Jed knows what's wrong, but isn't keen on fixing anything

Jed says, "I think" a lot, but does not appear to actually be doing much of it

Jed knows what's wrong, but isn't keen on fixing anything

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Before we get to Jed, David Brown and I took a look at the Wild Card series yesterday before the games started. Turns out everything we predicted has happened so far. Or something.

Jed Hoyer held his annual post season wank-athon yesterday. By now we know what the deal is. He will mostly accurately identify what went wrong with the flawed team he put together and he’ll declare he’s going to fix all of the deficiencies, and then the offseason will start and he’ll realize that’s going to cost money and none of it will be adequately addressed.

Anyway, let’s make fun of Jed. It’s pretty much the only fun thing we’ve got left with this bunch. This post is free, but if you want to subscribe (hint, hint) there’s a 20% off sale and you can sign up monthly or annually.

Anyway, on to Jed’s presser. Bruce Levine gets the honor of mumbling the first question.

Can you talk about the difference between 83-79 and 83-79 from last year and this year and how you feel about the organization as it is today?

The difference, I guess is that Jed paid two managers to win 83 games this year when he only had to pay one last year.

Jed: You know, when I think about our season and where we are, I'm disappointed, but optimistic.

I’m half of that.

I'm really excited about next year. I think we're building from a really great foundation going forward. And we need to get back to the postseason for these fans. I think that's what the fans deserve.

I think you’re building on a foundation of sand. Your minor league prospects are overrated in the saddest way possible. They’re OK, but we’re meant to pretend they’re somehow going to arrive some day and lift this team with what, their aggressive averageness?

Do you have any feel for the decision Cody Bellinger will make and how much does that decision impact what direction you go in the offseason?

Yeah, if he comes back Jed’s going to do fuck all to improve the roster.

Actually, that’s also the plan if Cody doesn’t come back.

Jed: When we signed that deal in late February, we knew that if he had a good year, we knew that he would have a lot of options.

Well, what’s he got now then?

He had a good year, and so I think he'll have options.

Wait, he did? His average dropped 40 points, his on base dropped 30, he slugged a whopping 100 points less. He did hit into more double plays, though.

Obviously, he didn't have quite the year he had last year. Like last year, he was an MVP candidate, I think. But when you look at the totality of the year he had, I think had roughly an 800 OPS on the road. I think his home OPS was 200 points lower than last year. And that's kind of how Wrigley played.

Cody’s home OPS this year was .700, which was down 200 points but his road OPS was .797 and that was down about 80, so you can make a better case that Wrigley inflated his numbers last year than you can that it depressed them this year.

So I expect him to have a lot of options. Obviously, it will impact team building. I think just figuring out what positions we're filling and he is versatile, but it'll have an impact. But like I said, I expect he'll have a bunch of options given how he played this year.

Sounds like Jed is trying to hint to Cody that he should opt out and cash in on…a year that was clearly far less productive than the year before when nobody but the Cubs tried to sign him. Good luck with that, Jedley. I’m afraid you just might be stuck having to pay, and find a spot for, a good baseball player. Oh, the horror.

Morning, Jed. The gap between the Cubs and the Brewers, 10 games, whatever it ended at, was that just a performance gap, you know, sort of within the margins or was that a roster gap? Was that an organizational gap? How do you assess that?

It was like 11:30 by that point. Good lord, man, get some sleep.

Jed: Ultimately, the only gap that matters, I think, is the standings. You know, we and the rest of the NL Central are roughly 10 games back and that's a significant gap. You know, obviously we have to, redouble our efforts and work really hard to close that gap.

Cool, just lump yourself in with the rest of the failures in the NL Central. It’s sad that you either can’t or won’t take advantage of your actual huge advantages over these cowtowns you share a division with. Actually, what’s impressive is that you somehow can’t and won’t at the same time. Plus, stop saying gap so much.

We've come a long way in the last three years.

Yeah, it’s great. After you stopped trying to win you got bad and now you’re just mediocre. Congratulations on your major accomplishment.

This year, being ten games behind them, I think that makes you realize that we have room to go. And I think that for everyone.

Stop including the cheap assholes in St. Louis, Cincinnati and Pissburgh in with you. It doesn’t make any of this better. The Brewers won 93 games because they played in a shitty division and you were a big part of it being shitty. The fact that there was a 10 game gap between them and you should be humiliating. But here you are showing your face two days after the season anyway.

A lot of your moves last offseason worked out, Shōta and Busch…

No, not “a lot.” Two. Two worked out.

Overall you look at the numbers and some of these players are basically their normal numbers. So can you pinpoint just what happened or is that just too many factors?

I can only assume that the guys who “are basically their normal numbers” are the three white guys who basically tanked the entire season by not hitting in May, June or July? At the end of the year Ian Happ (.782), Nico Hoerner (.708) and Dansby Swanson (.701) all ended up much better numbers than the positive impact they had on the offense. Happ had the best offensive season of the three, because he actually started to hit in mid-June, but Nico and Dansby didn’t lift a finger until the division race was over and the Cubs were too far behind too many teams in the wild card race to be a real threat.

Now, believe me, I think we've spent way too much time trying to think about that question.

Doesn’t seem like too much time, considering that fact you still don’t have an answer. Though I guess considering the big brains of the guys who are pondering these questions, you could spend a millennium on it and never figure any of it out.

Ultimately, we collectively fell into a slump in May and June that we couldn't get out of. I think in baseball, you're going to have ups and downs as part of the game. But that went on way too long. And we just dug ourselves a hole that was much too big.

How big was the hole exactly? Did anybody measure it? Was it below the water table? Did it start to get muddy?

And we did it collectively. Our offense wasn't scoring. Our bullpen was struggling. It wasn't just one factor. I think it was kind of multi-factor at that point.

You know the old saying, “If you want to fast go alone, if you want to get hopelessly lost go with the Cubs.”

And really, if you look at it, we got to nine under.

I don’t want to look at it. Put it away.

If you look at our records since then, we played really good baseball. I think we were a .580 winning percentage over the last three months of the season.

It doesn’t matter. Nobody gives a shit what your winning percentage was over the last three months of the season. Honestly, I’m still upset that you failed to repeat your great achievement of “fifth best record in the National League in the second half” for a third straight year. You only had the sixth best this time. What am I supposed to do with all the t-shirts I had made?

So I think that gives a lot of reason for optimism.

Sure. You know my favorite saying. Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.

But ultimately, we just dug ourselves a hole that was too big.

Enough with the holes, Jed! Get a new analogy. How about, “Ultimately, we just fucked ourselves until we bled?” Better? Worse?

And I am really proud of the coaching staff.

So is Craig. That’s why he’s firing all of them.

I'm proud of the players for fighting and continuing to fight and build on their seasons.

I wish they had fought. I’d have paid money to watch somebody punch Happ in the head.

I think when you look at a number of the players that struggled during that period, Dansby, PCA, Amaya, those guys struggled during that stretch. And they really ended up getting back to their expected numbers.

Great job struggling, guys! Incredible stuff! Nobody struggled as majestically as you!

I think we played really well in the second half, but the teams that we were chasing, played a little better. We didn't make up ground on the Mets. We didn't make up ground on the Padres or Diamondbacks. During that period, they played a little bit better.

You know we’d have made the playoffs if so many other teams hadn’t won more games than we did!

So I think we were sixth in baseball in winning percentage in the second half in July, August, and September. But unfortunately, the teams that we were chasing didn't falter.

No, Jed, we just went over this. You had the sixth best record in the National League in the second half. Not in baseball. Get your phony baloney stats right.

How you kind of evaluate a little bit of up and down nature of the season. How does that shape plans or what you guys may do to attack the offense going into the off season here?

We hit really well, both as an offense and situationally in April.

Really struggled in those areas in May and June, and then hit really well after that. So I think that a lot of the guys got kind of got back to the expected numbers that they had going in the year. think we ended up overall, think, 12th in baseball and run scoring.

You know how many runs you scored? Not fucking enough, that’s how many.

It's also really difficult to assess when you think about the way Wrigley Field played this year. Last year, Wrigley was the seventh best offensive park in baseball. This year, it was 29th.

You do realize that when you harp on the idea that Wrigley was somehow a terrible place to hit this year to defend your hitters you are also damning Shōta’s good first season. He was much better at home where he struck out nearly twice as many batters as he did on the road and held batters to 100 points less OPS.

Ultimately, when you think about offense or think about teams at Wrigley, we don't know what the weather is going to do year to year.

Here’s a crazy idea. Get better hitters.

You mentioned the last two years of the slumps that you guys have had in May and June. Is there anything, is there like a common thread between them? Is there anything that you guys have learned to try and either mitigate it or avoid that in the future?

Get better players? Why are we making this so hard?

Both years, we've really come out of the gates well, played really well against hard schedules in April, and then kind of fallen into a swoon after that. It's a hard thing to pinpoint. I don't know what we'd be doing differently in spring training or whatnot. I think it's probably something random in terms of the shape of the season. But you're totally right that the shape of the last two seasons is pretty similar or in terms of falling into a hole and then digging like crazy to get out of it and just falling short of the end.

Oh boy, we’re back in the hole again. And you’re not supposed to swoon until June. It rhymes.

Will you, Jed, will you explain the dynamic between you and Craig this year?

I love the use of Jed’s name there. He was the only guy at the table. Excuse me, only guy answering questions! This one is for you! Yes, you right there, the only guy sitting there!

[Craig, yes, Craig] took a couple of occasions to talk about how the narrative and the communication is continuing to grow and has to get better. What's your perspective of that relationship?

First of all, I couldn't be happier that he's a Cub. He's a great manager, a brilliant baseball mind. I think all of us learn from him on a daily basis.

Learn more, please.

We signed him to a five year deal, not a one year deal.

We know. You’re the guy with one year left on a contract, not him.

I think people are probably naive to think that someone could just walk right in and you have a great relationship and understanding right away. I think with every relationship is growing. I think that I have the utmost respect for what he does. I think he's really great at what he does. And I think we'll just continue to communicate.

I think I think you’re saying, “I think” a lot.

I think part of these jobs is you have hard conversations. I mean, the shape of this season led to some hard, hard times, difficult times, and I think we just have to communicate through those.

“We had some hard times, man. We had to send Nick Madrigal to the minors and then he broke his hand when he fell off his tricycle trying to ride it all the way to Des Moines. I mean, he got hit by a pitch in his first game there. Right? Was that our cover story?”

I was hoping one of the hard conversations you two would have would have been Craig consoling you as you packed up your office after you got fired. Well, these are the Cubs. Wait ‘til next year, right? Ha ha. (Cries a little.)

What's your frustration level just in being in this spot right now? And can you give us a sense of what Tom’s frustration level might be along those lines also?

Was this question about how frustrated he was having to talk to the ghoulish gaggle of reporters that cover the Cubs?

I think I said at the very beginning, think that kind of general sense of the organization is I think everyone's optimistic about our future.

Oh, I’m not.

I think we've put ourselves in terrific position.

What position is that? Prone?

I think everyone's disappointed that in the way the season played out. I think we showed at times for long stretches that we're a really good team.

No. I think you’re wrong.

I think that from Tom on down, I think there's a level of disappointment in that. Of course, there's frustration. I think there should be frustration when you fall short of a goal that you set a year ago.

My sympathies for you not reaching your goal and missing the playoffs by a few more games than you were planning to miss them by. Thoughts and prayers.

Since you took over, you've consistently made rational long-term decisions to put the organization in better place this off season with kind of a playoff or bust type of situation. Do you think more short term? Do you go outside your comfort zone? Do you take maybe a big swing that maybe the Cubs haven't in a couple of years, whether it's trade, free agency? How do you look at that dynamic going forward?

Patrick Mooney, everybody, with a very polite way of asking, “Are you ever going to put your balls on the table and actually try to acquire a great player?”

Well, we haven't truly gotten into our offseason planning mode yet.

So, no. Well, thanks for nothing.

I think in general, the goal is to build something that's sustainable.

We’d settle for something that might be good. Once. Because you haven’t done a lick of that since you took over.

Craig actually talked about building 90 win teams. What he really means is…

Great, Jed’s going to tell us what Craig really meant when he got pissed off after the team got eliminated and called out Jed for not being willing to do something that might actually pay off.

…building teams that can project that year after year after year.

Oh, that’s kind of a surprise. Jed actually just admitted that his 83 wins or bust mentality isn’t just kind of flawed, it’s completely fucked. Well, I’m sure he won’t do anything about it.

That's a difficult thing to do. Only three teams in baseball were projected for 90 wins going into the season.

That sounds like bullshit. But even it’s not, I don’t care. You should be one of those three teams.

To get to a place where we can build our projections up and consistently make the postseason year after year, I think there's a level of discipline to do that. You don't want to take wild swings, and you don't want to do things that are going to expose you long term.

You do want to take a wild swing once in a while. As for exposing yourself, well, stay away from where the kids play catch over at Gallagher Way.

I think the goal here is getting to a place where the playoffs are an expectation every single year that we're in a position to to sustain success.

Oh, that’s already the expectation. You are just failing miserably at it.

I think we did that before. I think we got to a place where we made the playoff, I think six out seven years. I think in doing that, we probably did take some chances.

You actually didn’t take that many chances. You keep acting like you traded away a bunch of hot shot prospects to build a team good enough to finally win a World Series and then keep going after them. But you didn’t. You traded away Gleyber Torres and Dylan Cease and Eloy Jimenez, and Isaac Paredes (remember him?) and Jeimer Candelario and that’s about it. What it should have told you is that the prospect cost is worth it. But you learned a completely different, completely wrong lesson from it, like always.

Craig did come on late. And as a result, didn't have a chance to really put his staff together.

You hired him on November 8. The Mets hired Carlos Mendoza the same day. How did Carlos manage to hire a full staff while you just stuck Craig with the drooling sycophants you hired for David Ross?

Obviously, part of hiring a manager like him is giving him the ability to build his staff.

Apparently not.

But at least I think it's his right to want his own staff.

How big of you.

He should want his own staff. And I think it would have been almost unusual if at the end of the year he chose to keep everyone together. And so I think with our help, certainly, we'll all be working on what that looks like.

Do me a favor. Don’t help him. Just get out of his way.

Obviously, there's a lot of teams playing baseball right now still. I'm sure there'll be permission asked and things like that. So I can't say this is our coaching staff for next year for sure. But I think that the people that are here will certainly have the opportunity to come back.

Fuck.

Just what have been the indicators to you as you guys start to plot the avenues for the offseason of next year's payroll? Do you anticipate things staying where they're at? Do you anticipate further or less flexibility in that area?

I think that we haven't got into the budget process yet. And I think that's something that we'll be discussing a lot over the next three or four weeks. So I think this month will be used to figure out exactly our direction this offseason. And obviously, payroll is part of it.

I really hope he’s lying. Seriously, why wouldn’t they know what their budget is for next year? Well, I guess Crane is taking his sweet time cooking the books.

There's all kinds of currency as far as flexibility for a front office like yourself beyond money, and that is your farm system's considered one of the best in baseball. Do you guys have lot of internal conversations about how you can use some of that currency to be a better team rather than just projecting them being on your team, using them as, you know. tools to be able to get better on the field.

Look at Bruce using the word “currency.” Ooh, fancy.

When you look at our books long term, they're incredibly clean. think we have really good contracts on our books.

Well, and Dansby’s.

The players that are on deals played really well. And think obviously we've graduated a lot of guys and we still have have seven top 100 prospects.

Yes, we know. You are awash in “this guy might not completely suck,” how great for all of us.

When it comes to trading young players, of course, I think those are things you have to consider. But it has to make sense for the long term. Making sure that we're not doing it just for a short term gain. Young players have upside, young players stay healthier.

Young players are cheaper. That’s what you actually mean.

The last thing we want to do is to get away from building through young players. Michael Busch this year, you know, Pete this year, I think, you know, showed a glimpse of what young players can do, I think, from an energy standpoint and from an upside standpoint, and we don't want to run away from that.

Busch turns 27 in five weeks, Jed. Young is apparently relative.

I'm excited about our young players. think a lot of those guys are gonna have a huge impact on the Cubs for a long time.

A positive one?

Oh boy, Bruce is back.

You could have anywhere from $65 to $95 million coming off the books. But I think if you look at across baseball, the answer isn't just spending money.

Looks like the bosses at Marquee wrote a question for Bruce. “Hey, don’t forget to point out that spending money is actually bad.”

Every offseason is different. I know that last year played out really late. Some years it plays out early. You have to be prepared for everything. But like I said, I'm excited about the foundation that we're building off of. We have, like I said, have a lot of good players on our team. We've got a lot of good prospects.

That’s a long way of saying, “We’re not adding shit.”

Do you feel any personal pressure to get this done in your fifth year? Does Tom say anything like, “Hey, we've got to get this done?”

Tom mostly says, “How much of your player personnel budget can we redirect to help fund the border wall?”

I feel the pressure I always should feel, is I'm president of the Cubs and and this is an exciting opportunity and exciting time to to be in this role and we're in really good position.

You could barely hear Crane yell, “You’re ONE OF THE PRESIDENTS OF THE CUBS” in the background.

You mentioned Busch and PCA. Just what is your comfort level at those two positions with those guys coming off the rookie years and seeing what they were able to do?

I think when you look at Michael, really impressive rookie year. I think he's going to win Gold Gloves at first.

Real Gold Gloves or Ian Happ ones?

I think he was outstanding over there. I think offensively, I think he ended up at .775 OPS as a rookie, which is really impressive. He really struggled at Wrigley. So I think that if you actually look at his numbers, he probably even had an even better year than it appears when you factor in the park factors and everything.

Yeah, he did really struggle at Wrigley. Busch slashed .211/.299/.384 there. Yikes. Well, I’m sure that’ll be fine.

With Pete, now obviously he's much younger than Michael…

Everybody is.

He struggled this spring. It took him a little while to find his legs. He struggled even during his struggles. He really helped us win games with his defense. He showed what he can be in the second half of season. He played really well offensively. He ran the bases well. His defense was unbelievable. I mean, I think that of all the developments of 2024, I think that his emergence in the second half should be certainly high on the list of those things.

I love Petecrow, but he was really only good in August at the plate. He slashed .314/.375/.558 that month and regressed back to .256/.299/.378 in September. So let’s not act like he’s got it all figured out. Granted, his September was much better than any month pre-August, but he struck out A LOT in September. Like 30 times in 90 at bats a lot.

When you have so many position players at AAA who are knocking on the door, you have so many positions locked in place at the big league level, and you're trying to improve the MLB team, just how challenging is that balance of having pathways to the big league roster with I need to make this offense better for 2025 so we can contend for the playoffs?

This one’s easy. Most of the prospects won’t amount to anything. So that’ll just handle itself. Next!

Oh, wait, Jed wants to answer.

There's a balance there, but we should never underestimate the value of depth. We've gotten to this place where our best prospects are breaking into the big leagues or they're in AAA. That provides real depth and a lot of that depth is off the 40 man roster, which is even more valuable. We'll obviously think about all sorts of different opportunities, but that's a really enviable position that, with an injury or poor performance, you know, the kind of guy that's coming up to the roster is a top hundred prospect and I don't want to lose sight of that.

Well, that was a lot of nothing.

When you look at the offensive production collectively, I you've talked in the past about wanting more slug, the home runs, obviously, Wrigley this year suppressed some of that. But do you feel like the group collectively needs more slug?

Yes. Next question.

Oh, shit, Jed’s going to belabor this, too.

Yeah, that is certainly something that was lacking this year. No one was hitting 30 homers, and we didn't have any one player slugging at a really high level. I do think Seiya ended up top 10 in the National League in OPS, top 20 in baseball. And I do think in general, Wrigley suppressed offenses here and baseball's offense was suppressed. Sometimes we have to readjust our numbers in our head. Certainly adding more slug would be beneficial, especially in today's game. Scoring quickly is what you want. It's hard to string hits together given the pitching today. And so we'll always be looking for more slug.

You can go on and on about how Wrigley magically made your hitters seem worse than they were, but this team didn’t score enough runs anywhere. Your offense sucked. You sat there a year ago and said you were going to fix it and you didn’t do anything meaningful about it. You can say you’ll “always be looking for more slug,” but you need to do more than look for it, you need to acquire it.

When you look at the bullpen, obviously another position group where you had some young guys take big steps forward, but [their failures were] a big part of that two month down stretch, how are you evaluating as a whole and how are you taking that into the off season?

I didn't do good job last offseason.

No shit.

Of the May-June struggles in 2023, you said you kind of like you miss those struggles because Cody was kind of carrying the team if others were struggling. Do you believe you have that player on the team right now? Do you need to find that player that doesn't really, you know, essentially doesn't slump very often?

It's an interesting question that you guys have asked me a few times this year about needing star players. And stars can help get through those slumps. certainly, Cody was a top 10 MVP guy last year and felt like he played like a five plus win player for most of the year and carried us for big stretches. And that really did help us a ton during that stretch.

But Cody’s not a star. He proved that this year. He’s a good player. But at least we agree that you need to get star players.

Right?

It's a hard thing to figure.

No. It’s not hard to figure at all.

I looked at it like if you look at the 12 teams in the playoffs, like every team in the playoffs has a guy that had five or more wins this year. So there's no question that when you're looking to be projections, when you're looking to have that excellent season, having players just outperform expectations is a big part of it.

No, you fucking dipshit. You don’t get it at all. Good teams don’t just luck into great players because some good players somehow overperform. Those great players are performing, not overperforming. They are that good. You need those players. Your old boss put those players on the Cubs and they won, but now you don’t have anybody who can produce like that, and it’s bad. But it’s worse that you don’t seem to think it’s bad.

On the flip side of that, you know, of that group, I think like five of the 14 five win players on playoff teams, only five of them were projected to be five or more win players, the rest of them this had career years, had fantastic seasons and outperformed.

Projected by who? Your crack staff of idiots?

I do think that's something we lacked this year. I think when you look at our season, we had a lot of guys on the team that had good years, they kind of got back to their numbers, maybe on projection, a hair above, a hair below.

Getting “back to their numbers” isn’t good enough. Nobody’s numbers on your team are good enough to really help make a difference. When Nico Hoerner needs to hit .355/.375/.495 in 24 meaningless September games to get to a 101 OPS+ (like he did), it’s worthless. When you needed him to be at least league average for a long stretch of the season he wasn’t. Neither was Dansby. Just getting back to their numbers didn’t accomplish anything important.

No one really had that carrying year that Cody had last year. I do think we missed that.

You missed it because you counted on it and that’s dumb because you don’t have anybody that can actually do that with any degree of reliability.

I think there's a number of guys on our roster that can absolutely do that going forward.

No. There aren’t. I just wrote that like two sentences ago.

Certainly, we can look for external things,

God, I hope you think “external things” means getting better players.

But also, how do we push these guys to have a five or six win season? What do we need to do to put them in that position?

Steroids.

If I were to ask you to self assess at all, how do you think you've done as president of the Cubs and how confident are you going into next year that you're the leader to deliver that next great Cubs team?

Oh boy.

That's a fair question. I think that we are really enviable and terrific position as an organization.

You are the only person who thinks that. Well, I can think of two others.

I think that we've taken a really big picture view of building this organization when we sold off the core in 2021. We were in position of having a farm system that was among the lowest ranked in baseball.

About that bad farm system. You act like that was because you traded away all these great prospects to make runs at the playoffs, but we already discussed that you didn’t. Your great farm system that fed the World Series team was top heavy, and really only the guys you took near the top of the first round (Kris Bryant, Kyle Schwarber, Javy Baez) or guys you traded for who were drafted near the top of the first round (Addison Russell) turned out. Your farm system wasn’t bad because you traded it away, it was bad because you drafted so poorly, and you had a pathological inability to draft a single pitcher who helped during that entire run of contention. You felt you had to rebuild in 2021 because your organization was incapable of filling those needs with your own prospects.

We lost as much WAR off a team as any team in the last 30 years. And so we're building back from that place.

You’re not doing it very well.

I couldn't be more proud of the work that our staff has done and that I've done putting us in position we are now.

What is that position, exactly? You’re having a press conference to discuss another failed attempt at the bare minimum of contention…earning the sixth playoff spot in a 15 team league.

I think to be really healthy from a payroll standpoint, a future commitment standpoint, we're incredibly healthy from a roster and a young player standpoint.

Basically what you’re saying is that you have been able to stay right at or below the payroll target Tom gave you, you’ve avoided taking any real risks in signing really good players so you have few “bad” contracts, but also almost no “good” ones and you have a lot of prospects who have yet to prove that they aren’t worth a shit. Terrific.

So I think from a organizational positioning standpoint, I feel excellent about where we are.

Cool. What fans really want isn’t pennants or World Series, they really crave organizational positioning. You’ve done it again. Thank you.

The last two years haven't ended in the postseason. And obviously, I have to take accountability for that. Consecutive 83 win teams, we have to push beyond that. But in terms of positioning this organization for success next year and success in the future, I feel great about where we are as an organization. And think the fans should feel good about it too.

I think you’re wrong.

Just a follow up on the question I asked before you, it sounds like you're saying like, you know, we need players to outperform their projections. And I understand that that makes a lot of sense. I guess as the Chicago Cubs with the big money market, wouldn't it make sense to also get a guy that projects to be that level and hope that others outperform their projections?

Mooney’s not giving up on this. And he shouldn’t.

I was trying to make the point that I think people always focus on the external when I think our job a lot of times is focused on internal. How do we make our own players better? What do we need to do as an organization? What do need to do? What do these guys need to do to put us in position to have those guys have those kind of years? Because that ultimately is how you beat projections. It's how you have a magical season is you have a bunch of guys that outperform.

Yeah, we know that was the point you were trying to make. And it’s bullshit. You can’t just make these decent but flawed players into superstars, and if you haven’t drafted guys who can become that (and you haven’t) or your international free agents can’t become that (and they can’t), then you have to go spend real money, which you appear to not want to talk about because you have no intention of doing it. You shouldn’t need your team to magically overperform for it to contend. If that’s the case, then you’re already fucked.

Which, you are.

Do you want clarity on your own contractual situation before the season, or is the expectation that this year could dictate your future?

I look at it as an opportunity. I'm excited about next year. I think we're in a great position. So I look at it as an opportunity.

It’s an opportunity. An opportunity for you to get fired and then the Cubs can bring some new stooge in to decide they need to rebuild so Tom can bask in the glow of low expectations and low payroll for a few seasons again.

It was such a big swing to bring Counsell in, especially just in perception. How he fares is going to inform how you're viewed and all that. So just in light of that, if somebody's looking from the outside and sees the same record and says, Counsell didn't make a difference, what difference did he make at the big league level?

Just the fact that Petecrow and Amaya got to play through their struggles and ended up much improved by the end of the season should be clue enough as to how Counsell did things that David Ross wouldn’t have even bothered to attempt.

We signed him to a five year deal, not a one year deal for a reason. I think that the impact he's going to have on the organization I think will be tremendous. And I think it'll be felt year after year, every year. I think being able to come in, establish a culture, help us get better with processes and things like that, I think he's going to have a huge impact. So I understand if you want to take a one year snapshot and we have the same record, that can be a view you can take. But I take a completely different view, which is I think he's going have massive impact on us for a long time. You don't sign someone like that and just evaluate them on year one. think it's going to be, I'm very confident that we're staring back at that contract in year five, that it's going to be pretty clear that it was a great decision and I couldn't be happier this year.

Where do you expect to be “staring back at that contract in year five” from? Maybe Theo can get you a job at a Dunkin’ stand at Fenway.

I didn’t expect much from Jed in this press conference, and that’s just what we got.