Depth of mediocrity
If a whole bunch of middling white dudes could win a World Series, the Cubs would never lose



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The Cubs are playing free and easy these days. Why wouldn’t they be now that they have shook off the shackles of our mild interest in whether or not they pretended to stay in the wild card race until the very end? Spoiler alert: they didn’t.
There will be some big decisions coming up in the offseason, and some of them could be made right away. First of all, Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts has to decide whether to pay Jed Hoyer to go away, or pay him to pretend to try to sign free agents. Sure, I’m the guy who guaranteed you that the Cubs wouldn’t be willing to fire David Ross last offseason and they did it, so we could be surprised and Jedley could get the axe, but let’s not count on it.
If the Cubs fired Jed it would mean they would embark on a massive overhaul of the front office. Because if you bring in a person to be your President of Baseball Nonsense from the outside they are going to want to bring in their own people. This was super easy when Jed replaced Theo in 2021 because he basically just kept everybody. It was also super easy in 2011 when Theo arrived because Jim Hendry’s front office consisted of Gary Hughes, a couple of interns and a case of Wild Turkey. Actually, a mostly empty case of Wild Turkey, otherwise Gary and Jim would have taken it with.
I suppose the Cubs could do the completely half assed thing and fire Jed and just promote Carter Hawkins. Actually, in that case, my guess is Carter would stay GM and they wouldn’t have a President of Baseball Nonsense, but Crane would go all Al Haig, “I’m in charge now!” I don’t even want to think about it.
My big brain idea is to fire Jed and promote Craig Counsell to his job. Craig spent a full season looking at his coaching staff and the vaunted pitching infrastructure and the big league roster and getting reports on all of the incredible can’t miss prospects. There’s no evidence that Craig would be any good at the big baseball ops job, but I’m confident he’d be better than Jed. That bar isn’t all that high.
I’m sure Craig will stick to being manager. But his influence on the entire organization is real. And he’s had enough time to realize how much of scam most of it is. The day the Cubs were eliminated from playoff contention, Craig had this to say.
“We should be trying to build 90-win teams here.”
That’s Craig’s Midwest nice way of saying, “This fucking organization doesn’t have nearly enough talent in it.”