(670 The Score) After the Cubs’ trades of icons in first baseman Anthony Rizzo, shortstop Javier Baez and infielder/outfielder Kris Bryant last week, the question on the mind of many moving forward is simple.
When will the Cubs spend and compete at a high level again? It’s a query that president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer himself isn’t sure about.
“When you say it doesn’t look quick, that to me is very unclear,” Hoyer said on the Bernstein & Rahimi Show on Monday morning. “People expect a declaration of when we’re going to be good, and the honest answer is I don’t know yet. I think part of it is trying to figure out what does the next CBA look like? What do the free-agent markets look like going forward? How quickly do these players develop? I think the idea that we know exactly what the puzzle looks like right now, we don’t. But I will tell you, I’m very confident that it’s not going to look anything like it looked in 2012 and ’13. That’s not what we’re looking at. That’s not what we’re going for."
The Cubs traded Rizzo, Baez and Bryant because they’re out of the playoff picture and each was set to be a free agent at season’s end. Beyond those three, they also dealt six other players off their 26-man roster in July, a housecleaning that ended an era and went a long way toward restocking a farm system that previously ranked in the bottom one-third of the league. In all, the Cubs received 10 prospects and two young MLB-ready players in second baseman Nick Madrigal and reliever Codi Heuer in the past few weeks.
The uncertainty regarding the timetable for high-end contention again comes as many of those prospects are at the lower levels of the minor leagues. That means the Cubs – and their fans – will need to have patience in the quest to return to glory, but Hoyer is hopeful in the start they have in building, as he puts it, "the next great Cubs team."
“We were incredibly proud as a group of the returns we were able to get,” Hoyer said. “The rental position player market is a difficult market. Given the players we were trying to trade, I think our returns were excellent. I’m really proud of our group for the players we were able (to get)."