The Chicago Cubs are the 4th most valuable team in MLB but can't be bothered to spend

We know that Chicago Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer likes to spend “intelligently.” He won’t go beyond what he feels comfortable with in a league full of teams that will, which has led to a string of mediocre seasons. 

History of Player Retention

The funny thing is that the unwillingness to spend like a large market team hasn’t been Hoyer-specific, Theo Epstein was pretty similar. The problem isn’t necessarily with free agent spending, the problem is with retaining the home-grown talent that the Cubs have cultivated through decades upon decades of rebuilds.

If you were to look for the largest extension in franchise history you’d have to go all the way back to 2007 when the Cubs signed Carlos Zambrano to a five-year $91.5 million dollar extension, however even at the time Zambrano had this to say about his team-friendly deal:

Not everything is about money, you know, I know if I got to free agency there were a lot of things that would come to me and offer me. I feel comfortable here. I feel good here and my family feels good here.

Since 2011, they’ve had 31 different players in MLB Pipeline’s top 100 prospects list, they’ve had players win Gold Gloves, they’ve had players win Rookie of the Year and they’ve had players win MVPs.

Of those players listed above the Cubs have extended… two of them. Last year Ian Happ and Nico Hoerner both received three-year contract extensions.

According to Spotrac, going into the 2024 MLB season there are 114 players that will be playing under a contract extension they received from the team they were previously under contract with.

Of those, 66 of those contracts were signed for five years or more. The Cubs have just one of those players and I can just about guarantee it’s not who you think.

It’s David Bote. 

Bote was lucky enough to be caught up in all of that intelligent spending as he inked a five-year $15 million dollar extension back in 2020 and has been in AAA pretty much ever since. 

When the Cubs had a core of Anthony Rizzo, Javier Baez, Kris Bryant, and Kyle Schwarber they traded three of them and non-tendered the other rather than give them an extension and instead focused on Kyle Hendricks who signed a four-year $55 million dollar deal. 

23 teams in Major League Baseball have a player this season playing under a contract extension of six or more years. The Cubs are not one of them.

The Atlanta Braves have seven players that they extended to five years or longer including Austin Riley, Matt Olson, Ronald Acuna Jr., Sean Murphy, Michael Harris II, Ozzie Albies, and Spencer Strider. Good thing we haven't leveraged our future like they have... They could definitely be in trouble soon with that young core under team control for the foreseeable future.

Current Player Retention

When asked whether he and the Cubs had any discussions of a contract extension that would allow him to make more than the $4 million dollar arbitration salary he’s due in 2024, Cy Young runner-up Justin Steele simply said “no.”

Everyone applauded when the Cubs wisely refused to re-sign Willson Contreras. He was expensive and a defensive liability. Everyone laughed when Contreras was removed as catcher for a brief stint by the Cardinals and made to be an expensive designated hitter for about a week. However, Contreras got the last laugh as he accounted for 3.4 WAR according to baseball reference and the Cubs combination of Yan Gomes, Miguel Amaya and Tucker Barnhart combined for 1.0 WAR.

Production costs money. It's as simple as that and the Cubs, for whatever reason, don't appear willing to accept that.

It's bad enough that insiders recently picked 18 players likely to sign a long-term extension with their club and there wasn't a single Chicago Cub on the list. Not Justin Steele, not Christopher Morel who just finished his age-24 season and improved his slash-line in all three categories as well as nearly doubling his homer output, and not the Cubs top prospect, Pete Crow-Armstrong. People across the industry know, the Cubs don't re-sign their players.

Chicago is the third largest media market in the country and have a bigger gap between their cross-city rivals in valuation than the other two largest markets (Yankees to Mets and Dodgers to Angels). 

The Chicago Cubs are the 4th most valuable team in Major League Baseball according to Forbes.

The value of the team has increased steadily (even through COVID) from $700 million when the Ricketts family bought the team in 2009, to $1.2 billion in 2014, to $4.1 billion based on last year’s data.

So the question has to become: 

How has a team that is this valuable, that has produced this much homegrown talent, allowed so much of it to walk away? 

I’m not sure that we can get to the bottom of that question, but something that we as fans have to do is hold this team accountable. 

Winning a World Series in 2016 was fun, but don’t forget that there had been 108 years' worth of suffering before that. I refuse to accept that one World Series victory in the midst of all of that rebuilding was worth it, and you should refuse it too.

This is a long quote pulled from an article at the Athletic by Patrick Mooney and Sahadev Sharma, but it’s important to see how deeply the willingness to trust the process runs:

The Cubs don’t spend money at the same level as the New York Yankees or Los Angeles Dodgers. The Cubs haven’t done the kind of 11-year, $288.7 million contract extension the Kansas City Royals just closed with young star Bobby Witt Jr. The Cubs don’t believe in awarding the type of lifetime achievement contract the Houston Astros just handed Jose Altuve. The Cubs haven’t collected No. 1 picks by tanking as much as the Baltimore Orioles. The Cubs didn’t mortgage their farm system this winter for an ace pitcher such as Corbin Burnes.

The Cubs don’t spend money like their two closest market-size and Forbes valued competitors. Why?

The Cubs haven’t done long-term extensions with talented prospects. Why?

The Cubs don’t award lifetime achievement. Why?

The Cubs didn’t mortgage their farm system this winter for an ace pitcher. Why?

If the Cubs don’t do any of those things, then what the hell do they do?

What the Cubs have done in this offseason, is nothing. 

They signed Shota Imanaga, and that’s fantastic because Justin Steele had positive things to say about seeing him on the mound. However, he was signed just days before Cubs Con and signed the seventh largest contract given to a pitcher with Jordan Montgomery and Blake Snell both still available and likely to receive more than Imanaga’s four-year $53 million dollar deal. 

Last season the Cubs spent intelligently, because that’s all Hoyer does. 

In that intelligent spending, he went after guys like Cody Bellinger on a one-year “prove it” deal (which he did), and Dansby Swanson on the second-largest contract given out in team history and those two were incredibly valuable. However, he also neglected the bullpen and thought that Trey Mancini and Eric Hosmer could handle first base which accounted for $-22.4 million dollars in value according to bleacher report, making the Cubs the 16th most efficient team in baseball at overperforming their contracts. 

An incredibly frustrating aspect of this team is that the Cubs want to have it both ways. They want to be efficient like a small-market team like the Tampa Bay Rays or the Baltimore Orioles who are first and second on that list respectively. However, they also want to be a valuable organization like the Dodgers and Yankees who are first and second on the Forbes list respectively.