Chicago Cubs: Who’s getting cashed in to pay for virus season?

Chicago Cubs: Who’s getting fired, sold or traded to pay for the virus season?

In 2021, the Cubs will need to extend or renegotiate contracts with many of the Cubs’ corps superstars. There are a lot of eyes of this deal because Chicago sports teams tend to make dumb decisions when it comes to bringing back superstars. To put it bluntly, owners tend to go the cheap route before engaging in career-long contracts.

Just last week, the Cubs already began sapping the juice from some of their coaching staff, and even the top brass felt the pinch, according to Paul Sullivan of the Chicago Tribune:

"Employees in the baseball operations and business operations departments and those with uniform employee contracts (UECs) — which includes manager David Ross and his coaches, scouts, minor-league managers and coaches and other non-playing personnel — are all affected by the salary reductions. The percentage of the cuts vary, with higher-salaried employees receiving cuts of up to 35%, the source said, while the majority of the cuts are 20% or lower. Baseball operations President Theo Epstein and business operations President Crane Kenney are at the high end and already had their salaries reduced before the latest action."

There is a lot of discussions online that Epstein could be the first to go. Reports are that he is ready to do something else and is not interested in rebuilding another Cubs team. With an estimated $25 million contract over the last five years, Ricketts could go for a younger President of Baseball Operations and pay just $500 thousand to $1 million.

You could even give General Manager Jed Hoyer’s duties to the President of Baseball Operations and pay him or her a cool $1.5 million. Now you’ve just saved $20-$30 million dollars right at the top for both these staff.

Don’t count out that extra money is going a long way to help bring in and maintain some good players on the team.  However, with the team standing to lose at least $100 million this season, that $20-$30 million is not even half of what the Cubs need to get back to usual bargaining ground again.

So, where do you get another $70 million to get yourself back to normal bargaining grounds?  This is where the Cubs stable of players will have to be evaluated to see where the trades and profits can be made a long term for the team. But if you had to start cashing in players right away, who would be gone first from the Cubs team?