Ok this is the thing. Every trade was for pitching. Why is that? Because they suck at targeting and development
I've already in detail said this in the prospect thread so I wont go super in depth here but people need to stop saying this because it just ain't true. Are they a top 5 organization at targeting pitching and finding gems? No but to say they suck is pretty ignorant of the situation. The thing people gotta understand is you don't generally pull top 100 pitchers from outside the first 20 or so picks. There's a little leeway there with high schooler arms sometimes going in the sandwich round and becoming a thing but those players are typically getting higher value slot bonuses than their pick would otherwise indicate.
If you look at the top 10 or so RH and LH pitching prospects the lowest draft bonus I believe was Kopech at $1.5 mil. I didn't do a super exhaustive search so I may have missed someone but suffice to say the vast majority of arms you will see on those type of list got crazy bonuses because most pitchers can't just develop crazy stuff and the ones who have it to start with already get the bonuses. Anyways since 2014 which was the last year I had easy access to bonus data the cubs had 4 pitchers who got $1.5 mil or over and they were Cease, Lange, Little and Jensen.
That's where the cubs issue with pitching is. They haven't invested resources into it. The 2 years they did were 2014 and 2017. In 2017 they came away with several guys who will make the majors. Biggest issue there was Little and Lange not living up to expectations at least thus far but then other than Nate Pearson there weren't really anyone they "missed" on big time. 2014 was the Cease/Sands/Steele draft and while Sands was an out right bust Cease and Steele have been decent picks.
Going forward, I really don't see their approach changing that much from what we've seen save for 1 point. The reason for this is hitting is just so much more reliable. I mean just go through and look at how strong their picks for hitters high in the draft have been. Almora is probably the worst and he's still a useful MLB player. The one point I do think that will be different though is I think we're going to see them go after a lot more guys like Jensen who have good stuff but are flawed in some way. The idea there being if you can fix his third pitch with their pitch lab then the rest of his stuff is good enough. Additionally, another thing we've seen that I think will pay dividends is them targeting late blooming high school arms and paying them like 3rd round money later in the draft. They've done that with Kohl Franklin and DJ Herz the past two years and it turn out to be a really smart play given they have a bigger scouting department than a lot of other teams.
