Chicago Cubs: Top 3 ways Tom Ricketts is looking to save his budget

Chicago Cubs: Get them while they’re young

3. Player development

So this is good news Chicago Cubs fans; because we have a genius named Tom Ricketts that bought the Chicago Cubs and had the foresight to hire some good business managers when they first acquired the team, Ricketts invested money into player development and now he’s hoping that can help along with a couple other things –ease the budget this season for the second highest spending team in MLB.

To ensure that Player Development is going to take off, the Chicago Cubs announced just last month a bunch of moves in the front office’s leadership to include Senior Vice President Matt Dorey and Director of Player Development Bobby Basham. The Cubs also announced new Directors of Hitting Justin Stone and Pitching Craig Breslow and Jeremy Farrell as their assistant Director of Baseball Development via press release.

The Chicago Cubs are also hoping for amazing results from their scouting teams and so moved Jaron Madison to be a special assistant to the president/general manager, a role the Cubs said will have an “emphasis on professional, amateur and international scouting,” and moved senior vice president of amateur scouting and player development Jason McLeod to become their senior vice president of player personnel.

While the Cubs have been successfully drafting outfielders to support their pitching, they have neglected their homegrown pitching. The MLB-level pitchers the Cubs are supposed to rely on right now, have stalled in their progress.

"“We have to refocus on developing players… We have to be able to develop players that we bring up because over the next couple years we are going to lose some of the guys. There’s no way that everyone can stay on this team forever because they’re all going to become free agents around the same time. We have to manage that…The real key for us is to focus on developing the players that will be our future because you just can’t buy your way into a championship,” Ricketts said. “Teams that signed the big free agents really didn’t move forward this year.”"

While many of these moves in the Chicago Cubs player development lanes could have been done last year or the year before – this is the year of shake-up by Ricketts for his ball club and again, if he is successful, will save his budget big dollars in the long run. Will it be too little too late?