Jed says the quiet part quietly

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As he often does before the first game of a homestand, Cubs President of You Won’t Need A Marquee Subscription This September Jed Hoyer perched his dainty little self on the bench in the home dugout at Wrigley Field and let the gaggle of big brains who cover the Cubs on a regular basis pepper him with questions.

Things broke up right after Jesse Rogers started to choke on the crayon he’d been eating, but before that Jed came out and made a very definitive statement about the direction his crack front office was prepared to take as the trade deadline arrives near the end of the month.

“Yeah, well, I was gonna say

Eloquent start, Jedly.

I think the next seven games obviously matter.

I was under the impression that nothing is obvious to you.

Certainly we saw what can happen last year.

Yeah, what happened was your team got hot before the deadline, you made a tepid attempt to improve the team and then your manager spent the final three weeks of the season throwing his poop onto the field like he was a chimp at the zoo.

So, you never firmly plant your feet [unintelligble garbling noise that seemed to be “ourourourour”] you know you have to be able to be nimble.

Don’t lock your knees, Jed! Here comes Carter!

Is that what he meant? Probably. Right?

I think where we are right now, I would say that uhm, oh, [appears to swallow tongue] moves only for ‘24, unless things—unless things change over the next week, I think we probably won’t make a lot of moves that only help us for this year.

Yeah, no shit. I’ve literally been telling you that in this newsletter (and I know you subscribe because spankin_itJH@gmail.com has been a devoted reader since day one) for months. It would be stupid to go out and add a player whose contract expires at the end of this year, since even if you did somehow wander into the playoffs it would almost certainly end in two days with no runs scored.

If moves help us in ‘25 and beyond I think we’re still exceptionally well positioned.

Wait, what was that? Let’s look at that sentence again, maybe we all read it wrong.

If moves help us in ‘25 and beyond I think we’re still exceptionally well positioned.

Nope, he actually said, “we’re STILL exceptionally well positioned.” STILL? When you have ever been moderately well positioned, much less exceptionally well positioned?

Hey Jed, since you took over before the 2021 season, your teams are a combined 35 games under .500, You’ve spent a grand total of 34 days in first place and 28 of those came in 2021 when you finished 20 games under .500. The biggest lead you’ve had since you became President of Baseball Whatever was 1.5 games on June 3, 2021.

You thought this year you had built a good team, and here we are on July 23 and it’s so hopeless you can’t even bring yourself to pretend there’s a chance.