Chicago Cubs owner to team: Just win, baby!

Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts says his team already has the players it needs; they just have to perform

Tom Ricketts has laid down a marker for all Chicago Cubs fans who believe their club hasn’t done enough this winter to solidify its ability to contend in 2019.

This is the marker: We’ve spent plenty. It’s time to produce.

That’s the gist of his remarks this week on The Mully and Haugh show on 670 The Score, a major Chicago sports radio outlet.

Rather than purchase more players, Ricketts appeared to be arguing, it’s time for those on hand – especially the team’s recent acquisitions — to live up to their salaries.

“Frankly, we have one of the largest budgets in all of baseball,” Ricketts told the show’s listeners. “We have a team that we think is going to go a long way. We have a team that won 95 games last year without a lot of help from some of the guys we picked up last offseason. So, I just think all that stuff’s kind of misguided.”

Ricketts acknowledged that the Chicago Cubs suffered from injury problems in 2018, including to several of those acquisitions. Still, his reference to winning “without a lot of help from some of the guys we picked up last off-season” was easy to read as a direct challenge to Yu Darvish, Tyler Chatwood and Brandon Morrow.

The Cubs signed all three last season to a total of $185 million in contracts spread across a total of 11 seasons. In return they got a cumulative 5-9 record with 22 saves in 28 starts and 35 relief appearances.

What the Cubs didn’t get from those three was often as noteworthy as what they did get. Due to injuries (in the cases of Darvish and Morrow) or ineffectiveness (in the case of Chatwood), all were useless after the All Star break, when the Cubs coughed up their seemingly secure NL Central lead and then lost the wild card game to Colorado.

It is hard to see Chicago contending in 2019 without productive seasons from at least two of those three.

It’s easy to understand why Ricketts would lob the fans’ payroll concerns back at the players themselves. The Cubs approach the 2019 season with a record payroll expected to approach or possibly surpass the $207 million luxury tax threshold. It may end up being the third highest payroll in baseball, surpassed only by the Red Sox and Dodgers, and is likely to exceed the payroll of any of Chicago’s NL Central competitors by $50 million or more.

Darvish is one of four players who will draw $20 million or more this coming season. Another is Cole Hamels, who the Cubs did re-sign this off-season, largely to guard against the potential of continuing performance eclipses from Darvish and/or Chatwood.

Since the signing of Jon Lester to a six-year, $155 million deal prior to the 2015 season, Ricketts and the Chicago Cubs management team has given out six contracts of four years or longer, plus acquiring Jose Quintana’s five-year deal in a trade. In combination, those seven contracts committed the Cubs to $727 million in spending through 2023.

Those deals also have the potential to tie the Cubs’ hands in upcoming negotiations. The Cubs are already on the books for $101 million in 2020 commitments – largely to Chatwood, Darvish, Lester, Anthony Rizzo and Jason Heyward. That’s before their young, productive core – Kris Bryant, Javier Baez and Kyle Hendricks – goes to arbitration.

Since the 2020 free agent class might include such attractive potential pickups as Nolan Arenado, Paul Goldschmidt, Chris Sale, Garrett Cole and Nick Castellanos, there is every reason for Cubs management to attempt to retain some level of payroll flexibility in the hope of being players in that free agent market. Their previous, and often unproductive commitments, appear to have forced them to the sidelines in the bidding for this  winter’s prime free agents, Bryce Harper and Manny Machado.

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Beyond Darvish, Chatwood and Morrow, Ricketts’ comments might also be interpreted as a warning shot to the guys who were in charge of acquiring and utilizing those disappointing players. That would be team President of Baseball Operations Theo Epstein, General Manager Jed Hoyer and field manager

. Despite having won the franchise’s only World Series title in more than a century in 2016, there has been particularly aggressive speculation regarding Maddon’s status since his contract expires at season’s end and the Cubs have refused thus far to open talks about an extension.

Although the most expensive 2018 acquisitions were pitchers, Chicago’s every-day lineup is also loaded with players who underperformed their norms. That was true of Bryant, Rizzo, catcher Willson Contreras, shortstop Addison Russell, and outfielder Ian Happ. It’s also true that while Heyward didn’t under-perform his averages, he also didn’t deliver like the $20 million outfielder the Cubs are paying him to be.

So there’s plenty of room for improvement in the roster already on hand, which was Ricketts’ point.

“We’ve definitely signed a lot of players over the years,” he said. “We have a team that we like. And all the different things that we fought through last year – the injuries, everyone’s having kind of down years, some of the off-field distractions…we like our club.”

All that’s left for the Chicago Cubs then is to produce …or else.