For two years, the narrative around the Cubs has been a failure to exhibit the proper urgency. Joe Maddon’s loose nature, which worked so well with a young, inexperienced team in 2015 and 2016, failed to yield success with a young, experienced team the next three years, as slow starts in 2017 and ’18 coupled with collapses in 2018 and ’19 brought frustration to all-time highs in the Theo Epstein era. Before last season, the word was that Maddon was under pressure to go for the jugular more often on getaway days. By the end of last season, he’d become a distraction, and he and the Cubs parted ways.
David Ross doesn’t represent a strategic shift from Maddon. By hiring someone from in-house, the Cubs signaled that strategy and approach wasn’t necessarily the problem. In terms of fun, Ross isn’t expected to deviate from Maddon either—the Cubs didn’t hire Tony La Russa.
Urgency, though, is expected to differ. Ross had a reputation as a player for knowing the proper times for various emotions—in contrast to Maddon’s perpetual relaxation, Ross has been known to be confrontational and aggressive in certain situations, and to take a more active approach with young players.
It’s easy to overstate the importance of a manager, and the overarching messages from the Cubs’ activity this past offseason seem to be that 1) the luxury tax weighs heavy on the Ricketts family consciousness and 2) Epstein doesn’t think anything’s actually broken with the Cubs approach. Still, if hiring Ross was at least in part an attempt to build a more intense psychology, a sixty-game season giving way to a three-game series to start the postseason is the exact kind of setting where that intensity would theoretically be desired.
Whether the Cubs succeed or fail this year will have a lot more to do with the construction of the roster than anything David Ross says or does. The narrative will tell us otherwise, and that’s probably part of the point for the Cubs—Ross provides a narrative shield from the stuff that matters more. But psychology in baseball is not entirely meaningless, and if the Cubs do things like come out with an aggressive lineup Sunday, piece together a rally or two should they trail, and show some antagonism towards arguably their current biggest rival, it’ll be a sign that Ross’s approach really is different from that of his friend and predecessor.
