Chicago Cubs officially miss on Shohei Ohtani as he signs with Los Angeles Dodgers

The Chicago Cubs can officially move on to their other targets this off-season as the team has indeed missed out on superstar free agent Shohei Ohtani.

News broke on Saturday that Ohtani signed the largest deal in MLB history with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

There likely will be hot takes that Cubs fans will have in response to this news in saying that Ohtani wasn't worth the money or that they are glad the Cubs can now spend $700MM across several players instead of one and that is just a disguise that fans will wear to hide their pain.

The Cubs missed on Ohtani and fans will need to live with the reality that this is another off-season where the team was unable to swim in the deep end of free agency. But, we are just about at the point where we do need to have a real conversation about Jed Hoyer.

Not a conversation in the sense that Hoyer is bad at his job because he has accomplished his goal of an accelerated rebuild that started at the Trade Deadline in 2021. In just two and half seasons, the Cubs are on the doorstep of competing again. The issue with that is when a team is at the doorstep of competing, there is a need to act like it in the off-season. With that, comes a need for Hoyer to shift his spending philosophy and he has yet to prove that he can.

The Cubs missed on a potential trade for Juan Soto and now they have missed on Ohtani. That's not to say that the Cubs won't have a good off-season, there is still a path for that. But, it will be an off-season where they will enter the 2024 season with more questions than answers.

What does that off-season look like? Perhaps, it's this one.

That is still an off-season that should put the Cubs near the top of the National League Central division but one that still will have them a tier below the Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers.

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