Cubs: 3 scapegoats for disappointing season not named Jed Hoyer

Cubs owner Tom Ricketts

The simple fact of the matter is that if the Ricketts family (mainly Tom Ricketts) didn’t sell off most of their top players last year, they wouldn’t be an unmitigated disaster this year.

The Cubs have dropped their payroll from $214 million in 2019 (the last non-pandemic impacted season before 2022) to $149 million this year. When you drop your payroll 30 percent, you aren’t going to win as many games. It’s as simple as that.

Sure enough, the team’s total amount of wins is on pace to drop by about 25 percent so, as they say, you get what you pay for.

Their four highest paid players (Heyward, Stroman, Kyle Hendricks, and Miley) are combining to make $71 million, or just under half of the team’s entire payroll. They have combined to have 1.1 rWAR on the season.

That formula is not exactly a recipe for winning.

Instead, Ricketts is crying poor … while he was trying to buy Chelsea FC earlier this year for an estimated $4 billion.

Ricketts isn’t exactly living paycheck to paycheck but he is running the Cubs like he is. Until he forks over some cash and the front office decides to go all in on a rebuild or go all in to be a playoff team next year, the Cubs will be doing what they have done for most of their history: be stuck in a quagmire  of mediocrity.