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

MLB owners are firing staff due to the financial toll of dealing with the effects of the virus. Who’s on the chopping block to pay for this fiasco season?

Fans tend to think of the Chicago Cubs organization as some immortal entity that will go on and on, as long as fans keep coming to games. That’s a great compliment to owner Tom Ricketts and the people he’s brought on board to manage the Cubs organization and team but just isn’t true.

The Cubs organization and team are only as strong as their fans. When fans are in the stands, and the game is on television across the nation, those credit cards are being swiped by vendors online as well as the game. The point is, the game drives the excitement, and the fan participation drives the revenues, plain and simple.

Now imagine you run the Cubs organization. It’s February, and spring training is in full swing. The very first games have kicked off, and so you say to yourself, I’ve got to pay the bills for Wrigley Field to open up; the season is about to start in less than a month.  So you pay all the expenses upfront, knowing you’ve got significant revenue coming in once the regular season games begin, but they never do, and now you’ve lost what you paid and have made nothing.

The Cubs need to find the cash fast.

The plan for the Cubs’ financial recovery has already begun with pay cuts to skipper David Ross and more. Who needs to get fired, sold or traded on the Cubs between Kris Bryant, Javier Baez, Anthony Rizzo, Willson Contreras, Jon Lester, Kyle Schwarber, Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer to help pay for this 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?