The Cubs will be buyers at the trade deadline.
But as Nico Hoerner pointed out Wednesday, there are different levels of buying and selling.
“There’s ‘buyer’ and ‘seller,’” the Cubs’ second baseman said, “but even within that, there’s a bit of a spectrum of aggressiveness that isn’t chosen by the players. But we obviously dictate that by being the best version of ourselves on the field.”
Hoerner and his teammates won’t be the ones negotiating trades ahead of the Aug. 3 deadline. But they’ll obviously impact how team president Jed Hoyer acts.
The Cubs were buyers last year, too, when Hoyer balked at the price of pitching and opted against a splashy move, despite adding multiple players. Their October did not last long.
This year’s team woke up Wednesday six games back of the Brewers in the NL Central, giving it work to do to win the division and secure a first-round bye in the postseason.
Their playoff tickets are far from officially punched, of course, but they started the day with more wins than all but four teams in baseball, owning the NL’s top wild-card spot.
Would that be enough to spur Hoyer to the highest levels of trade-deadline aggression?
“You have to go into the deadline,” Hoyer said last week, “you have to think about it analytically, you have to think about: Getting a bye is effectively winning a series and weakening your opponent in the next series. That’s a really big deal.
“If the odds say that you can do that, that’s a different equation than if not. You have to be aware of those things, and we certainly will be.”
What can happen to boost the chances of Hoyer & Co. going big at the deadline and acquiring the kind of player — let’s be honest, the kind of pitcher — that will make the Cubs a fearsome playoff contender? Do they need to significantly shrink the Brewers’ lead?
With the deadline less than two weeks away, Cubs players believe themselves responsible for forcing any necessary changes to hearts and minds.
“You want to put your team in the best place it could be for everyone involved to believe in what we have and what we can improve on,” Hoerner said. “We’re still trailing our division by a good bit, so that’s up to us to continue to chip away and play good baseball. We’ll see.”
The team’s expectations have been at championship-level since before the season began. But a choppy first half featured an avalanche of pitching injuries, a monthlong offensive slump and a 10-game losing streak. They survived enough to head into the All-Star break a dozen games above .500.
“That might not be exactly what we set out to do, but to still be within the margins despite a lot of things not going well is a sign of a strong group,” Hoerner said. “It’s up to us to make the most of that moving forward, but we’re in a good place to do that.”
Those expectations haven’t changed.
“Top to bottom, everyone seems to be all in and ready to play the best they can every time,” said righty pitcher Aaron Civale. “Everyone in here understands what the expectations are, and no one’s shying away from that.”
As the deadline closes in, does Hoyer need to do any further fact-finding before deciding how aggressive to be? More than likely, individual trade opportunities will come with their own set of factors that play into that decision-making.
But what if the Brewers don’t budge? What if they comfortably win the Central, like they did last year? What if the Cubs are destined to start the postseason as a wild-card team?
Does that change what they’re capable of?
And perhaps more importantly, does it change what Hoyer is willing to do?
“I try to not get overly emotional about it. I try to stick to the numbers and make sure we’re doing things that make sense on paper,” Hoyer said. “But I think our position-playing group is really, really good. … That’s a group that could win a lot of games in October.
“Obviously, the challenge for us has simply been pitching and pitching injuries. The whole team matters.”
