CHICAGO — One day before the last game of another lost season by the Chicago Cubs, Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” blasted over the Wrigley Field sound system as a crowd of 38,180 gave pending free agent Kyle Hendricks a loud standing ovation. They were celebrating the last player remaining from the 2016 World Series team.
Little did they know, they were also saying goodbye to the Cubs’ recent way of doing business.
Even before the end of an 83-79 season, the Cubs started a major transformation of the front office. And emotion — sweet or otherwise — is no longer a significant part of a plan to reach their goal of building a sustainable winner.
“As hard as they are, if we didn’t feel like these changes moved us closer to that goal, we wouldn’t do them,’’ Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer told The Athletic. “That’s the guiding principle, that’ll never change and these decisions are very much in line with that.”
More than ever, the Cubs will rely on data, video and models for their evaluations of players.
The Cubs are actively interviewing prospective candidates and looking for new talent in spaces such as R&D and player development, on top of the investments and hires already made in their efforts to find and develop international talent.
However, while some areas have seen growth, others are being scaled back as a result of the Cubs’ shifting emphasis. In the amateur scouting department, one high-level scout was laid off while two others left the organization and weren’t replaced. In player development, the Cubs axed a group of five senior staffers who had combined for roughly 200 years of experience in professional baseball. The biggest change has come in the Cubs’ pro scouting department, which has been drastically reduced.
In pursuit of what Hoyer has dubbed “The Next Great Cubs Team,” most of these recalibrations amount to leaning further into a rational, emotionless strategy that relies on an analytics-based model to evaluate players. It’s a model-based approach that the Cubs have drifted toward in the aftermath of 2016.
This has raised a question among officials both inside and outside of the organization: If that strategy is so wise, why have the results been so mediocre?
Even with a new manager in Craig Counsell, the Cubs underwhelmed in 2024. (Jason Mowry / Getty Images)
Those same officials suggest that it’s presumptuous for the Cubs to think that their model is better than the systems run by teams such as the Cleveland Guardians, Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays, three clubs that have attained the sustainability that the Cubs seek. Those skeptics also note that adopting what can be perceived as a small-market approach represents a departure from the Cubs’ philosophy during their last championship window.
And, in a sense, it is a step away from clubs like the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, who use their financial might to combine their analytic models with robust scouting, even at the highest levels of the sport.
The organizational changes, Cubs officials maintain, have been the product of carefully considered deliberation. From afar, Hoyer has long admired how the Guardians operated and understood how its model held more sway than traditional scouts. Now, Hoyer and general manager Carter Hawkins have made big changes ahead of a pivotal offseason.
With money to spend, prospects available for trades, and mounting pressure to produce, Hoyer will be one of baseball’s most interesting figures to watch this winter. He is entering the final season of a five-year contract with no playoff appearances as the Cubs’ top baseball executive.
More money means more decisions — which for the Cubs means more dependence on their analytical model than ever before.
The Cubs seem undaunted by any perception around the league that their cuts to pro scouting have been drastic. Hoyer, who once ran the pro scouting department for the Boston Red Sox, pushed back at the idea that the Cubs have become anti-scout. He views the changes as a next step in an effort to stay on the cutting edge.
Said Hoyer: “The end goal of any decision we make is to win the most baseball games now and in the future.”
For some in the organization, the reality of the Cubs’ upcoming change arrived in early September. It came in the form of a notification that was abruptly placed on their schedules: a conference call with Hoyer. After the COVID-19 pandemic, scouts assigned to watch professional players had slowly begun to feel their input was being diminished, and they sensed this latest development would not bring good news. Their gut instincts were correct.
Hoyer spoke for the majority of the call, informing them of the layoffs before explaining how player coverage would be conducted moving forward. He also laid out a new structure in the front office.
In a way, Hoyer signaled the start of a fundamental shift in 2021, when he hired Hawkins to be his general manager. To that point, all 14 of Hawkins’ years in professional baseball had come with Cleveland’s franchise, a small-market operation known for consistently outperforming expectations and being heavily reliant on its analytic model.
Three years later, with the full support of Hoyer, multiple sources say that Hawkins has been the driving force in the team’s move away from in-person pro scouting, a change that reduced the number of talent evaluators in that department to seven.
Carter Hawkins’ hiring to the Cubs front office led to changes in baseball operations. (Lucas Peltier / Imagn Images)
Scouts’ opinions are still being solicited and the Cubs will maintain a robust presence at the amateur level and internationally. But scouts will rarely, if ever, travel to see players in person in the major leagues or the upper levels of the minors. The belief is video and data-tracking technology are so prevalent in professional baseball that only the complex leagues — the lowest rung of the minors — will require consistent in-person scouting coverage.
Given the sport’s explosion of information, Cubs executives framed the changes as part of a greater reallocation of resources, as well as a natural evolution that falls in line with a larger industry trend. Their belief is that more teams will continue along similar lines rather than continuing to spend money on hotel rooms and airline flights for scouts, viewing that as an inefficiency.
It has become standard practice for each club to identify data points and certain player traits that signal future success, and then leverage those indicators to make deals. And the use of an analytical model to produce those data points is hardly a new concept.
The Cubs began building their “Ivy” system at the beginning of Theo Epstein’s regime, creating an information-sharing platform that houses videos, reports and statistical analysis, connecting different departments. That database has been continually updated by adding more information and adjusting the inputs.
Models are designed to highlight the potential value of a specific player, a Cubs official explained, rather than dictate overall strategy.
But how prominently those models are used in decision-making is where the differences among the teams emerge. The Cubs’ turn away from in-person pro scouting seems to go against some of the more successful clubs in the sport.
Of this year’s 12 playoff teams, a league source estimated that seven rely heavily on in-person scouting at the pro level. And at least two more — the Baltimore Orioles and Houston Astros — were in hiring mode to boost their in-person scouting capacity. Even clubs that lean heavily on a model remain devoted to staffing large scouting operations.
The Rays, another league source said, are known for not blindly following their model. Instead, the organization uses a data-driven system to line up potential deals, while also empowering one of the game’s largest scouting staffs to make recommendations and find hidden edges.
They are among the teams that still see practical reasons for investment.
The Astros rely heavily on both models and in-person scouting. (Mark Blinch / Getty Images)
Sending scouts in person brings information that a model can’t access. Evaluators can watch how players work before a game and interact with teammates in the dugout. Evaluators can find out more details about a recent injury or an off-the-field issue. Evaluators can hear about which players have a reputation for partying.
Scouts also fill blind spots with video. Film doesn’t capture every angle on the field, which can be an issue while evaluating defense or base running. It’s harder to see what type of read a defender gets on a ball or the jump a runner takes when a ball is put in play. Across ballparks, particularly at the lower minor-league levels, camera angles can also be inconsistent.
Accountability can also be an issue if a club defers too much to a model. An individual scout has a name attached to every evaluation. With an R&D department, a rival scout observed, “once they put the info in there and they kick it out, no one’s responsible for it.”
The Cubs may still deploy scouts for special assignments, such as in-person looks for targets leading into the trade deadline or offseason, and for advance preparations ahead of a postseason run. But, as the Cubs already proved during this year’s trade deadline, those looks would be optional.
In late July, when the Cubs acquired Isaac Paredes and Nate Pearson in separate deals, sources said they did so without sending scouts specifically to get an in-person look leading up to the acquisitions. Instead, the team used other elements of their infrastructure to track those players and project their future performances. Paredes had originally signed with the Cubs as a teenager out of Mexico, and the Cubs almost used one of their first-round picks on Pearson in 2017. For the Cubs, that history was enough.
That approach differs somewhat from other big-market teams. The Dodgers and Yankees, for example, don’t treat in-person scouting as optional. Rather, those clubs see in-person scouting as a worthwhile investment to try to gain the slightest edge.
“It’s about evaluating every area,” Hoyer said in late September after the Cubs were eliminated from playoff contention. “We’ve spent a lot of time going through each department and really modernizing it and overhauling our processes. I think taking a really close look at the player personnel and professional scouting space is really important. All those things are things we have been doing, but are doing with urgency.”
One day after the Brewers clinched the division title, Craig Counsell sat down in the Wrigley Field interview room and did not sugarcoat his team’s overall performance. He discussed how the teams were separated by a “big gap.”
Hoyer hired Counsell with the idea that it would become a partnership. The Cubs wanted some of Milwaukee’s secret sauce, so they lured Counsell away from the Brewers with a five-year, $40 million contract, proximity to his family’s Wisconsin home and the big-market stage. Hoyer quietly closed that deal last November and then flew to Florida to tell David Ross that he was fired. Under each manager, the Cubs finished with the same 83-79 record.
“We should be trying to build 90-win teams here,” Counsell said, delivering a sound bite that would go viral.
Counsell did not walk into that media session with a plan to call out the front office or ownership. He merely responded to questions from reporters in his own direct style. His words weren’t even that controversial.
The delivery was jarring because the franchise had sunken into the forgettable middle — neither lovable nor losers — with a roster that was competent enough to post a winning record but not good enough to deliver October baseball.
Craig Counsell, left, called out the front office, led by Jed Hoyer, right, towards the end of the season. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
To pursue its first championship since 1908, the Cubs lured Epstein away from Boston and Hoyer soon followed. The group assembled the game’s top farm system, won bidding wars for free agents, executed blockbuster trades, and brought in Joe Maddon to manage the team. The Ricketts family financed a renovation of the Friendly Confines that cost in the neighborhood of $1 billion.
Such was the clarity of the organization’s focus.
But the urgency of breaking the curse has long since faded.
A franchise that once harbored dynastic ambitions now obsessed over efficiency. The priorities became flexibility and sustainability. The Ricketts ownership group authorized high payrolls around the luxury-tax threshold — but stopped short of disrupting the baseball industry’s balance of power.
By 2021 the farm system became barren — a regression that Hoyer has to take some blame for — and the major-league talent wasn’t producing enough wins. To replenish the organization, Hoyer went all-in on removing the core of the 2016 team. While using the word “rebuild” became verboten, that clearly was the goal.
Spending money on good players like Dansby Swanson, Shota Imanaga, Jameson Taillon and Seiya Suzuki — while also reaching contract extensions with Ian Happ and Nico Hoerner — gave the Cubs some hope of putting out a respectable product. But there is an internal understanding that this roster is not fully formed.
“We are in a really enviable and terrific position as an organization,” Hoyer said when asked for a self-assessment during his end-of-season news conference. “We’ve taken a really big-picture view of building this organization. When we sold off the core in ’21, we were in a position of having a farm system that was among the lowest-ranked in baseball. We lost as much WAR off a team as any team in the last 30 years. We’re building back from that place.”
From the standpoint of payroll flexibility, future commitments, roster depth and volume of young talent, Hoyer described the Cubs as “incredibly healthy.” Even after Pete Crow-Armstrong graduated from the minors, the Cubs still have eight players on MLB.com’s recent rankings of the top 100 prospects in the game. And in recent years, the Cubs have substantially improved when it comes to developing pitching, closing some ground on industry standard-setters such as the Brewers and Guardians.
Amid the euphoria of winning the World Series in 2016, there was a sense that this might only be the beginning. Loaded with young talent, and awash in new revenues from a modernized ballpark and a championship run, the Cubs aspired to be a global brand on par with the teams of that moment, such as Manchester United, the New England Patriots and Golden State Warriors. No one riding on the double-decker buses down Lake Shore Drive during the championship parade could have envisioned that years later the Cubs would be trying to become another Cleveland.
Yet that is a direction the Cubs are heading now.
“The last two years haven’t ended in the postseason,” Hoyer said. “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 I think the fans should feel good about it, too.”
(Top image: Meech Robinson / The Athletic. Photos: Griffin Quinn / Getty Images; Daniel Shirey / MLB via Getty Images; Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
