Plenty of eyes will be on the Chicago Cubs this offseason, and the expectations should follow suit.
The organization parted ways with Joe Maddon after missing the playoffs for the first time since 2014, and they proceeded to hire a rookie manager in former catcher David Ross.
Meanwhile, Cubs president Theo Epstein has consistently reiterated that he does not believe any one player is “untouchable,” and his season-ending press conference hinted at internal changes.
However, there is not a whole lot of transparency with respect to Chicago's offseason strategy.
Epstein refused to get into specifics on what the Cubs hoped to address this offseason, telling Jordan Bastian of MLB.com that he feels divulging information puts the team at a disadvantage:
“As an organization, we're not talking about payroll or luxury tax at all,” Theo Epstein said after manager David Ross' introductory press conference on Monday. “I feel like every time we've been at all specific, or even allowed people to make inferences from things we've said, it just puts us in a hole strategically. We'll see how things shake out at the end of the year.”
Bastian also included Cubs owner Tom Ricketts' comments from Wednesday morning on a local radio show, where Ricketts suggested that payroll does not dictate success:
“It's not about how much you spend,” Ricketts said on the Mully & Haugh Show. “It's about how much you win. The correlation between spending and winning isn't nearly as strong as we'd like it to be in a sense. Obviously, the top couple teams in the league [in payroll] didn't make the playoffs
The Cubs have some money coming off the books and figure to buy out a number of their relievers, but the massive contracts that they doled out to the likes of Jason Heyward and Yu Darvish could prevent them from making a run at Gerrit Cole or Anthony Rendon in free agency.
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