Cubs President Jed Hoyer on the State of the Buy-Sell Decision and What Comes Next
Chicago Cubs President of Baseball Operations Jed Hoyer spoke with the media and, although I shared a bit of it in the Bullets this morning, I wanted to share as much as I could find. The President’s comments this time of year are pretty important and get scrutinized closely.
You can read Hoyer’s full comments here, here, here, here, and here, among other places. Some of what he said …
The Cubs want to buy. They want any excuse to buy. It’s not hard to sense in their words. But that doesn’t mean they are going to refuse to sell if things don’t go well the next two weeks:
“There is nothing we want more than to add,” Hoyer said. “But if we are in a position of saying that is not the right bet to make, then we will pivot. There are some early deals that get done but by and large you expect the moves to be fairly late. The volume intensity will begin to pick up as we get into the final week (of July).”
Again, Hoyer’s thoughts on trying to keep a steady head about the buy-sell decision at a time like this, with the deadline coming and the team not clearly pointed in either direction:
“The phones have been ringing today,” Hoyer said Friday, prior to the Cubs’ series opener with the Red Sox at Wrigley Field. “Obviously, we aren’t going to make any trades today, We will see where we are and assess how we play the next two weeks. I don’t want this to be a day-to-day assessment thing but it’s that time of year in baseball. We need to make up ground on first place, and we need to make up ground on .500 …. “We have had a lot of internal talk during the break. I will not give you our exact criteria but we are trying to make decisions in the best educated way possible. We don’t want to use emotion or one day’s loss or one day’s win to dictate the direction. That is the most important thing. We do need to make up ground first and make up ground on .500. “You do try and study trends from past seasons during this time. You look and see how much this decision and that decision really affect a teams play and results. We are making decisions based on this year, but obviously you want to learn from the past. We try to keep learning what other teams have done in similar positions. How much those decisions swung their odds in different ways. There is not just one way for a club to run a deadline. The important thing is to be clear headed and decisive when you make the decisions.”
One thing we know about this front office: when they do make a decision, they’re going to GO with it. That may not mean we see a lot of deals – because their decision might be a firm “hold everything,” depending on the circumstances – but I don’t expect much waffling. I believe the Cubs will wait as long as possible before making a decision, and then they will be all-in on that decision. Heavy selling? Thoughtful buying? Mostly holding and seeing what happens in the second half? I can see the argument for all three approaches. Just need more clarity on the field at this point.
Hoyer believes the next two weeks will provide more clarity not only for the Cubs, but also for several other could-be-buyers-or-sellers:
“It’s a complicated time of year, and there [are] a number of teams that are in similar positions,” Hoyer said. “I think a lot will play out around baseball over the two weeks here and elsewhere in terms of teams figuring out exactly where they are and making their best estimate of that at the right time and making decisions …. “There are some very clear buyers out there. But there’s a lot of teams that I think are still trying to figure out where they stand. I think there’s a lot of teams where a good 10 days or a bad 10 days could change what they’re doing. That’s been the nature of our conversations.”
It’s worth pointing out that your own buy-sell decision is not made ENTIRELY in a vacuum – at the margins, it depends a bit on what other buyers and sellers are doing. Who is available? Who is offering how much for pieces? Which competitors are also pushing? So on and so on. You want all that information.
Hoyer on how the underlying metrics do and do not matter at this point:
Source: bleachernation.com
