What happens when you don’t have the money to fix something that’s broken? That’s seemingly what the Chicago Cubs’ front office is facing this winter as it attempts to improve its club without spending gobs of money on free agents. Sometimes the answer is to find a creative solution.cheap nike nfl jerseys china
As is, its payroll commitments for 2019 buck right up against the luxury-tax threshold, so the notion of spending on Bryce Harper — a name Cubs fans have been salivating over since the day they realized he and third baseman Kris Bryant were friendly — seems farfetched. It wouldn’t be if the team was willing to blow past the tax thresholds and commit to having one of the top two or three payrolls in baseball, but that doesn’t sound like a possibility right now.
“We’re not ruling anybody out, but it’s important to have some perspective too,” president of baseball operations Theo Epstein said last month. “Like every other team, we’re going to have our budgets, not set artificially at all, but set as a result of looking at revenues and looking at expenses and doing everything we can to put a winning team on the field for the fans.”
Epstein sounds like he’s trying to balance his household budget and might have to cut back on the gourmet coffee. Agents who have spoken with the Cubs confirm the team’s reluctance to spend big, which means the Cubs’ offseason moves might be more creative than impactful. To Epstein’s credit, he puts the blame squarely on his own shoulders because he’s right about one thing: A $200 million-plus payroll should be more than enough to win.
“Some offseasons are more challenging than others. If that means anything, it means I need to do my job better. And that we need to do our job better as a baseball operation to continue to put a top-level team on the field and feel secure in that for years to come.”nike nfl jerseys cheap paypal
There’s little to argue with there, but the fact is the Cubs are in their window for winning now. Frankly, the team won the World Series in 2016 with a less-than-bulky payroll considering almost the entire position-player base was made up of pre-arbitration-eligible players. Now it’s the opposite. It’s called the cost of winning.
