Q-and-A: What Jed Hoyer really thinks about the Cubs heading into Opening Day (Part 1)

Posted March 25, 2026 11:49 am

By Jon Greenberg

MESA, Ariz. — Every spring training, going back to when he was the general manager, Cubs president Jed Hoyer sits down with me for a long interview published as a Q&A. I don’t know if our conversation can be considered “wide-ranging” because it’s mostly just about baseball, but it’s certainly long, which is what most people mean when they brag about their “wide-ranging” interviews. Anyway, we split it into two parts. Here is part one.

Q: So what’s camp been like?

A: It always feels a little disjointed in years with the WBC, just because you’re missing a bunch of players. We were missing a lot of guys for a while, and even at the end, we were missing four or five guys. So it feels different. I think you have to accept the fact that it’ll feel different, and I think in a lot of ways it gave a really good opportunity to guys like Pedro Ramírez and Jefferson Rojas to just play more. I think Pete (Crow-Armstrong) being gone gave more playing time to Kevin (Alcantara) and to (Dylan) Carlson and (Michael) Conforto, and I think that having (Alex) Bregman gone gave more third base reps to guys like Pedro Ramírez, so I think there’s a benefit to it as well.

Q: Daniel Palencia told me that he said to Craig Counsell when he got back that he felt that experience is just going to help him get ready for October.

A: It’s a World Series environment. You talk to anyone that was there, it’s bonkers, and I think that especially in their situation, the national pride is incredible, so I think he felt like an obligation to his country and he felt a real obligation to his teammates, and I think that’s fantastic.

Q: The flip side is, as we’re talking, Seiya Suzuki’s over there with a knee brace talking to reporters. How are you feeling with that?

A: It’s hard because I know the WBC is great for the game and I found myself just thinking about what it would be like to work in soccer. We deal with this once every three or four years, and they deal with this every year in some capacity, and then in World Cup years it’s even worse. And so, of course, I don’t like that aspect of it, but at the same time, I do think that we’re nothing compared to them.

Q: That’s a healthy, optimistic way to look at it. Going into the season, what’s your level of contentment? How happy are you about the depth and the length of your roster?

A: I think that this job rids you of any level of contentment, for better or for worse. It takes away the color of your hair and it takes away your contentment. We have real depth in both areas, and the hard thing is when Seiya got hurt, part of me is like, OK, well that’s the first one, but it’s not going to be the last one. And you have to understand that it’s part of what we’re going to deal with, that’s part of the job. It’s why you have to have a lot of good players. And I know sometimes in the offseason it feels cliché to say, oh, well, you can’t just write your lineup on paper or your rotation on paper. It’s true. Guys are going to get hurt. Guys are gonna play poorly. And I try to tell myself every year, I haven’t had this conversation with myself yet, but I will before Opening Day, is that whatever I think is going to happen is not gonna happen. The season wouldn’t be fun for anyone if the season went as scripted or didn’t involve a ton of surprises.

Q: How much time do you spend talking to yourself?

A: A lot. This job does that to you as well. I got a lot of time on the drive home. I think earbuds have made talking to yourself better because they assume you’re on a call. But seriously, I try to tell myself all the time, things are going to happen that you can’t imagine, both good and bad. Like, I didn’t imagine Pete hitting 27 home runs in the first half last year, so that’s on the good side. Justin Steele made four starts last year. Those are the ups and downs. Those are going to happen and you have to realize that … we’re not a very good team if any one player goes down and we can’t win. So that’s the bottom line. And so you have to understand that that’s what you’re going to be dealing with all summer.

Q: Last year when we talked, I used the word “volatility” about the Cubs counting on all these young players in an important season, and you said you looked at it as upside, as in if you’re going to get to a “sort of 75th percentile or above outcome on this season,” you need good years from (Michael) Busch from Pete from (Matt) Shaw.

A: Yeah, I mean, we project a little higher this year than we did last year in part because some of those players had really good seasons, so they project better this year. But you can’t exceed your projections without your individual players doing that. It seems obvious. … In order for us to be a truly great team, we’re going to have to have players do things that they haven’t done yet. And I think that’s exciting. I think we have a lot of players that can do that. That is something that I’m always thinking about, which players can kind of take this to the next level. What player can have a career year that pushes us up.

Q: A guy like Edward Cabrera is already a veteran, but is putting him in front of your defense that kind of a situation, where whatever he’s projected to do could be even better?

A: I think Edward’s a great example of that. And I think a real stabilizing force for us is our defense. If we’re running out our main guys, we play great defense, we’re a clean team, we make the plays, we make all the routine plays and we make a lot of spectacular plays. I think that the most important thing for our pitching staff, besides obviously staying healthy, is throw strikes. If we throw strikes and keep the ball in the ballpark, our guys are going to make plays. You never want to say you’re the best at defense, but I certainly think we’re in the top handful of defensive teams in baseball, and that makes life a lot easier on our pitchers.

Q: Alex Bregman was hanging over last year’s camp because he was a guy you wanted. Now you have him. He’s changed the calculus of what we expect from the Cubs, hasn’t he?

A: I think that’s the fun part of expectations. You want fans excited for the season. You want them to have high expectations. And we have that. I do think Alex raises that. I think he wants that as well. But, you know, he’s been gone a lot, so I think he hasn’t really been able to get into the flow here. He’s a really good hitter. He’s going to do all the things that we like in our hitters in terms of his swing decisions, he puts the ball in play, plays really steady defense. And he provides, you know, a real sense of gravitas, I would say, within the clubhouse. So I think those things are all positive, and we’re just excited to see the season.

Q: When I talk about expectations, I talked about this with some of your players too. They have high expectations. I think externally, Cubs fans are always pretty optimistic, for the most part, and internally, sometimes you can say, all right, they think we’re going to be this good, but I know we have these problems or these holes or whatever. I feel like this year, the internal expectations have to be pretty high on this team.

A: They are high, and the concerns are always the same. They’re going to be health, they’re going to be the bullpen coming together, all these different things. But I do feel like our group got a taste of what it’s like in the playoffs, what Wrigley’s like in a playoffs, and I sense a really hungry group this year, a really serious hungry group, which is a great feeling. I think they believe in themselves and they believe in what they can do.

I’m going to disagree with you for one second. I feel proud that Cubs fans are optimistic. I feel like when I first got here, Cubs fans were fairly pessimistic, and I think that that’s something I feel proud that we’ve changed over my 15 seasons.

Q: That is true. Lou Piniella used to talk about how Cubs fans get too high and too low. But when you’re talking to yourself, have you reflected on the path just to get here since 2021? You know, the last five years to get back to where you are.

A: I knew taking over in 2020 that we had a lot of hard decisions to make. I don’t think the ascent has been perfectly smooth. Missing the playoffs in September of 2023 is something that I still play over in my mind. It felt like that was a team that should have made the playoffs. In May of ’24, I feel like we had a playoff-caliber team that sort of took itself out of contention and then we played well the rest of the year. So there have been ups and downs, but I think when I look out at the field and look at our roster, now there is a real sense of pride for our operation. I see a guy like Palencia closing out the WBC. Pete’s playing in the WBC. He was someone we acquired at the deadline in ’21, and Palencia was acquired then too.

Part 2 coming Thursday: Young players, lessons learned and an anniversary.