With a couple poaches over the past few weeks, the Chicago Cubs have two critical roles in the organization to fill. First, Assistant GM Jared Banner left to take the General Manager job with the Orioles, and that is a spot the Cubs currently still have open. It isn’t a singular role, though, as the Cubs have multiple Assistant GMs (Garrett Chiado, Ehsan Bokhari), so they don’t HAVE to act quickly to get someone in place. Indeed, it can be held open for promotions if the Cubs need to give someone a bump to retain them.
Funny thing about that? The Cubs had planned to fill the AGM spot by promoting farm director Jason Kanzler to the role, per Meghan Montemurro. Exactly the kind of bump you see for a rising star the organization wants to keep … like when the Cubs bumped Banner from farm director to AGM, which led to Kanzler entering the farm director role in the first place.
But ope! Kanzler was picked off by the Mariners to be their new manager. So much for that repeat plan!
Unlike AGM, though, the farm director role – Director of Player Development, officially, but often called “farm director” because it’s basically the person in charge of the farm system – is one you have to have filled. Someone has to be the boss of player development, and the Cubs have filled that void quickly:
Ben Martin, a major-league coach who worked closely with Alex Bregman, is now the Cubs’ farm director after the Mariners’ outside-the-box decision to hire Jason Kanzler as their new manager. t.co/ZVEXBel8vj
— Patrick Mooney (@PJ_Mooney) November 11, 2026Ben Martin, 29, worked on player development at the big league level this past season, so this is a “drop” in level, I suppose, but a major boost in responsibility. Like Kanzler, it appears Martin comes from the positional side of things, though he’ll have to work closely together with Tyler Zombro and the pitching group to continue development there, too. (The presence of Zombro as kind of the overarching “pitching guy” for scouting and player development in the organization probably meant it made all the more sense to go with Martin for the farm director role. In a way, it almost makes the most sense to have two separate heads of state for position players and for pitchers, and it feels like the Cubs have done a lot of that going back to the days of Craig Breslow.)
Carter Hawkins discussion the bump, from The Athletic:
“Ben is relatively young in age, but relatively deep in experience,” Hawkins said. “He actually started in our R&D department. He played college baseball. He’s always been willing to say ‘yes.’
“Most times, when I’m talking to a young coach, I’m like, ‘Hey, you should go coach in the Dominican Republic for a year.’ Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, sure.’ And then they decide not to do it because it’s really hard.
“He was like, ‘Heck, yeah.’ He went down there for an entire year, spent an entire year in our complex, living in our complex, learning Spanish, learning how to handle the Latin American player …. “
“When we asked him to do this major-league job, there were no questions asked,” Hawkins said. “We asked him to really attach to Bregman and help him out. He jumped right in it.
“He’s extremely smart, extremely driven, extremely willing to do what he needs to do to help the team win. When I think about a farm director, those types of qualities stand out, so I don’t think we’re going to miss a beat.”
Given that the Cubs had been planning to promote Jason Kanzler to the AGM spot when Jared Banner left, I have to assume they had also already been planning to promote Ben Martin to the farm director role. So at least they weren’t left scrambling in that regard, even with the loss of some front office talent. Ideally, you WANT to be able to keep filling these roles internally, as the organization’s depth of knowledge and experience becomes more and more institutionalized. It’s what organizations like the Brewers, Rays, and Guardians do so well, and why they survive poachings without missing a beat. No individual person is absolutely critical to the organization’s scouting and player development apparatus.
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