A veteran Chicago sportswriter remarked this week that he does not understand the logic behind the Cubs trading away six quality pitchers when in fact, the hardest thing a team has to accomplish is to build a quality pitching core.
The Cubs continue to fall apart after trading 40 percent of their rotation. The team fell apart after the 2012 trades
of Ryan Dempster and Paul Maholm and the 2013 trades of Scott Feldman
and Matt Garza. This season, the Cubs had a long losing streak after Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel were traded to Oakland. The Cubs best pitching prospect, Andrew Cashner, was also traded.
Jim Litke of the Associated Press opined that the Cubs (like most teams) are in need of pitching in order to be a competitive ball club. But the Cubs have traded away six quality starting pitchers in three years which is counter-intuitive on how to build a team.
This is a point that is often overlooked in the rebuilding story.
The Cubs have traded valuable assets, major league starting pitchers, for prospects.
There are only 150 starters in the majors at any given time. But that is still 20 percent of the league's active rosters. And at any given time, there may only be 50 quality starters in the majors. Starting pitchers are the hardest players to find and keep.
There is no doubt that any general manager would have drooled over the prospect of having Dempster, Garza, Maholm, Feldman, Samardzija, Hammel and Cashner to choose a starting rotation. But the current management team has taken these players and turned them into two unproven starters (Arrieta and Hendricks) and bullpen arms (Grimm, Strop, Ramirez). By most accounts, trading proven starters for relief pitchers is a horrible strategy.
Some may say the Cubs traded away their starters at the right time. Collectively, Dempster, Maholm, Garza and Feldman only have contributed a 1.0 WAR since leaving Chicago. Feldman has a 1.2 WAR since leaving the Cubs.
If the plan is to have an inventory of cheap, controllable position players on your roster - - - at the expense of home grown pitching talent - - - then one has to spend huge money for free agent starters (in the hundreds of millions of dollar range with the Kershaws and Tanakas). That is a risky and expensive proposition considering most free agent pitchers are veterans who if not already broken down have much wear and tear on their bodies that injury is a risk. There is probably more dead money contracts tied to failed veteran pitchers than any other position in baseball.
So the basic point is that the Cubs are building a team differently than most other teams who prize pitching first. As you can tell in the current trade market, teams are not trading their major league ready pitching prospects. And other teams are wary of trading their starting aces (unless they are about to become free agents). To acquire a David Price will cost a team like the Cubs four of their top prospects, which puts the Cubs prospect inventory back to almost square one.
This is why the balanced approach to rebuilding a major league franchise is the common sense way to do business. But the Cubs think they are smarter than the other teams. But as a result, the Cubs have a huge pitching deficit in their organization.
