The Chicago Cubs are running meetings this week at Wrigley Field, focusing on scouting and player development. As the Cubs continue to work toward building a more holistic organization with departments that are in regular communication and striving for collaboration, moments like these meetings can come with small victories. With the buzz of the Kyle Tucker trade still being felt, Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer complimented staffers on their tireless work behind the scenes.
“In order to have the player resources to make a deal like this, it comes with a lot of good scouting and a lot of good acquisitions,” Hoyer said on a video conference with reporters. “You have to make a lot of good decisions to be in that position.”
The meetings served as a kickoff event for 2025 draft preparations within the amateur scouting department, as well as planning sessions for how player development will continue to evolve and grow into the summer. Those moments can be unifying as the Cubs build their vision for now and the future.
Trades like the one for Tucker serve as a reminder that everyone in the organization is essential to the big picture. It’s the staffer in player development who recommended that Scott Effross start throwing sidearm, which created the value to acquire Hayden Wesneski, who was the final piece in the Tucker deal with the Houston Astros. It’s the international scout who identified Christopher Morel, who got traded for Isaac Paredes, another key part of Houston’s return. Everyone matters.
But the work doesn’t stop. The Cubs didn’t move up in the 2025 draft and actually fell one spot to No. 17 through Major League Baseball’s lottery. Still, the front office has been impressed with the recent draft results, despite the fact the Cubs have selected in the top 10 only once in their last nine drafts.
Tucker entering his walk year makes this acquisition a risk, though one that is worthwhile. If he leaves as a free agent, the Cubs will almost certainly get a draft pick, assuming they give him a qualifying offer. The next task, then, would be to find another Cam Smith or Matt Shaw.
In hindsight, the problem wasn’t that the Cubs traded Eloy Jiménez and Dylan Cease to the Chicago White Sox in the Jose Quintana deal. Defending the franchise’s first World Series title in more than a century required bold action. Quintana pitched in the 2017 National League Championship Series, contributed to a 95-win team the following year and finished a good-but-not-great run as a Cub with a 33-23 record and a 4.24 ERA.
The Cubs traded away top prospect Dylan Cease in an effort to keep momentum after winning the 2016 World Series. (David Frerker / Imagn Images)
Jiménez became what the Cubs thought he would be — primarily a designated hitter who would struggle to stay healthy and maximize his potential. Cease exceeded expectations and reached his ceiling on the South Side, but his breakout season did not come until 2021. And the White Sox failed to capitalize on their years with a Cy Young Award contender, trading Cease to the San Diego Padres in March, exempting him from the worst team in major-league history.
For the Cubs, the biggest issue was the lack of young, homegrown talent coming after Jiménez and Cease. During that era, the organization accumulated enough trade chips to also acquire Dexter Fowler, Miguel Montero, Aroldis Chapman, Wade Davis, Cole Hamels and Nick Castellanos. But at a certain point, there simply weren’t enough high-end prospects to backfill.
The Cubs couldn’t supplement their pitching staff with homegrown pitchers, forcing them to pay free-agent prices for even standard relievers. The Cubs didn’t have enough inexpensive talent to plug into their roster, which limited their pursuits of star players. The Cubs wouldn’t be a factor in the trade negotiations that saw Mookie Betts, Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto change teams.
Consider this: According to MLB Pipeline, Smith would have entered 2025 as the Cubs’ No. 7 prospect if he hadn’t been traded to the Astros in the Tucker deal. Yet Smith is still a top-100 prospect.
When Betts was traded, the seventh-ranked prospect in the Cubs’ system was Kohl Franklin. When Lindor was moved, it was Adbert Alzolay. Both were quality prospects for their time, but neither was close to being the primary prospect used to get a star talent.
Most of the Cubs’ win-now trades toward the end of their last run of success came at the deadline. Even though some of those trades were successful — Hamels and Castellanos stand out — they weren’t shopping at the very top of the trade market. And in each case, they were essentially able to get the deal done because they were paying for two months of service. That’s very different from their deal for Paredes or even a full year of Tucker.
A strong farm system allows them to make bold moves like this without having too much concern that they’ve drained their organization of young talent. The Cubs are far from a finished product at every level. But at the same time, their amateur scouting department is getting results and their player development seems to have made significant strides. Now it’s time for the major-league club to do the same. With Tucker, the Cubs are back in the mix.
“Even with this, our future is really bright,” Hoyer said. “We still have a really good farm system. We have really clean financial books and some ability to make moves in the future. I don’t see this move as precluding any of those things. We traded some really good players to get a player that we feel like is one of the top players in the game. It makes a lot of sense for us now with where we are in our competitive window.”
(Top photo of Kyle Tucker: Robert Edwards / Imagn Images)