4 October 2023
Chicago Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer had hoped his annual end-of-season news conference would have come later in October than the previous two years.
Instead, Hoyer spent nearly an hour Tuesday morning reflecting on the Cubs finishing one game out of a playoff spot and how the organization moves forward.
“Externally, we were not expected to be a playoff team, but the internal expectations were that we’re going to make the playoffs and going back to spring training that was the clear goal,” Hoyer said. “When we were 10 games under .500 in the middle of June, these guys still believed and it was a pretty amazing thing from my seat to listen to them talk about how good they thought the team was.
“Right now we’re stuck thinking about what could have been and thinking about the painful last 2 1/2, 3 weeks. You can’t call something that falls short of your goal a success, so ultimately we have to live with that.”
Hoyer expressed his support of manager David Ross, who will be entering his fifth season at the helm, with 2024 representing a make-or-break year.
1. Not one specific area to blame for the September collapse.
Plenty of hours will continue to be spent trying to diagnose the root causes of the Cubs’ September failures and their awful stretch to close out the final three weeks. Hoyer said it’s been hard to define what exactly went wrong, but broke it down into five different areas: fatigue, regression, a banged-up bullpen, struggles in clutch situations and critical defensive miscues.
“It’s going to be hard to figure out exactly what proportions of those things led to our demise,” Hoyer said. “All of those things contributed in some way or another and we have to put it under a microscope and think about, can we tease out exactly what went wrong?”
Hoyer thought how the Cubs played at the end of the season mirrored, to their detriment, how they performed during their struggles in May and early June.
“Whenever you have a terrible stretch like that at the end — we were (2-10) in two-run games after that Giants series — whenever you have that, there’s so many different factors you can point to,” Hoyer said. “I feel like most of my waking moments are thinking about those moments and what we could have done differently.”
2. The Cody Bellinger question.
Will Cody Bellinger be back with the Cubs in 2024?
It’s arguably the most important decision surrounding the Cubs’ offseason and how they approach building next year’s roster. On Bellinger’s end, he made sure to appreciate the final weeks of September knowing it might be the end of his time playing for an organization he loved being a part of this season.
“We sat down with him on Sunday and had a long conversation — we’ve had really good dialogue throughout the whole year,” Hoyer said. “He loves Wrigley Field and he loves the fans and his experience was fantastic and obviously our experience was fantastic and we’d love to bring him back.”
There are lots of implications to what the Cubs’ lineup looks like in 2024 if Bellinger is not re-signed. Among them: the Cubs already needed to acquire another power hitter to the lineup, making the potential loss of a lefty slugger in Bellinger doubly tough. They need more quick-strike options when it comes to home run damage. Replacing Bellinger’s production and bringing in another top offensive threat presents a challenge. Their minor-league depth could also present a trade path to finding the bats the Cubs need. As a Scott Boras client, Bellinger likely won’t sign until late in the offseason, another wrinkle to roster building.
“We’ll have a lot of conversations with him,” Hoyer said. “Obviously it’s a process and that process does not start now. It’s going to play out for a while. … The contributions he made will have to be replaced. Like I said, we’d love to bring him back, but in a world where that’s somewhat uncertain, we do have to figure out a way to replace that offensively.”
3. It will take time for the Cubs to get on the level of top-caliber teams like Atlanta.
During the Cubs’ series last week in Atlanta, Hoyer looked over from his seat in the visitors dugout to the Braves dugout and remarked how much he enjoys those types of series.
The Cubs faced a historic offensive juggernaut that finished with an MLB-best 104 wins, which serves as a measuring stick of the high standard the organization wants to reach. Hoyer believes the Cubs’ roster needs time to reach that point. And the first step is returning to the playoffs in 2024.
“Can we create that in one offseason? No, that’s really difficult,” Hoyer said of reaching the Braves’ level. “The key is to build a team that we like that gives us a good chance to make the postseason. When you get in the postseason, anything can happen, which is part of why it’s going to be really painful to watch games this afternoon, knowing that we had a chance and we didn’t finish the race. That has to be the goal.
“It takes steps to get to the place where those teams are at. It’s not going to be one offseason to make that leap. When people look at our roster, they’re going to know it’s a playoff-caliber roster and hopefully we can add to that roster, but to make that leap up to Atlanta territory, that’s going to take a little bit of time.”
4. Cubs are looking for the ‘right time’ to go over the luxury tax threshold.
The Competitive Balance Tax (CBT) is also a looming factor in offseason decisions and acquisitions.
The Cubs aren’t strangers to going over the CBT threshold, surpassing it in 2019 and 2020, then making moves leading into the 2021 season to get under the annual figure to reset and avoid the penalties that occur after a third consecutive year beyond the limit. Hoyer didn’t want to get into the specifics of the Cubs’ payroll situation for 2024 — noting the figure still needs to be discussed in the coming weeks — but pointed to ownership and the front office’s willingness to go over it in the past.
Currently, the Cubs are roughly $78 million under the 2024 CBT threshold ($237 million), according to Cot’s Contracts.
“As the previous core got more expensive and as we needed to supplement the roster we did go over, so philosophically we’ve shown a willingness to do that,” Hoyer said. “It’s both a budgetary question but also we want to make sure that strategically you do it at the right time. So we’ll have those discussions, but there’s no organizational mandate against it.”
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