Cubs president Theo Epstein told reporters
that the team will have the financial wherewithal to add to the payroll
in the coming years due to its young core of prospects playing at the major league level. The core prospects are on team friendly deals, several years away from arbitration or free agency. Epstein said he never looks
at one off-season and decides that he has to get something done that
year, but he expects to add impact starting pitching from outside the
organization in the next 18 to 24 months.
The latter part of the story is the key element. As media columnists and radio pundits "expect" that the core will ramp it up next year in collective production, they also "expect" the Cubs to pull the trigger and go out and sign two "impact" players, like a Jon Lester (who may cost $140 million or more). But Epstein is foreshadowing the opposite.
He is not going to commit to spending money this off-season. Eighteen months brings the Cubs to the trade deadline in 2016. And the outer limit is spring of 2017. But these goal posts can continue to move, farther away to 2020 (when the old local media deals expire).
So Epstein is quietly signaling that the front office is not convinced (rightly so) that the core will actually perform at a high enough level in the next two years to "justify" spending hundreds of millions of dollars on quality, proven starting pitchers.
The Cubs rebuilding program has this built in Catch-22. The team does want to grow cheap, controllable players through their minor league system. In order to draft the best talent, the major league team needs to lose. Losing does not help sign talent in the free agent market. Once the prospects arrive at Wrigley, there is no guarantee if any or all will become impact major leaguers. If the team's new core does not pan out, then there is no reason for Ricketts to approve spending millions for pitching for a bad club.
Besides, the concept that the "business side" needs to catch up with the "baseball side" is another built-in diversion in case the Cubs rebuilding program falters. Epstein claims there is plenty of money in the future, but any idea that the payroll savings are being banked in the past three years is an illusion. Ricketts has a highly expensive real estate project to build in and around Wrigley. That is the business side priority, not the baseball team. The hundreds of millions to be spent on pitching more likely will be spent on brick and mortar projects.
