SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – APRIL 08: Dansby Swanson #7 of the Chicago Cubs connects for a two-run triple during the fourth inning of a game against the San Diego Padres at Petco Park on April 08, 2024 in San Diego, California.
Sean M. Haffey/Getty
SAN DIEGO – Manager Craig Counsell’s new team impressed him on a Sunday morning in the middle of spring training when he had the players run the bases.
“The effort level was no more than I expected,” Counsell said in a conversation with the Sun-Times, “and that was really cool for me.”
As subtle of an observation as it was, for Counsell – who has been in professional baseball for over 30 years, as a player, executive and manager – the drill was a reflection of the team leaders he’d inherited.
“There’s a lot of attention to detail, baseball rats in the group,” Counsell said. “And they’re thinkers. And they’ve thought about this stuff a lot already. That’s when you can tell about this group; they enjoy thinking about it.”
Counsell has managed plenty of different teams with different leadership styles. What works or one group may not work for another. What works one year might have to shift the next. There’s no one-size-fits-all formula, but so far this Cubs team has seemed cohesive.
The same core of players were together last year, when the Cubs had to scratch and claw out of a hole to prove they were contenders before the trade deadline.
The Cubs have yet to be tested in the same way this year, but they were dealt a tough blow with their ace Justin Steele straining his hamstring in his Opening Day start. So far, they’ve coped well.
In a 5-1 homestand against the Rockies and Dodgers, the Cubs scored eight-plus runs in four separate games, despite cold, wet and windy weather. Entering play Monday, the Cubs’ 58 runs scored ranked No. 6 in MLB.
“The consistency of the at-bat was just so good and from so many different places in the lineup,” second baseman Nico Hoerner said Monday. “I thought that was just really admirable.”
Even in spring training games, Counsell noticed the group packed together on one side of the dugout, talking a lot. That’s a theme president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer seized upon as well.
“The leaders of the team are constantly thinking about how to get better, what can we do differently, they’re always talking about their at-bats, they’re talking about what they’re seeing,” Hoyer said. “I just don’t worry about that with this group. It’s a very serious group. They get their work in, they’re focused, they want to prepare. You worry about a lot of things; that’s thankfully not one of the things I worry about with this particular group of players.”
Constant baseball conversations were also a mark of spring training in 2023, when Dansby Swanson and Cody Bellinger were first introducing themselves and Ian Happ and Hoerner, bridges to the old regime, were just beginning to come into their leadership roles.
Now, they’ve all helped steer a team through a full season together. And thanks to Happ’s extension last year and Bellinge re-signing this spring, they’re all back.
Leadership on the pitching side is just as important. And the Cubs have a mixture of veterans like starter Kyle Hendricks and reliever Héctor Neris, plus homegrown connectors like Adbert Alzolay helping guide the group from that side. But while starters take the mound every five or six days, and relievers’ schedules are determined by role and game state, the offensive core is on the field every game.
“We have distinctive leaders here,” said Hendricks, the only player on the roster from the Cubs’ 2016 championship team. “And you can kind of point to who they are. And maybe the past couple years – two, three, four years ago – we might have lost that a little bit. But I know back in the years we were winning, we had distinctive leaders that you knew who to follow.”