Like his team, the Chicago Cubs’ President of Baseball Operations just got back from a lengthy road trip. But unlike the team, Hoyer was much further away: he was in Japan for five days scouting professional baseball talent.
Hoyer spoke to the media upon his return, before last night’s game, and you can read his comments , , , and , among other places. And you can watch him speak . Some of his thoughts and remarks …
Hoyer talked about the team’s struggles over the recent ten-game swoon, noting that the at bats hadn’t looked as sharp, the defense hadn’t looked as crisp, and the baserunning hadn’t looked as good. He feels like it came out of nowhere, and hopes that it goes right back into that nowhere.
So it wasn’t about the guys just being ground down and tired? Maybe. But maybe not. “I always say a lot of times when you don’t hit, you looked tired. We just haven’t hit during that (road) stretch. I don’t think the quality of our at-bats was nearly as good as when we were playing well. A lot of times people during those periods, people want to say the team looks flat, because when you have bases loaded, no one out twice and you get double-play balls, you look flat or tired. When guys are circling the bases, you look like you have a lot of energy.” Maybe some of it is just a perception issue, but given the Cubs playing 27 games in 27 days at one point, with game times changing constantly throughout, Hoyer himself acknowledged that it was a tough stretch physically.
As far as the balance between giving guys rest and keeping your regulars starting every day, Hoyer was diplomatic. “We have guys that want to play every day; that’s the way they view themselves as players, is doing that. And that’s hard …. [if-this, if-that questions about resting players or changing the lineup] are all almost impossible questions to answer. Because, ultimately, you can only make one decision in that moment. And if it works, people think it’s smart. And if it doesn’t, then people say you should have done the other. And you never know what thing actually led to what happened.”
Hoyer was watching the bizarre and galling 13-inning loss in Arizona while he was in Japan, and given the tiny margins by which the Cubs lost that game – inches, milliseconds, blown calls – he tried to remind himself that the Cubs were on the other side of some lucky games like that earlier this year, too: “I got on a flight later and I was still sort of staring ahead on the plane afterward to kind of think through that game because it felt like there was just so many moments of that game that felt like we were about to win and then something would happen. Sometimes you try to remember we’ve had some good fortune along the way when we have a game like that where it just feels like everything went against us and we couldn’t get any break. We’ve gotten some breaks along the way and hopefully we get some more. But that one took longer to recover from the most.”
As for that trip to Japan, I don’t know that Hoyer was going to tip his hand on any specifics for obvious reasons. “It’s a great baseball culture. Obviously, they have a lot of really good players. Making sure that’s a market that we are actively involved in is something that’s really important.” It has been reported that Hoyer would see ace righty Yoshinobu Yamamoto while there, but he likely saw many others, including lefty Shota Imanaga.
Hoyer also didn’t tip anything new off on Marcus Stroman’s role, only to say that it’s great that he’s back and hopefully he can help a beat up bullpen. To me, once Stroman pitched back-to-back games in Arizona, it did SEEM like the Cubs were thinking of him as actually, truly a reliever the rest of the way. We’ll see, but that might be it. He can certainly help.
As for where things go from here, Hoyer kept reiterating that the Cubs just need to play 12 good games and hopefully win four series. “The perspective I try to have, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, is if you had told us this situation on July 17 or something, you would have been elated. Obviously, we had put ourselves really in the catbird seat at one point and obviously this road trip certainly hurt that. But we would have loved to be in this position in the middle of July, and we’re here right now, and we have 12 games to play really well. That’s the nice thing is that we still very much have a situation where if we play well then we should be playing in October.”