Triple-A ain't what it used to be
Development in the bigs is a necessity, because it's impossible any other way


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This Cubs offseason was already going to pose lots of questions that need answering, but then they jump started it by firing one of their biggest obstacles to winning and hired Craig Counsell to replace him.
That doesn’t mean the other questions have been answered. I took a shot at a few of them Monday, but there are more. Lots more. So let’s dig into another one.
Clearly, one of the reasons the Cubs moved on from David Ross was the feeling that he wasn’t capable of being a manager who can help players develop at the big league level. Is that really that big of a deal? After all, what are the minor leagues for if players still need to develop after they get called up?
The highlight of the Counsell introductory press conference wasn’t (just) his Rockabilly haircut, it was his answer to a question from the Tribune’s Meghan Montemurro about the role of the manager in integrating young players into the team during the season.
I printed1 his answer in its entirety in Tuesday’s newsletter, but it was so good I’m going to do it again.
“I think certainly the biggest thing is that the Major Leagues is an incredibly hard league and player development does not stop when it gets to the big leagues. That's often the hardest thing to learn. After you go through cycles of players, you start to learn how hard the transition is to the Major Leagues, for players. The norm is a massive struggle. That's the norm. I think if you come at it from that place, the problem is that expectations for those players are on the other side of the spectrum. That's a hard thing for everybody to balance, right? It's a hard thing for the manager trying to win a game to balance. It's a hard thing for the fans to balance. It's a hard thing for all the player development staff that have worked so hard to help get a player. Most of all, it's hard for the player.
“I think trying to create some empathy with that and some understanding with that for the players and for the group, all of us is, is probably the most important thing to do. The goal of that is so that the player gets in a better place and the player doesn't have so much on his chest. To not come to the park every day and know he has to do everything for everybody, because that's what he feels like. It's a process for those players and I think it's essentially one of time and support to get him to a good place.”
If you believe the Prospect Perverts, the Cubs are about to unleash a treasure trove of young talent upon the big leagues the likes of which no one has ever seen. And while those creepy shut-ins are greatly overstating things, it certainly does seem like the Cubs’ minor league system is ready to start providing actual useful players to the big league roster.
Sending players to the big leagues does no good if the manager won’t play them because he’s too busy using “the guys who got us here.” Especially when “here” is nowhere special like it was last year when Ross refused to use Alexander Canario in any situation and yo-yo’d Pete Crow-Armstrong in and out of games with no apparent strategy.
But to be fair, the front office put Canario on the roster on September 1 with no illusions that Ross would actually use him. It made no sense at the time and in hindsight it makes even less. They basically were rewarding Canario for his hard work in returning ahead of schedule from two serious injuries suffered on the same play last winter. And they seemed resigned to just giving him the 27th spot on the roster because, “Ross isn’t going to use anybody we send up, anyway. So why not use it to reward Big Al?” What the hell was that?
Canario was just the most obvious example (exacerbated when in his second big league appearance, 19 days after his callup he hit a grand slam and drove in five runs). He played in just four more games, two of them after the Cubs had been eliminated from playoffs contention
If Ross’ expectation was that the minor league system was going to provide him with completely formed, ready to play, every day guys like when Kris Bryant strolled through the door in April 2015 after spending those eight valuable days “working on his defense,” Ross was never going to ever play anybody.
The simple fact is that there has never in the 122 year history of the minor leagues been a larger talent and competition disparity between the highest minor league level and the Major Leagues than there is right now. There’s always been a jump from the minors to the majors, but right now it’s basically like strapping yourself to Evel Knievel and trying to clear Snake River Canyon.