• Ownership invested a ton of money into renovating Wrigley, snapping up surrounding businesses in the neighborhood, and their own RSM, assuming it would all coalesce into an infinite money-making machine and tons of tax breaks and refunds from Chicago for the renovations. For various reasons this resulted in less revenue than was projected and Chicago told ownership the could take a hike when they came panhandling for public financing. Combined with the Cubs sitting over the luxury tax multiple years, ownership suddenly got stingy and essentially sat out of the last three offseasons worth of free agents, which left the Cubs unable to address glaring roster holes from 2018-present.
  
  
• What money was there was not spent well on free agents basically at all post-2017. Darvish eventually righted the ship, but Chatwood, Descalso, and the cavalcade of fringe arms and bats brought in sucked rear end.
  
  
• The core lineup consists entirely of launch angle type power hitters, which was a viable way to construct a team in 2015-2017 (and also was balanced out by contact bats like Zobrist, TLS, pre-foul ball incident Almora, Fowler) but is now hard countered by the high fastball revolution. This is partially on the FO, but also the players have shown no interest in adjusting their approaches at all, and ran the coach who tried to make them think about contact out of town (Chili Davis).
  
  
• The farm was run by an absolute loving dullard in Jason McLeod, who was convinced Kyle Hendricks was a repeatable market inefficiency instead of a goddamn unicorn, and so wasted almost a decade of Cubs pitching drafts on low-velo pitchability guys who almost to a man flamed out in the lower levels.
  
  
• What talent was in the farm was freely traded away for win now moves like Chapman, Quintana, Justin Wilson etc. This is a big one: teams like the Padres or Dodgers proved that if you're savvy enough you can hold on to your top guys and still pull off high impact trades, but the Cubs gleefully just handed over Gleyber, Eloy, Cease, Candy, Lange, etc. So they gutted their farm for additions that ultimately didn't really help winning much, outside of Chapaman and the hottest month of Castellanos' career.
  
  
• The Cubs are now currently in full crying poverty mode, salary dumping their best pitcher for lottery tickets and backfilling the roster with scrap heap guys they hope will look good enough to flip at the deadline. Based on the kinds of prospects the FO is now targeting, and the sheer number of guys in walk years who were lucky to get token extension talks thrown their way, it's pretty clear the plan is a 2-3 year mini-tank to reset the tax, give Ricketts a chance to recoup some losses by running a minimalist payroll, and try again in the 2024-2025 range when (hopefully) all the high upside A-ball guys we have are ready to hit the bigs.
  

Sydin fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Apr 14, 2021