Everyone can stop pretending that Jed and Carter are good at this

For the second straight year, The Athletic charged Tyler Kepner with calling around to every front office in baseball with one simple question. "Can you name the five other front offices that you think do the best job?"

For the second straight year 20 of baseball's 30 front offices got at least one vote.

For the second straight year, the Cubs got zero.

Maybe all of the teams are jealous of the incredible job that the front office led by President of Baseball Nonsense Jed Hoyer and Assistant Piss Boy to the President of Baseball Nonsense, Carter Hawkins, and that jealousy led every other front office to exclude the Cubs from their list.

Or--here's a stretch--maybe the front office responsible for zero playoff games since they took over are just obviously bad at their jobs.

The Nationals are 269-406 since Jed took over the Cubs, and they got a vote.

The Cubs were lumped in with such luminaries as the Pirates, Rockies, Angels, Marlins and...gasp! the Cardinals.

Don't these other front offices know about all of the incredible prospects the Cubs have? Have they never read one of Sahadev's 37,000 word articles on the wonders of the Cubs' vaunted pitch lab? Good god, man, have they never heard that Carter went to VANDERBILT?

But most confounding of all, is that while the Cubs haven't won a playoff game in eight years, have been outscored 37-10 in their eight postseason games since they won the 2017 NLDS in Washington, and have only scored more than one run in one of their last seven postseason games, the Cubs have done the most prestigious thing in baseball THREE STRAIGHT YEARS!

Cue the commemorative flag:

Screw those voters! They wouldn't know a competent front office if it gave two year deals to Tucker Barnhart and Trey Mancini right in their faces!

Don't they know that when the D'bags went to the World Series two years ago, that they won just one more regular season game than the Cubs did? Why, the Cubs were basically pennant winners by proxy!

Tom Ricketts considered handing out rings at last year's opening day, but the Cracker Jack guys never got back to him with a quote.

You can literally hear Steve's brain finally tell him, "Harry's not kidding about how pissed he still is at Cracker Jack for stiffing him when he was an orphan growing up in St. Louis."

Honestly, if those so-called voters didn't vote for the Cubs (maybe the voting took place before they amassed the largest run differential in the sport so far this year?), who did these losers vote for?

The Dodgers? What have those guys actually done? They spend all that money, and they've barely won two of the last five World Series. The Cubs, you will remember have won three of the last 138! In your face!

The Rays? They haven't made the playoffs in two years! And they only made it five years in a row before that. OK, fine, that seems pretty good.

The Brewers? What's so great about them? They've never won a World Series and they've only finished ahead of the Cubs in their division in six of the last seven years. Besides, Jed figured out how to beat them. He stole their manager last year and that worked out great.

The Guardians? Oh, so they get credit for being cheap but the Cubs get shit for it? Besides, the Cubs stole Carter away from them and he knows all of their secrets. One of these days it's gonna matter.

And clearly, one of those secrets was, "Sell high on Eli Morgan."

The Cubs don't have a terrible front office. They did manage to trade for Petecrow and they signed Shōta, and Dansby's gonna hit one of these days, right? Plus, what teams wouldn't have given Ian Happ a full no-trade clause--other than all of them, because it's just so colossally stupid. They finally did something bold and traded for Kyle Tucker and have been trying to tamp down any optimism that they might actually keep him.

But they haven't done anything to make you really shocked that nobody thinks they're all that good, or innovative, or forward thinking, or aggressive. They are risk averse to the extreme, they refuse to use the biggest advantage they have, which should be the ability to throw money at every problem. They get a lot of credit for drafting well, but even going back to the Theo days (when they actually were a top five front office) they've basically been shit when not drafting in the top 10 or 12 of the first round.

There are plenty of Cubs blogs who will tell you how wonderful these guys are, but they're all either dumb or just wish casting. The league knows these guys are nothing special, it's about time the final holdout Cubs fans finally admit it, too.

Just because you want your team to be well run doesn't make it true.

We know that, because we're also Bears fans.