Remember when the Cubs didn’t trade anyone at the trade deadline and lots of teams, including the Pirates due to their likely interest in Carlos Pena, seemed awfully confused by it? As it turns out, Jim Hendry had been told on July 22nd that he was going to be fired after the draft pick signing deadline, and he decided that it wouldn’t be right for him to make any trades at that point.
To reiterate: the Cubs decided immediately before the trade deadline they wanted to fire their GM and faced with the choice of either not telling Hendry (to keep him in place for the signing deadline) and let him run the deadline or hustling him out of office to get someone else in place for the deadline, the Cubs instead went with a tragically hilarious combination of both approaches that accomplished literally nothing.
It’s not all fun and games today, though, especially not for the Pirates (or any other non-Cub team in the NL Central). Huge market teams generally have two possible ways they can approach trying to build a winning team. One is throwing money at everything in sight and hoping it turns out and one is hiring a smart person to figure out how to not only spend more money than anyone else, but how to spend it wisely. Hendry and the Cubs have used Approach #1 for nine years and while it yielded decent results for a while, doing this almost always results in a roster of old, overpaid players that can’t do anything for anyone. If the Cubs go out and hire someone that knows how to spend their money, the rest of the small-market NL Central could be in a lot of trouble.
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