Open Letter to Cubs' Front Office: Unless You're Getting a War Chest, Don't Trade Jeff Samardzija

Dear Theo Esptein, Jed Hoyer, Jason McLeod, whoever else in the Cubs’ organization is responsible for these things:

Don’t trade Jeff Samardzija.*

(* - I don’t want to type it out 20 times, so I’m going to knock it out up here: Any mention of not wanting to trade Jeff Samardzija is with the understanding that if some team wants to absolutely pay through the nose in top-tier prospects for him that I would rethink my stance. I don’t suspect any team would.)

There are a myriad of reasons why I don’t want the Cubs to trade their best pitcher. At least one of them, the first reason I’ll mention, is a selfish one.

The Cubs have a key 2015 asset in Jeff Samardzija, and
it should take a lot to give him up.

Samardzija has been a near-daily presence in my sports fan life for about a decade now. He’s atually been part of it far longer, dating back to when he almost single-handedly defeated my high school in a state quarterfinal football game in 2002. From there he went on to Notre Dame, my favorite college football team and far and away my favorite sports team, period. After two seasons of lack of use, “The Shark” exploded onto the scene in 2005 and remained there in 2006, a first team All-American wideout in both seasons as the Irish won 19 games in that time frame. His incredible hands, penchant for making the big catch and his occasionally cocky behavior on the field (skip to 1:15 of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAh4MoQXq-g) made him one of my favorites, if not my favorite, player on those teams.

That’s what made me give an audible “WHAT?” when I was watching a Cubs game in the summer of 2006 (I vividly remember the game being at Houston and the camera being in the Cubs’ dugout at the time) and a WGN graphic came up listing Samardzija as the Cubs’ fifth-round pick in the MLB draft, which was going on during the game. I knew Samardzija was an accomplished baseball player and would be selected — it had simply never occurred to me that my team would be the team doing it. (In retrospect, given former GM Jim Hendry’s obsession with athletic ability, often at the expense of actual baseball ability, it probably shouldn’t have.)

After that, I followed, as closely as one can in short-season ball, the exploits of Samardzija as he spent the summer pitching in the Cubs’ organization, never dreaming he would ultimately choose to play for the Cubs. After all, he had an NFL future as a potential first-round pick.

It was a future that would never come to pass, as in January 2007, Samardzija made the stunning move to forgo the NFL and pitch for the Cubs. Hendry made what was at the time a seemingly insane gamble and gave Samardzija piles of money (a five-year, $10 million deal that until recently was the longest commitment ever given a player prior to playing an MLB game) to get him away from football. Of course, now it appears to have been one of Hendry’s very best moves as GM.

From a personal perspective, it was outstanding. No player in the history of sports had ever starred for my favorite sports team, Notre Dame football, and my second-favorite sports team, the Cubs. Samardzija was going to do just that.

“The Shark” made his first MLB appearance not too long after, joining the Cubs’ bullpen in mid-2008. Improbably, Samardzija was terrific in his short stint in the pen, but bounced around between the Cubs and the minors the next couple of years as he tried to make it as an MLB starter.

He exceeded expectations once he arrived as a starter in 2012, posting a solid 3.81 ERA, and was even better for most of 2013 until getting roughed up in some of his later starts, finishing with a 4.34. In 2014, he has been outstanding, notching a 2.83 ERA thus far that would be far less if not for one outlier start where Milwaukee crushed him. He’s not doing it with smoke and mirrors, either — his FIP (fielding independent pitching, purportedly a more ‘true’ indicator of a pitcher’s performance) is not much higher, at 3.06. He strikes out nearly a batter an inning and his walk rate and home run rate are at all-time lows.

Naturally, because the Cubs’ current front office is operating under a current philosophy of losing MLB games essentially on purpose and trading away anyone with any value every deadline to stock the farm system, talk has been that Samardzija will soon be on the move. It’s been reported that the Cubs are making such feeble efforts to re-sign him, barely offering him a bigger contract than the one they pissed away on Edwin Jackson, that you have to wonder why they’re even going through the motions.

My problem with trading Samardzija isn’t because I think the Cubs should pay a premium to re-sign him. There have been several reports that Samardzija wants a monster deal of five or more years at over $100 million, and I can easily understand, given the fact that this is his first season performing as a true premium-talent starter and the fact that he’s approaching 30 years old, why you wouldn’t want to make that move. But if the Cubs want to make any effort to compete in 2015 (and a friend of mine recently outlined a perfectly plausible plan under which they might have a chance to do it which I recommend reading), their best chance is keeping Jeff Samardzija for that season, barring a massive overpay by another team. Samardzija will enter his final year of arbitration next year and is likely to earn in the neighborhood of $10 million. Even if Samardzija regresses and becomes closer to the pitcher he was in 2012 and ‘13, he could easily be worth that. Even if you assume Travis Wood and Edwin Jackson will be better in 2015 than they are now, and even if you assume Jake Arrieta will continue pitching well and remaining healthy, AND even if you assume the Cubs can unearth another short-term gem as they did with Paul Maholm, Scott Feldman and Jason Hammel the last few years, the Cubs will still need at least one more starter to compete, and Samardzija fits the bill.

Again, I reiterate: if the Cubs can get someone to hand over big-time, big league ready pitching prospects, preferably more than one of them, for the services of Jeff Samardzija this July, then go for it. I don’t think that will happen. And in the absence of such an offer, the Cubs’ best chance to succeed in 2015 is to keep him. Unlike prior seasons, there is a road map for the Cubs to not be atrocious next year, and I don’t think it should be abandoned nine months before that season begins in the service of yet more lottery-ticket prospects.