How Jed Hoyer Can Put His Stamp on Cubs After Theo Epstein's Departure

How Hoyer can put his stamp on the Cubs post-Epstein originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago

The first person Theo Epstein wanted on his front office team when the Cubs hired him almost a decade ago was Jed Hoyer.

That’s how Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts tells it.

“I think we said the words, ‘Jed and Theo’ so much it almost became one word,” Ricketts said of the past nine seasons. “Just JedandTheo.”

That changed last week when Epstein resigned. As Hoyer replaces Epstein as president of baseball operations and begins a search to fill the general manager position he left open, Hoyer has the opportunity to put his stamp on the Cubs.

Now, it’s just Jed.

 “Ultimately part of being a leader is being genuine,” Hoyer said Monday. “I can't be someone I’m not. I can't try to act like Theo; I have to act like me. And I think that's really important.  I try to be transparent. I'm very conversational. I'm probably always going to have a pretty flat hierarchy in whatever office I'm running because I want to talk to everyone, I want the information.”

RELATED: What Epstein expects of Hoyer as next Cubs president

While Hoyer’s personality will set the tone for the rest of the front office, the more visible changes will come in the form of on-field performance. In that area, the two failings of the last era leave room for a lasting legacy.

For all the success of Epstein’s tenure, which he brought a World Series home to Chicago and turned the “lovable losers” into a perennial playoff team, the future Hall of Famer wasn’t perfect.

To begin with, under Epstein’s watch, the Cubs never proved they could develop home grown pitching.

“That's been something that we've been rightly criticized for,” Hoyer said, “and I promise we beat ourselves up over it far more than we've been criticized for it.”

Even before being named president of baseball operations, Hoyer began to address the issue. He was “instrumental,” as Epstein put it, in restructuring the Cubs’ scouting and player development departments over the past couple years. But, especially with the cancellation of the 2020 minor league season, the results of that effort have yet to come into focus.

“Certainly, the lower levels of our minor leagues are really improving rapidly,” Hoyer said. “But to continue to build that pipeline is something that's going to be critically important for the next few years.”

It’s not a matter of pitching quality. The Cubs’ team ERA has been among the National League’s top five every year since 2015, and top three in four of the past six seasons. But that success hasn’t been cheap.

“Counting on major league transactions to have a good team ERA is really difficult,” Hoyer said, “and really inefficient from a financial and trade-capital standpoint.”

MORE: Jed Hoyer agrees to new 5-year deal as Cubs president

The other area where Hoyer can make his mark was originally the Cubs’ strong suit. But after Epstein declared in 2018, “Our offense broke somewhere along the lines,” the club never managed to fix it.

“The irony of the whole thing is that on the hitting side we've drafted and developed great hitters,” Hoyer said. “We've actually had a surplus of hitters, and we've been able to trade some of those hitters for pitchers. So, that's been frustrating that we haven't had the kind of offensive juggernaut that we thought we were developing.”

The team’s offensive weaknesses have dominated the Cubs front office’s conversations so far this offseason. According to Hoyer, they’ve discussed practice habits and messaging.

Eventually, however, Hoyer will begin making roster changes. And they could be big ones.

“In this job you always have one eye on the present and one eye on the future,” Hoyer said, “and the truth is, given (player) service time realities, I might be a little bit more focused towards the future than usual. But that doesn't take away from the goal. And the goal is always to make the playoffs and give this organization a chance to go deep in October.”

The Hoyer era begins.

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