It's not fine to be "fine" with Jed being a lame duck
You can't expect things to improve when they're running out the clock on a guy they know won't take any risks



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The other chairman of a presumably big league team in Chicago who ought to be trying to sell it, Tom Ricketts, chatted with the Chicago Tribune’s Meghan Montemurro last week. The big things to come out of the interview were:
- Tom says last year was “amongst the toughest, maybe the toughest” season he’s had in the 15 years since his dad bought him and his idiot siblings a baseball team. Tom apparently blacked out during 2018 and 2019, I guess?
- When asked if he felt compelled to give a contract extension to Jed Hoyer he said, “He’s under contract, that’s the way I see it.”
- Tom confirmed that despite fielding a team that never seriously contended for anything that they went over the lowest level of the competitive balance tax by $280,000. “We tripped over it by a little bit.” Sort of like Ian Happ chasing a fly ball, I guess.
- And he summed up his expectations for his team as, “I feel like our future is really bright, and we’ve always looked to be consistent.” He’s not wrong about the second part, they’ve been consistently ass for five years now.
Has Hoyer done enough to deserve a contract extension? No. Of course not. His teams haven’t won anything, he builds rosters with big, gaping holes in them and waits way too long before finally embarking on a half-assed effort to address those holes, and for all of the pats they give themselves on the back for their robust farm system, we are still waiting for somebody to show up from it and not be a long term project learning on the job in the big leagues.
The fact that Jed fucked up and the team barely went over the luxury tax threshold shouldn’t be a big deal. The penalties for that level are almost nil. The Cubs will pay a penalty of 20% for the amount they are over. That’s it. There are no draft pick penalties or penalties on the pool to sign draft picks or international free agents. The Cubs will write a check to MLB for $56,000 and that will be the end of it.
But…