The Dangers of a Quick Rebuild

As all Cubs fans know, Theo Epstein took over baseball operations of the Chicago Cubs prior to the 2012 season. His 2003-2011 Boston teams had been consistent and perennial winners, and he promised to give the Cubs organization similar sustained success through a ground-up rebuild. This certainly sounded enticing at the time, and the rebuild’s awesome effects are now finally being realized at the major-league level. But, as Cubs fans also know all too well, this does not change the fact that the rebuild led to some really (really) stinky teams from 2012-2014.

Many Cubs fans expected and accepted that the rebuild was going to be a time-consuming process. They were willing to watch unsettlingly large doses of players like Nate Schierholtz and Chris Volstad if it meant that—in a few years—they would be able to watch Jorge Soler and Kris Bryant (and Addison Russell and Kyle Schwarber) instead. They were onboard with the rebuild, and this year they are finally getting the first tastes of their reward.

But there was also a vocal contingent of Cubs fans who clamored for a quicker rebuild. Some dismissed these fans as not understanding the process, but with Ian Stewart manning the hot corner and Chris Rusin toeing the rubber, it is hard to argue that they had no fair complaint. They suggested the Cubs—a large market team—get more involved in free agency and attempt to parlay some of their budding farm system stars into productive and established MLB players through trade. The playoffs are basically a crapshoot, they fairly contended, and the goal should be to put a truly competitive team on the field every season. You never know what could happen, and you never get these lost years back.

I’m not particularly well-versed in the laws of empirical statistical testing and modeling, but one thing that I have picked up from spending (too much) time with math and economics majors is that you can’t observe the counterfactual. If something happened in the past, the question “What if (x) happened instead?” is—empirically—impossible to answer. This is all to say that we’ll never know what would have happened if the Cubs had “gone for it” in 2012-2014. But I would like to call your attention to a current team that arguably attempted the sort of quick, one-offseason rebuild that many clamored for over the past three seasons. This is a speculative exercise, but I would like to suggest that we can treat the 2015 San Diego Padres as an (imperfect) proxy to represent this type of rebuild and why it is so dangerous for an organization.

The Padres’ big moves both during and after this year’s Winter Meetings made them the off-season darlings of many baseball pundits. Here is a timeline of their key off-season moves, via MLB.com:

This is a lot to take in, but the general trend was that Padres GM A.J. Preller acquired established right-handed power for the young talent within their system. By the end of the offseason they had unloaded top young players and prospects like Yasmani Grandal, Jesse Hahn, Joe Wieland, Joe Ross, Trea Turner (their first-round pick in 2014), and Jace Peterson for established hitters like Derek Norris, Matt Kemp, Justin Upton, and Wil Myers. On paper, these moves made a lot of sense. The Padres’ 2014 offense had been historically bad, and it made sense to corner the market on right-handed power, which has become more and more scarce in the league over the past few years. The idea was that these moves would make the team relevant and exciting again, and that a team with such a powerful lineup could not help but contend for at least a wild card spot in the National League. The February signing of 33-year-old pitcher James Shields sent a message to the rest of the league that the Padres were ready to contend right now, and their Opening Day trade of Matt Wisler—another top organization prospect—for all-star closer Craig Kimbrel solidified the team’s all-in approach for 2015. They did all this without trading any top-25ish MLB prospects, and they accepted a much heavier payroll burden for the next few years in the hopes of drawing more revenue through increased ticket sales. In this way, it was a model for the sort of rebuild some Cubs fans had clamored for between 2011 and 2014. And, on the surface, a season-long race with the Dodgers for the NL West didn’t seem out of the question.

Right now, though, the Padres are just one game better through 90 games than they were a year ago: 41-49. They are in fourth place in their division, 8.5 games out of the Wild Card, and under the direction of an interim manager (they fired Bud Black in June). Of their top-end acquisitions, only Norris, Upton, and Shields have worked out approximately as well as expected, and none of them have exceeded expectations in any concrete way. Kemp has been affirmatively bad, both offensively (.253 TAv) and defensively (-4 DRS), and Myers has spent most of the year on the DL. Kimbrel has been a solid closer, but has pitched to nowhere near his usual dominant performance level. And players that the Padres were hoping could take a step forward this year—Jedd Gyorko, Will Middlebrooks, Alexi Amarista—simply have not. Barring a major turnaround, 2015 is likely to be a lost season for the Padres.

This sort of hard-luck season is always bad for an organization, but the Padres’ offseason aggressiveness made it particularly damaging. Therein lies the danger of the quick rebuild. The problem is less the Padres’ record for this season, and more what it portends for the future. While the Padres did not have or trade away anybody in the top tier of major league prospects, they traded away basically all of the very strong prospect depth that they had going into the offseason. Ex-Padres prospects Hahn, Wisler, Ross, and Peterson have already looked solid in MLB auditions, and Turner is likely to have at least a useful career in Washington. Meanwhile, Grandal has been named an NL All-Star for the division rival Dodgers, and his success was recently profiled by Sahadev Sharma. The Padres are now saddled with the heavy contracts of under-performing or aging players like Kemp, Shields, and Melvin Upton Jr., and have no clear future coming up through the minors. Having used most of their baseball currency, now, if they still hope to compete in the immediate future, all they can really do is hope that the same basic group of players stays healthy and performs much better next year—far from a guarantee.

We don’t know that this year would have been better for the Padres if they had stayed the course with their prospect development and gradual rebuilding strategy. But—it is pretty safe to say, I think¯we can guess that the next five or ten years would be much better. Maybe Preller can catch some magic in a bottle next offseason, and maybe the team will still turn it around, but these things are now far less likely than they were before last off-season. The Padres have little payroll flexibility and few valuable players that they can translate into clear MLB talent. This is the danger of a quick rebuild.

The Padres are probably the best current example of a quick rebuild gone wrong, but just across town we’ve seen another example of an aggressive offseason gone wrong. The White Sox tried to fill in their holes through aggressive trades and expensive signings this offseason as well, and so far it has not gone well. Melky Cabrera and Adam LaRoche have significantly underperformed their expectations, and Jeff Samardzija’s early results were bad enough that he is having pieces like this written about him. Similar to the Padres, there is no clear way for the White Sox to get better next year—they might just have to hope the group they have now rebounds.

So what does this mean for the Cubs? Maybe nothing at all. Each team’s situation is different, and the Cubs play in a much larger market than San Diego does. But while we will never know exactly what would have happened if the Cubs had traded prospects for, say, David Price, or had signed, say, Jacoby Ellsbury prior to the 2014 season, we probably can fairly guess that they would have had to mortgage a significant and dangerous amount of their future to do it. You can win a World Series with a team that is good for one year, but you are much more likely to win one with a team that is good for seven or eight consecutive years.

You can never perfectly predict baseball, and these examples are admittedly cherrypicked. You probably could find examples of quick rebuilds or reloads that went very well (the 2013 Red Sox come to mind). But I picked the examples of the Padres and the White Sox to illustrate the danger of what can happen when this type of rebuild goes wrong. These cases suggest that the Cubs took the much (much) safer route to success, and it seems to have actually gotten them there. Not even four years after Theo and Jed took over, the Cubs are now contending and have what looks like an incredibly bright future. And because of the route they took to get here, this year is not the only chance for this Cubs team. It is simply their first.

Lead photo courtesy of Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports