Jed Hoyer's biggest regret? Letting Kyle Schwarber walk. Now an MVP candidate, he continues to haunt his former team with big home runs.
When Jed Hoyer took over as the Chicago Cubs' president of baseball operations in November of 2020, his first big decision was what to do with Kyle Schwarber.
Schwarber was coming off a subpar 2020 season in which he slashed .188/.308/.393 with 11 home runs, 24 RBI, and 66 strikeouts across 59 games. He posted only a 0.1 WAR that season and continued to carry high strikeout and whiff rates.
But the year before that, he posted elite power numbers at the top of the Cubs lineup. He batted .250 with 38 home runs, 29 doubles, and 92 RBI across 155 games and finished with a 2.1 WAR during the 2019 season.
Unfortunately, Schwarber is the one that got away.
Hoyer eventually decided not to tender Schwarber in December 2020, a decision that has proven to be the front office's biggest mistake in recent memory. The slugger signed just a one-year, $10 million deal with the Nationals just one month later and has now turned into one of the best hitters in the game.
All it would have taken was $8 million to $10 million to bring him back. Instead, Hoyer let him walk, and Schwarber continues to make the Cubs pay for not re-signing him more than six years ago.
In the Cubs’ 13-7 loss to the Phillies on Monday evening, Schwarber launched two home runs against his former team. He hit a 414-foot home run in the bottom of the first inning and then followed that at-bat with a 417-foot home run in the third inning.
Schwarber’s 2-for-3 night with two home runs, three RBI, and four runs scored just reminds Cubs fans how big a mistake it was to let him go back in 2020.
Since leaving Chicago, the three-time All-Star has become an MVP-caliber player. He finished second in the National League MVP voting last year and has hit over 45 home runs in three of his past four years.
While the Cubs will always regret letting Schwarber walk for nothing, the 33-year-old has been thriving with the Phillies over the past five seasons. To him, it’s no longer weird facing his former teams since so much time has passed.
“It’s been long enough,” Schwarber told reporters in Philadelphia. “I had a lot of great memories there. That’s where I started my career, won a World Series there. That’s where it all started for me, and I was lucky enough to come up with a lot of great people in that organization, who taught me how to be a big leaguer and taught me how to win and taught me how to care about winning and care about the right things. It’s kind of like the foundation aspect of it."
It has been a long time since Schwarber donned the Cubbie blue. He has played for three different teams since playing for the Cubs and hasn’t played for the North Siders since October 2, 2020.
However, letting him go was easily Hoyer’s biggest mistake.