Dear Theo,
Let me start by saying I’ve long been a big fan of your work, and as a Cubs fan old enough that my first favorite player was a guy who had eyebrows and a mustache that were all the same size (Bill Buckner), I will always thank you for forever ending the most confounding, inept and downright embarrassing era for any team in professional sports history.
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It’s fitting that Game of Thrones returns at the end of this week because my next thought is the infamous Eddard Stark statement that, “Everything before the word ‘but’ is horse shit” so…
As we look at the disastrous start to this season, I don’t want to cast blame or single anyone out. But, this is your fault. Just like you said the other day.
People can, and do, blame it on the manager, but I’m not buying that anything seriously wrong with this team is much of Joe Maddon’s or his staff’s doing. He has his faults, but getting the most out of his players has never really been one of them. You can rotate out hitting coaches and pitching coaches and watch your bench coaches leave for managing jobs elsewhere, but the important things that are wrong with this team are your doing.
In your marathon 2018 season postmortem press conference the day after your Cubs lost to the friggin’ Rockies, you talked about how the offense “broke.” Nobody disagreed with you, because that Cubs team went binary and only put up ones and zeroes for most of the last six weeks of the season. But that temporary blip of severe underperformance by a (mostly) talented offense was basically a distraction from what was, and still is, really wrong with this team: Your incredible inability to draft and develop a pitcher. Any pitcher. A starting pitcher, a closer, hell, even a single reliable relief pitcher. You’ve been drafting players for eight years and signing international free agents just as long and have nothing to show for it on the mound. Nothing. How is it even possible? (I guess we could say it’s Jason McLeod’s fault, but that would ruin the point.)
We know your model was to pay for pitching at the beginning, draft position players and when they started to get expensive it’d be fine because you’d be producing quality, low-cost pitchers but that time. But the pitching part of that plan has been an abject failure.
We hear and read stuff about how innovative your front office is, and how you are blending analytics, psychometrics and diuretics, L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, all the ‘etics basically, and clearly you have done a lot of really good things. Four playoff appearances in a row, three NLCS trips and a World Series trophy prove that. But you also have largely fielded teams where the outfielders don’t hit very much, though it was a nice touch that Dexter Fowler waited until he got to St. Louis to stop hitting.
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The ill-fated signing of Jason Heyward and the 2017 midseason trade for José Quintana were obvious examples of the kind of moves that your front office was supposed to be too smart to do. Both are examples of paying premium prices for good players and hoping that they’d become great players. It’s like you found an old Jim Hendry memo in your desk and decided, “Hey, THIS is a good idea.”
Nobody thought Heyward would be as bad as he has been — well, maybe the Braves did — but he also hadn’t shown that he was ever going to be worth anything close to what you paid. His two homers the other night were nice, but felt more like a novelty than anything else. Quintana is what he was with the White Sox, a good, solid starting pitcher, but nothing more than that. He’s running out of time to leave any lasting impression in Cubs’ fans minds that he was anything other than the guy you traded Eloy Jiménez for. And heaven forbid Dylan Cease turns out to be the one good pitcher your guys actually produced.
The 2016 trade for Aroldis Chapman demanded a steep price, as on a semi-regular basis we read things that start with “Gleyber Torres is the youngest Yankee since Mickey Mantle” to do such and such. It proved to be undeniably worth it because the Cubs would not have won the World Series without Chapman. Given the more than a century-long drought, the sacrifice of Gleyber is unconditionally accepted. I shudder to think how that World Series would have ended if Mike Montgomery had to pitch to anyone but Michael Martinez, but he didn’t, and all was well.
And, because the Cubs had turned things around so quickly, the fact that you needed to shore up the bullpen from outside the organization wasn’t a big deal. We all knew that eventually those kinds of guys would be developed not acquired. Ahh, to be that young and dumb again.
The media are just now dipping their toes into Joe Maddon Fire Watch, which should be a completely ridiculous idea. You can fire him and bring in a different manager, but you aren’t going to find a better one. Your impressive career resume has one pretty strong theme. You’ve been running teams as a general manager or vice president for 17 seasons now and have been incredibly successful. Except for the first three years with the Cubs when you did an amazing job of rebuilding a crap franchise on the fly, you have presided over contending teams in 14 of those seasons. Other than the doomed Grady Little season in 2003, 13 of those 14 teams were led by either Terry Francona or Joe Maddon. In other words, when you have a Hall of Fame manager running the teams you’ve built, things tend to work out pretty well. Maybe don’t mess with that?
I have no doubt that when you made the moves to sign Tyler “Spin Rate” Chatwood and Yu Darvish that you believed you had filled two holes in your rotation, not lost any draft picks in the process and still would have ample payroll in the next offseason to continue to improve the roster. I have no sympathy for Tom Ricketts’ absurd claims that the Cubs are out of money. I also notice that Laura and Todd didn’t run to the media to demand equal billing with their brother when he said that.
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The Ricketts aren’t wrong in their expectation that a team with a $210 million payroll should be good enough. But, if you spend $850,000 on a house and the roof leaks, how wise is it to stand in the house getting rained on and insist that you’re not going to pay to have it fixed because a house that expensive shouldn’t have a roof that leaks?
Then again, they also wouldn’t be wrong to wonder why after paying to send your kids to trade school for eight years that none of them knows how to fix a fucking roof.
I’m sure at some point this week you’ve felt the familiar old urge to put on the gorilla suit and sneak out of the building for good. I really hope you don’t do that. The mess is real, but also magnified by the fact that it happened at the very beginning of the season. There’s nothing here that can’t be fixed, and your track record is full of irrefutable evidence that you can do it. It’s eventually going to take reinforcements a few notches above Allen Webster and Kyle Ryan, but that’s not something I need to tell you.
Bullpens can be rebuilt on the fly, and have by any number of teams over the last few years. It would have been nice if it had been done in the offseason, but it wasn’t. That ship has sailed and crashed into the rocks and caught fire and sank and everyone died. So move on.
To continue this horribly executed ship metaphor, don’t be afraid to throw guys overboard, just don’t start with your manager. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but he’s pretty good at this stuff. You’re going to need him, and if that time comes and he’s not around that’s not going to do you much good.
Thanks,
Andy
(Top photo: Charles LeClaire/USA TODAY Sports)