouldn’t be too much for Tom to write a check for

[biggz]

Brad Boxberger, come on down! $2.8MM. $2MM for 2023, $5MM mutual option and $800k buyout.

https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2022/12/c...erger.html