Did the Chicago Cubs Overpay for Craig Counsell?

The Chicago Cubs made Craig Counsell the highest-paid manager in baseball. But is he worth it?

The Chicago Cubs shocked the baseball world on Monday by hiring Craig Counsell to be their new manager, stealing him away from the Milwaukee Brewers.

Even more shocking were the terms of the deal itself.

The Cubs handed Counsell a five-year, $40 million contract, making him the highest-paid manager in MLB by a considerable margin.

At $8 million a year, Counsell is earning nearly twice as much as the previous highest-paid manager. That was Terry Francona, who just retired from a Hall of Fame-worthy career that included two World Series titles and three pennants.

With all due respect to Counsell, he isn't nearly as accomplished as Francona was. Naturally, that begs the question: is Counsell worth all that dough?

Before Craig Counsell agreed to an $8M-a-year salary with the Chicago Cubs, the highest-paid manager in MLB was $4.5M. For context, other sports:

NFL: Bill Belichick, $20M
NBA: Monty Williams, $13.05M
CFB: Nick Saban, $11.4M
CBB: John Calipari, $8.5M
NHL: Todd McLellan, $5M

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) November 6, 2023

After all, $8 million a year is a good chunk of change to spend on a manager. For that amount of money, you can typically buy close to one WAR in free agency, which would get you a pretty decent ballplayer. 

On the one hand, Counsell had a lot of regular-season success with the Brewers. In his nine seasons at the helm, Milwaukee compiled a 707-625 record (.531 winning percentage), made five playoff appearances and won three division titles. Excluding the Covid-shortened 2020 campaign, the Brewers had a winning record in each of their last six full seasons with Counsell.

That's consistency!

On the other hand, regular-season wins are nice, but the game is played to win championships.

In that regard, Counsell falls woefully short.

Milwaukee went just 7-12 in playoff games under his watch, and six of those wins came in 2018. He's just 1-8 in the last four postseasons and has lost his last five playoff series.

That implies that while he is good enough to get his teams to October, he may not have what it takes to get them over the hump. The Brewers were one win away from reaching the World Series in 2018, but couldn't finish the job.

Then again, the MLB playoffs are inherently random, especially now that the postseason field has been expanded.

Maybe Counsell just needs more time.

It's difficult to quantify how many wins a manager adds or subtracts from his team's ledger, but one way to evaluate a skipper is by comparing his team's actual record to its Pythagorean record, which is an estimate of how many games a team would be expected to win based on the number of runs it scored and allowed.

In Counsell's case, Milwaukee's real record was better than its expected record in each of the past seven seasons, suggesting that he helped his teams overachieve to some degree.

Now that there are three Wild Card spots in each league, every win matters.

Chicago learned that the hard way in 2023, missing the playoffs by one game after underperforming their Pythagorean record by seven wins. Perhaps if Counsell had been in charge, things would have turned out differently.