SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer arrived at his hotel suite in Scottsdale late Monday from Florida, after a long day. The the news he delivered to manager David Ross that morning had to be conveyed in person – after all they’d been through together, Hoyer wouldn’t have been comfortable doing it any other way – hence the trip to Tallahassee before the general managers meetings.
“It just felt like an exceptionally hard decision, but one that I felt like I had to make if the opportunity was there,” Hoyer Tuesday said of firing Ross to hire Craig Counsell as manager. “From my perspective, my job is to figure out how to win as many games as we possibly can in the short term and in the long term. And there was nothing about this move that didn’t feel like it met that criteria.
“There’s no knock on Rossy, who I think incredibly highly of, but I just felt like Craig is at the very, very top of the game.”
Technically, the Cubs didn’t have to pursue one of the best managers in baseball while their skipper was still under contract. The move, which exemplified the “it’s a business” cliche, raised eyebrows around baseball. Former Cubs manager Joe Maddon similarly caught heat when the Cubs dismissed Rick Renteria less than a decade ago to hire Maddon.
As of Tuesday evening, Ross had yet to publicly chime in. Hoyer said Ross was “amazingly respectful” when he got the news.
When asked about overcoming the optics of the move, Hoyer said: “By phrasing it that way, you’re kind of saying that we’re factoring in how it looks on us to do it. And I don’t think that’s my job.”
He doesn’t see optics as falling under figuring out how to win. As Hoyer evaluated the 2013 season, the fact that the Cubs missed the playoffs as their underlying numbers and record diverged gnawed at him.
“That’s not all one person,” Hoyer said. “That’s on me and every person in the organization. But it felt like we left wins on the table.”
He hopes that with Counsell the Cubs will be less likely to leave wins on the table.
“Consistently, they’ve outperformed expectations,” Hoyer said of the Brewers during Counsell’s tenure, noting that the manager wasn’t the only factor. “And that’s borne out both with your eyes and you look at the data.”
Hoyer has been admiring Counsell from the other side of the division rivalry for years.
“My thought on Craig as I’ve always watched him against this was the Bum Phillips quote about Bear Bryant,” Hoyer said, “where he says, he can take his and beat yours, and yours and beat his.”
Though the Cubs won the division in 2017, Hoyer marveled at how close a race it was despite the gap in talent between the two rosters. The next year, the Brewers passed the Cubs in the NL Central.
Counsell is known for a well-rounded skillset at the helm. The one knock on his resume – magnified by the size of his record five-year, $40 million contract with the Cubs – is a lack of success in the postseason. In five postseason appearances, his teams have only won one playoff series. Hoyer said he didn’t think that record was a reflection in any way of Counsell’s skill as a manager.
“Do I think that they had teams that were capable of going really far in the playoffs? I do,” Hoyer said. “... To me, the greatest sign of a really good manager is his ability to navigate the marathon.”
What the Cubs saw in Counsell over those marathon regular seasons convinced them he was the right person to lead their team in a championship window.