Post by Troy (Cubs) (LM) on Nov 11, 2013 20:19:02 GMT
Chicago Tribune, 11/11/13
It's been a crazy start to the tenure of newly appointed General Manager Troy Cavell. Taking over for the incumbent Theo Epstein, who was seen leaving Wrigley after the final game of the season in a gorilla suit. Epstein's resignation left Cubs fans in disgust, and Red Sox fans thinking it was 2004 all over again. The Cubs ownership moved on swiftly, naming Cavell the GM just hours after the incident. I recently sat down with the young, savvy, guru for the Cubs, and asked him about his current progress on the job.
You've made numerous amounts of trades since taking the reins here in Chicago, what made you go into full rebuild mode, and trade off potential cornerstone pieces in Rizzo, Castro, and Samardzija?
- You can call it "full rebuild mode", but this is not an extensive rebuild plan. The rebuild will be quick, swift, and when it's said and done, we are going to have a championship caliber team out on the field. Very shortly, at that. When I took over the team, we had 3 really good players in Rizzo, Castro, and Jeff. They were players that we definitely could have built around, but ultimately we felt the best way to win a championship was to add 7-8 prospects in their place. We now have 7-8 potential stars on our hands after the trades, and they are not far from being up here either.
The Major League Roster is barren, just a few recognizable names, how do you foresee the roster shaping up?
- We just acquired a consummate pro in Nick Markakis, we brought back Ryan Sweeney, Schierholtz will be roaming in the outfield with them. We have a merging star in Rendon manning 2B, he can play 3B too. Barneys glove is going to be in their somewhere too. We like what we have. We will certainly be players in the Free Agency market. We have some holes to fill, we aren't oblivious to that. We have just as much money to spend as anyone else, so yeah, we will be bringing in some quality major leaguers. I'd expect a major focus on starting pitching, that's our number 1 target. No doubt.
The Free Agent market is rather deep, you've been connected to almost every top free agent available, can you comment on that?
- Yeah, definitely. We like a number of guys. Some more so than others. We aren't looking to dish out big money for guys on the other side of 30. If we see an opportunity to get a player we like, we certainly aren't going to hold back.
Ellsbury? Tanaka? Cano?
- (Smiles) Great players. No comment.
I'd like to focus on the draft, you had a ton picks, who are you really excited about?
- We like all of them. We are excited for every individual player we drafted. If not, we wouldn't have drafted them.
Who can help the quickest?
- We draft our players based on who can be the best overall major leaguer, not who can get to the club to help the quickest. That being said, we have some elite front line college pitching that is rather close. Appel, Gray, Gonzales, Shipley. We are excited for our future.
It's opening day 2015, what's the roster look like?
- Ideally, we'd have these players helping us win;
1B: Maikel Franco
1B: Dan Vogelbomb
2B: Anthony Rendon
2B: Arismendy Alcantara
SS: Javier Baez
SS: Chris Owings
SS: JP Crawford
3B: Matt Davidson
SP: Mark Appel
SP: Noah Syndergaard
SP: Jonathan Gray
SP: Aroyds Vizcaino
SP: Braden Shipley
SP: Hunter Harvey
SP: CJ Edwards
Well, Troy, thanks for your time, the future looks good in Chicago. I look forward to our next interview before the season starts.
- No problem. Anytime. Thank you.
