Like any baseball fan who came of age in Chicago during the 1990s and 2000s, I followed the Cubs religiously during the boom of sports talk radio. Which is just another way of saying I can recite the Heavenly Bodies commercial more accurately than the national anthem. And anyone who listened to the reasoned and […]
Tag: Theo Epstein
Why Have the Cubs Not Developed Some Pitching by Now?
Yes, Rob Zastryzny and Jen-Ho Tseng have each filled in, but the Cubs in the Theo Era have not yet developed one permanent starting pitcher for the rotation. Through six drafts and six International Free Agent signing periods, nothing. Simply put, why have the Cubs failed, so far, to produce big league pitching on their own? Let’s […]
The White Whale Trade: The Search for a Young Cost Controlled Starter Ends
After a frustrating first half of the 2017 season, some people wondered whether or not the 2017 Cubs would be better off as sellers instead of buyers. Theo Epstein, Jed Hoyer and Co. quickly put an end to that line of thinking yesterday by trading Eloy Jimenez, Dylan Cease, and two other minor league prospects to […]
Theo, Fortune Magazine, and Good Fortune
Like many of you, my offseason is not complete until I pick up my number one source for sophisticated baseball analysis and accurate season predictions: Fortune Magazine. So it was with no small amount of enthusiasm that I received this year’s Fortune Baseball Preview and saw Theo Epstein’s face gracing the cover. I quickly sped […]
What Draft Strategy Could the Cubs Have for 2017?
After the 2021 season, most of the Cubs’ current position players will conclude their initial contracts. Somewhere, somehow, there will have to be position players ready to take their place as the Cubs will not be able to afford all those free agents. Will the 2017 draft be when the Cubs start reloading for that […]
Baseball Therapy: How Much Is Theo Epstein Worth?
This article, by BP’s Russell A. Carleton, originally ran on the main site. We hope you enjoy this preview here. The Cubs really like their president, Theo Epstein, and according to reports just gave him 50-ish million reasons to like them back. On top of that, they also gave his friends (general manager Jed Hoyer […]
Transaction Analysis: Cubs Extend Theo and the Gang
This piece originally ran, in full, on the BP main site. We hope you enjoy this preview of it here. Chicago Cubs Signed president of baseball operations Theo Epstein, general manager Jed Hoyer, and senior vice president of player development and scouting Jason McLeod to five-year contracts. [9/28] Wednesday night the Cubs announced that they […]
A New Bullpen Was A Need, Not A Luxury
“You kinda know going into the season that not everyone is going to perform as well as you hoped. It’s a lot of guys to expect them to perform at the level they were previously at; you can have injuries or poor performance, and so you kinda know that it might be an area you have to […]
Cubs, Perhaps, Give In To Chapman Temptation
Ordinarily, I’d guess that Tom Ricketts makes it a policy, across all of his businesses, to avoid actively alienating large swaths of his customer bases. Without having done the research, though, I can’t say that with 100 percent certainty. For all I know, the internet could be crawling with records of interactions like: RICKETTS: Are you […]
Evaluating Theo’s Recent Past, and the Mysteries of His Future
The draft is today, which is very cool if you’re a prospect person. If you aren’t, the draft can be a bit befuddling, as it’s hard to tell which decisions are good and which are bad when you don’t recognize any of the players being chosen, and all the catastrophic and/or spectacular effects of those decisions won’t manifest […]