Justin Steele doesn’t get caught up in the rumor mill around this time of year, even if his name is the one being brought up in trade speculation.
“I really don’t pay too much attention to that,” Steele said Wednesday following the Cubs’ 3-2 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers. “I had a good line the other day, I was like, ‘The only GM-ing I do is over a few fantasy football teams.’ That’s all I really do.”
Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer made it clear before Monday’s series opener where the front office stands ahead of the trade deadline next week: He won’t be focused on making moves that are solely to help this team this season.
That means acquiring short-term rentals, specifically to improve the 2024 roster, shouldn’t be expected. Perhaps a move that might boost the Cubs’ 2024 playoff chances can be made, but unless it’s a move that will also help the team in 2025 and later, too, it probably won’t happen. More than likely they’ll make deals on the smaller side, like ones that trade away relievers and bring back potential near-future contributors.
Hoyer wasn’t signaling that the Cubs were headed for another reset. A major sell-off isn’t on its way. It’s just the fact that the team hasn’t played its way into a place where Hoyer feels confident enough to give up young talent to enhance the Cubs’ playoffs odds for this year alone.
Those comments have made their way into the clubhouse over the last two days. Jameson Taillon said Tuesday that “it’s not like that caught me or probably anyone off-guard,” because the players know they haven’t “played the way we should.”
But at the same time, they certainly aren’t going to roll over now that Hoyer has made his trade-deadline focus clear.
“There’s definitely noise going on and stuff,” Taillon said, “but at the end of the day, I’ve been around long enough to just understand that I have a start tonight, and I gotta go about my routine. If I don’t check my boxes and do what I need to do, then I’m going to put the team in a bad spot. So that’s just kind of like the discipline and the professionalism aspect. You gotta show up and do your job regardless”
“That’s our job in the clubhouse right now is to make it tough on Jed,” Ian Happ said Monday. “It’s going out and playing good baseball and putting ourselves in a position where we can get back in this thing. The nice part about the wild card situation is it’s all bunched up right now, and we got plenty of baseball left.”
Of course, to keep trying to compete post-deadline, the Cubs would need to get things rolling over the last two months of the season, regardless of which players get dealt away.
That didn’t happen during the first homestand after the All-Star break. Wednesday’s loss to the Brewers was their second straight series loss, after dropping two of three to the Arizona Diamondbacks over the weekend.
The pitching staff gave up a total of 14 runs during those six games, allowing three runs or less in five and one run or less in three. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ball, the offense mustered a total of nine runs, getting shutout twice and not scoring more than three in a single game.
During his press conference Monday, Hoyer left open the caveat that a big winning streak could change things. Yet, the team responded with a series loss that pretty much seals what Hoyer what will do at the deadline.
As it stands, they’re 11 games out of the division and five games back of a wild card spot, and they don’t have a bunch of outside additions coming. But again, the Cubs aren’t going to wave the white flag on the season at the end of July.
“Where we’re at is, this is our record,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said Tuesday. “It’s put us in a little bit of a hole, and we gotta play really well the rest of the year. But we have a whole bunch of opportunities left to change that, to make that better, and that’s how we look at it.
“That’s how the players look at it. That’s how the coaching staff looks at it. And so, what happens around that is what happens, but it’s not going to change our focus and what we have an opportunity to do.”
Though they didn’t get the job done at home, they’ll have to keep that mentality as they hit the road to take on the Kansas City Royals and the Cincinnati Reds. That’ll then have to continue when they head back home to host the St. Louis Cardinals and the Minnesota Twins, and so on and so forth.
There’s no huge sell-off coming like the one at the 2021 trade deadline. Most of the core pieces expected to help this team compete in 2024 should still be around, so it’s not as if Counsell and Co. will be left with just a bunch of youngsters who need development (though that can certainly become part of the process if the Cubs fall further down the standings).
No matter what, if this team wants to prove the front office wrong and battle for a playoff spot, they have to find ways to win a bunch more baseball games. There’s really nothing else they can do anymore.
“Whatever happens for any team, no matter you get players, you pivot on players, you sell players, whatever it is, you change the mix of your roster — there’s going to be [54] games [after the deadline] left for everybody,” Counsell said. “[There’s going to be 54] games where you gotta go out and compete, and there’s going to be results after them. And the players in there, we’re going to go compete.
“There may be some different names in the room, because the trade deadline’s an opportunity for the whole industry to transact and change things. But for us, it’s go out there and compete.”
