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This story was excerpted from Jordan Bastian’s Cubs Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
ANAHEIM — The Cubs have a little more than seven weeks to pick a lane. The hope going into this season was that the front office would look to add impact pieces at the Trade Deadline, but the team’s performance to date has muddied the waters.
At Angel Stadium this week, Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer was asked when he needs to decide whether his approach will be buying or selling ahead of the Aug. 1 Deadline.
“End of July. Honestly, I’d love to know sooner,” Hoyer said. “I’d love to rattle off a long winning streak and feel like, ‘OK, all these questions are not going to be asked anymore.’ That’d be the hope. We’re certainly not going to make any decisions early. I mean, listen, we had a really good month and we had a really bad month. And we need to play well.”
With Wednesday’s 6-2 loss to the Angels, the Cubs dropped to 26-35 through 61 games this season. At this point in the calendar a year ago, the club was mired in a 10-game losing streak and on its way to a second straight year of selling at the Deadline.
The Cubs fortified their roster with a pile of veterans — All-Stars, award winners and World Series champions among them — and got off to a 14-10 start in April. The 12-25 stretch that has followed has featured a myriad of misfortunes.
The biggest issues that have sunk Chicago in the standings have been the bullpen (13th in the National League with a 4.62 ERA) and situational hitting (MLB-worst -5.81 in FanGraphs’ offensive “Clutch” metric). That has contributed to an 8-16 record in games decided by two or fewer runs.
Hoyer also pointed to five home series already in which the Cubs won the first two games (against the Rangers, Mariners, Marlins, Mets and Rays) but were unable to finish a sweep.
“It’s going to be hard to two-out-of-three our way to a really good place,” Hoyer said. “We’re going to have to, at some point, win a bunch of games in a row, and I think we have the pitching to do that. We’ve had consistent starts, which is usually the thing that leads towards winning streaks. We just have to do it. That’s really what I’m hoping for over the next seven weeks.”
If the Cubs go into sell mode, there are multiple veterans who could be flipped, but the biggest question centers around the future of starter Marcus Stroman.
The 32-year-old Stroman is pitching like an ace (2.39 ERA through 13 starts) and has the ability to opt out of his contract ($21 million in 2024) in favor of testing free agency. Stroman has made it clear he would love to stay with the Cubs beyond ’23, and the sides will undoubtedly discuss that possibility in the weeks leading up to the Deadline.
“I’m not going to comment on the contract,” Hoyer said. “Obviously, he’s thrown great this year. Our focus is, we just need to be consistent as a team and kind of claw our way back into the race. It’s not that far a climb. We just need to play consistent baseball, and my hope is that we’ll do that.”