This Jed Hoyer quote is the biggest problem for the Cubs ahead of Opening Day

It's Opening Day across Major League Baseball, however, for the Cubs, it's the resumption of their regular-season schedule.

The Cubs open a four-game series against the Arizona Diamondbacks on Thursday night with a record of 0-2. The Cubs traveled to Japan last week and were winless against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It was a brief two-game series but one that highlighted how big the gap is between the Dodgers at the top of Major League Baseball and where the Cubs are. The Cubs aren't a bad team by any means, but they're a team that is going to need to depend on winning on the margins if they are going to contend in 2025.

Whether intentional or not, Jed Hoyer, during an interview with The Athletic, perfectly illustrated the flaw with the Cubs' roster construction when talking about his concerns for the upcoming season.

"The Dodgers can have some things go wrong. I feel like for us, we don’t have a lot of margin for error. We need guys to improve, we need to stay healthy, we need to play clean baseball. I think that the way this team is built — we have a really good defensive team, we should run the bases well — we need to do all those things really well. We don’t have the ability to sort of muddle through and just show up and make the postseason. We have to have a really good season to do that.," Hoyed told Jon Greenberg.

If the Cubs can't win on the margins, then what are we doing here?

Case in point: Last week, the Dodgers were without Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman during their games against the Cubs and still looked like the best team in Major League Baseball. Meanwhile, the Cubs were without Nico Hoerner and had a rookie making his Major League debut at third base. It was clear the one thing they aren’t currently great at is winning on the margins.

The Cubs can't be the team that prides itself on winning on the margins only to play fundamentally unsound baseball. It also speaks to the incompetence of how the Cubs’ payroll is being managed if they need to depend on being good at the little things instead of adding talent to overcome those lapses.