It was said of Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer, when they were the tandem running the Cubs from 2012-20, that they worked together well and often thought the same way. They’d been together for several years in Boston, too.
Since Hoyer has taken over as Cubs President of Baseball Operations, we’re finding out that the two men have very different approaches to leading a baseball ops department. Whether this winds up in another Cubs World Series championship remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: Hoyer doesn’t have much room for sentiment, trading away many popular players from the 2016 team (the right thing to do, in my view) and not signing Willson Contreras to an extension, purportedly because he didn’t feel Contreras was a good fit for his team’s pitching/catching philosophy.