Chicago Cubs president: “We’re leaning on our defense too heavily…we can’t catch homers”

The Chicago Cubs have a lot of work to do this offseason. And, obviously, that work will center on pitching.

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Cubs pitching was inconsistent at best and flat-out horrid at worst.

They gave up the most home runs in the National League and struggled throughout the season with allowing opposing teams to get quick-shot scores via the long ball. It seemed like the team was almost always fighting back from some deficit caused by the inability to keep balls in the park.

Injuries, of course, were a big factor in the pitching staff’s undoing. But even when healthy, the home run bug bit them. A pair of first inning homers from Fernando Tatis and Manny Machado in game one of the Wild Card series against the San Diego Padres marked a disappointingly appropriate beginning of the end for Chicago’s playoff hopes.

A real opportunity for change

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The good news is that this offseason presents the unique opportunity for the Cubs to almost completely rebuild their pitching staff. The entire end-of-season starting rotation—Matthew Boyd, Shota Imanaga, Kevin Gausman, Clay Holmes, David Peterson—may be gone via free agency, as could relievers Caleb Thielbar, Hunter Harvey, Aaron Civale, and Trent Thornton. They also have club options on Colin Rea and Jacob Webb.

Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer recently talked to media and laid out the obvious plan of attack for this offseason.

“Our position-playing group was the best in baseball,” Hoyer told reporters. “From a pitching standpoint this year, it was sort of a struggle from the get go.

“We’re leaning on our defense too heavily, and the overall quality of the pitching has to improve. The great majority of our focus [this winter] is going to be on pitching acquisition. I think we’re in a good, remarkably healthy position on the position player side. I think that we have to focus our resources and energy on the pitching side predominantly… When I think about our offseason, when I think about seasons to come, that has to be the goal, to get our pitching infrastructure and pitching quality to the level of our position-player group.

“It’s safe to say that the biggest part of our focus going into the offseason is going to be on pitching. Whether that’s 100-to-0, what that ratio is going to be, has not been determined yet. But certainly, the great majority of our focus is going to be on pitching acquisition.”

A focus on swing-and-miss?

And that probably—hopefully—means that Hoyer and the Cubs would be focusing more on power pitchers with the stuff to miss bats.

“I think I said hundreds of times during the course of the year, we can’t catch homers,” Hoyer said.

The big question, though, is whether Hoyer will move on from his well-established aversion to spending big on top shelf pitching. It seems, at this point, that the only answer to the Cubs’ pitching woes would be to bite the bullet and take some big risks on elite arms and not just target bargain buys and reclamation projects, as has been the case recently.

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Source: https://www.chicitysports.com/chicago-cubs-president-jed-hoyer-pitching-2027-free-agents/