Two years before the Cubs won the World Series, general manager Jed Hoyer said the team’s front-office executives would sit in their box at Wrigley Field and watch the team’s minor league teams on TVs as much, if not more, than what was on the field in front of them.
“You know that on a day-to-day basis, determining whether your future is going to be bright or not is based in large part on what's happening 1,500 miles away,” Hoyer said this spring. “It was exciting on a night where (Kris) Bryant, (Addison) Russell and (Kyle) Schwarber and those guys went off, but you had to balance that with the fact that the real product is the major league team.