Jed Hoyer: Cubs Are Always Looking To Add Pitching Help, Hitting Not So Much

(CBS) While the Cubs comfortably lead the NL Central less than two months into the season and hold the best record in baseball, general manager Jed Hoyer maintained that the team will search for additional pitching help on the trade market as the summer wears on.

"Pitching in general, you kind of go through a year and you know you're going to need more pitching," Hoyer said Friday morning in an interview with Mike Mulligan and David Haugh on 670 The Score. "I think there are probably 30 teams in baseball that are going to be looking at pitching and know in order to get through the whole grind, you're going to need a lot of it. So that's an area we never stop looking for. We know if something's going to happen, if that leads us to needing additional starters, needing additional bullpen arms, I'm sure we're going to end up acquiring pitching not only at the (July 31) deadline, but last year we acquire some pitching in August as well with guys like (Trevor) Cahill and (Fernando) Rodney. That's really an area we never have an ability to stop focusing on."

Hoyer indicated the Cubs aren't inclined to pursue the addition of any more hitting, even with the season-long loss of Kyle Schwarber and a recent slump that saw the offense scuffle for a bit.

"I would never say we would never go outside the organization, but I don't think that's our focus right now," Hoyer said. "When you look at that streak, a couple things I thought stuck out to me, first of all, the first thing was we really got away from our approach. I think what we've done really well is grind out at-bats, draw walks, get starting pitchers out of the game. We sort of stopped doing that for a week or so. We got a little bit aggressive, and we had some starting pitchers going into the eighth inning against us, even in a couple cases into the ninth inning against us. That's not really who we are. It's going to happen from time to time, but it sort of happened pretty consistently for almost a week."

Listen to Hoyer's full interview below.