Well…it happened.
There’s a baseball side of this, and there’s an emotional side of this, and then the two kind of overlap because of course they do, this is all intertwined.
The Cubs traded nine players this past month. Three of those were the three players most central to the Cub identity over this seven-year stretch (sorry, Kyle Hendricks and Willson Contreras, but you were not those three). It was a good seven-year stretch. Three division titles. Three NLCS appearances. One pennant. One World Series. The first World Series in 108 years, in fact. It got spoiled a bit—the Brewers got better than they were expected to get (we’ll have to talk through the Brewers as a model for the rebuild-period Cubs at some other time, if I don’t do that remind me to circle back on it), the Cardinals put things together just one single time and that knocked off another division title, the Brewers got better again—but you expect to have competition within your division during your championship window. 2017’s dinner for schmucks (disclaimer: I’ve never seen that movie) was not to be the norm. The competition wasn’t the problem. But we’ll get to the problem(s).
It was, again, a good seven years. It started on a cold night at Wrigley Field to open the 2015 season, with Jon Lester on the mound and toilets in short supply with the stadium under renovation. It ended yesterday, with that sickening video of Kris Bryant getting the call in the dugout in D.C. There is material for prequels, and there will be material for sequels, but this was the arc: 2015-21. Seven seasons. The last cut short a few weeks ago when they just…they just ran out of gas.
Sadness is the predominant emotion for me. I don’t know about you. I understand some of you are angry, and we’ll circle to why that’s probably justified, but my predominant emotion is sadness: Sadness for all those who loved these guys more than I did (and I did love those guys), sadness for these guys (whose lives are, understandably, a bigger part of their own lives than they are of ours), sadness for every time I look at the Cubs and those three guys, those guys who were supposed to be there forever, are gone. It had to end sometime. But it was going to be sad no matter when. I’m surprised they ripped the band-aid off like they did—it’s possible one or more will come back this offseason, but it’s not likely for any of the three individually—because I, like many, assumed they’d be too scared to do all of that to their consumers. But they did it. They did the baseball thing to do.
On the baseball side…they were good trades, on the aggregate. All eight of them, taken together, were good trades. The Cubs, as we wrote yesterday, got a steal for Anthony Rizzo. The Cubs, as we’ve written previously, got a good return for Andrew Chafin. The Cubs didn’t get the best returns for Ryan Tepera and Joc Pederson, but they had bigger fish to fry and when you’re making the number of deals Jed Hoyer was making, I’d imagine you have to concentrate your negotiating time and energy on the biggest-ticket items. Hoyer extracted a ton of value, near-term value, for Craig Kimbrel, bringing back Nick Madrigal and Codi Heuer. Madrigal is now assumed to be the middle-infield partner to Nico Hoerner into the next contention window, and you could do worse than those two up the middle. Neither will crush the ball, but each is a good contact hitter with some reason to believe contact will become more valuable as baseball tries to increase the number of hits that are not home runs (this is how they should phrase that goal, by the way—this is the element they’re missing and trying to increase). Heuer is a good bullpen arm already, and could serve a variety of purposes during this rebuild. For Jake Marisnick, the Cubs got a high-upside prospect with a lot of risk, which is everything you could ask for in return for a replacement-level outfielder, fun though he was. For Kris Bryant, the Cubs got a reasonable return that was probably the most the market would pay. For Javy Báez and Trevor Williams…this is the one I think was a bad trade, but that’s mostly because I think Williams was a lot more valuable than the throw-in he was treated as. Báez is the better player, obviously—I’m not trying to do some outsmart-myself shit here, I’m much higher than the median on Báez as a player—but Williams has a 4.33 xERA and a 4.52 FIP this year, has been worth 0.5 fWAR, and is under team control next season as well. He’s been inconsistent over his career, but in a starting pitching-starved market he could have commanded more. The Cubs got a reasonable return were it for Báez alone. It was not for Báez alone.
But again, on the whole, it was the exact trade deadline you would prescribe if looking at rosters numerically and trying to maximize your total championships. The Cubs stripped the thing down. They turned expiring assets into future value. The farm system now ranks ninth in baseball, per FanGraphs (narrowly missed passing the Giants, which is partly on the Giants for taking a big risk in not grabbing another piece), after entering the month somewhere on the bottom half of the line. The team has only two players set to earn eight figures next year—Jason Heyward and Kyle Hendricks—and only Willson Contreras and Ian Happ figure to get more than a couple million in the arbitration cycle, leaving the luxury tax payroll, as currently calculated (we’ll see what the CBA does to anything and everything), with something like $125M or $150M of space heading into the offseason. Jed Hoyer has a blank slate with which to work, and one of the richest wallets in baseball sitting in his pocket. The Cubs will be back, and this deadline has broken down a lot of obstacles to getting back. But woof. It hurts.
This does, of course, leave the Cubs in a tough spot in the immediate future. FanGraphs’s projected standings, which don’t take schedule into account and are therefore a rather direct reflection of a team’s quality, has the Cubs with the third-worst projected win percentage in baseball the rest of the way. Worse than the Rockies. Worse than the Orioles. Worse than the Tigers, Marlins, Royals, Twins, and Diamondbacks. Worse than everyone save the Pirates and Rangers, and it’s close with those two. There is hardly anything left. Just a few bones. Not even a full skeleton. These two months are going to be ugly.
Before we get to that, though, what got us here: No, this did not have to happen. It had to happen once July started the way it did, and it was heading this way for the last three years or so, but it didn’t have to happen, strictly speaking. The Cubs took a guy who averaged more than 5.0 fWAR over 2014 and ’15, Jason Heyward, and turned him into a one or two-WAR player while paying him $23M a year. The Cubs took a guy with one of the best three-year career-opening spans in baseball history, Kris Bryant, and never again got him above five fWAR. The Cubs took the 2018 MVP runner-up, Javier Báez, and watched him regress by one fWAR the next year, plummet all the way to replacement level for the 2020 season, and land now at a three-fWAR pace this year. The Cubs took a guy who broke into the league with an absurd 131 wRC+ in his contributions as a rookie, Kyle Schwarber, and never again got him to even just match that number, a number he’s now exceeded in Washington and may well exceed as a key piece of a pennant-chasing lineup in Boston. Top prospect Albert Almora wasn’t able to hit. Top prospect Addison Russell wasn’t able to hit (and was abusive, something the Cubs didn’t head off soon enough). Two of Willson Contreras’s best three years at the plate were his first two years in the league. Rizzo held up pretty well, but he had a down 2018, the year Chili Davis was the hitting coach, the year Bryant started to fizzle, a key development year for all those guys (only one of whom, Báez, took a step forward), and one wonders what would have been if even just that one decision hadn’t been made. To be fair, the Cubs do not bear responsibility for maximizing every single prospect’s potential. That would be absurd. And to be fair, players bear responsibility for their own development to some unknowable-to-me extent. But on the whole, the Cubs blew it. The Cubs had an outrageous core of young talent, and from Heyward to Almora, they blew it. They could’ve kept retooling around Bryant and Rizzo for the whole of each’s career, had down years but bounced back quickly with their massive revenue streams, but they didn’t develop their hitters once they reached the big-league level, and they catastrophically whiffed on Heyward, who was a very good baseball player in the time before he was a Chicago Cub. Some of this, perhaps a lot of it, given what an inflection point 2018 was, is the Chili Davis hiring. Some of that, and some of other things, can be tied to Joe Maddon. Some of it all, of course, can be tied to Theo Epstein. Some of it can be tied to Hoyer. Some of it can be tied to the players. Some of it can be tied to Tom Ricketts and the ownership group.
To be fair to the Ricketts family, the biggest crime they committed was crying so poor during the pandemic, and the second-biggest crime was seemingly blockading signings during the 2018-19 and 2019-20 offseasons, though to be fair again, that was partially a reaction to the signings of Heyward, Tyler Chatwood, Brandon Morrow, Yu Darvish for a long time, and Craig Kimbrel for the beginning there going so terribly, and to be even more fair, Epstein whiffed similarly at times in Boston (see: Crawford, Carl), so it might have been reasonable to say, “Hey, can you play a little moneyball around this core like you did around the core you inherited with the Red Sox? Go get us a David Ortiz and a Kevin Millar? Another Jake Arrieta like you did in 2014?” Still, the crying poor was so outrageous, such a let-them-eat-cake moment culturally, and there seemed to be some mixed messaging during those two silent offseasons, two offseasons that really stalled things out before the teardown was evidently ordered this winter—ordered due to bullshit pandemic excuses from a family that won’t open its books, just like all baseball owners won’t open their books, and then has the audacity like so many others to tell us they’re losing money during an era in which the price to buy a Major League Baseball franchise is skyrocketing. The Cubs treaded water for two straight offseasons instead of biting the bullet and retooling around the core or at least two pieces of the core, and now it hurts.
Anyway, yes, I think you can be mad at Tom Ricketts. But I think the reasonable direction for that anger should be spread around, and I want to also make clear that the Ricketts/Epstein tenure through 2017 went as perfectly as you could have asked it to go. That went so, so, so well, and we’re all very lucky 2016 worked out, and that Epstein did the hard things he had to do, willingly getting fleeced here and there, to make it as close to a sure thing as he could. This could have been so much worse, and the fact the Cubs were still division contenders if not pennant contenders in 2019 and 2020 is a testament to how well-built this franchise was over that first half of the last decade.
As far as “extending the core” goes…maybe Jed Hoyer’s bullshitting with his comments about the offers they made holding up well, but based on the Rizzo offer, he’s probably right. Rizzo’s offer looked like a bit of a lowball before the year, but as we wrote at the time, it wasn’t an outrageous lowballing, and it’s held up well as he’s scuffled this season. Given that Kris Bryant couldn’t net a top-100 prospect, it’s hard to imagine him getting more than what the Cubs presumably threw out there at times during these last seven years. (We keep making this point but we’ll make it again: Scott Boras’s feet should be held to the baseball fire for what was probably an urging from him to Bryant to not sign a big extension post-’17, though the Cubs’ service time manipulation—again attributable to Ricketts and Epstein—probably played a big role in that, I guess, so again, blame to share.) We’ll see what Báez takes, but he’s going to be near the bottom of the big-name pack in a loaded class of shortstop free agents (Carlos Correa’s better, Corey Seager’s better, Trevor Story’s been better and is younger, Marcus Semien’s older but is better), so we’ll see what he takes. Rizzo took a team-friendly but also young Rizzo-friendly deal early in his tenure. The other two either weren’t offered such a deal or declined it. Which is all to say…you want the core extended, but you don’t want to tie a substantial amount of money up in nostalgia and then have to complain about not making free agency moves and not getting enough production from the middle of the order. There’s a “can’t have it both ways” to extending the core. Or can’t have had it both ways, now.
Anyway, it’s all sad. It’s all smart in a baseball sense now, in 2021. But it didn’t have to be this way, and no, it’s not all tied to the Chili Davis hiring, but goodness that was dumb and things never did recover.
***
Putting this in a separate section, but the Cubs lost last night despite Jake Arrieta turning in what passes for a decent Arrieta start these days, lasting four innings while striking out three, walking one, and allowing one home run as the Shell of the Nationals defeated the Shell of the Cubs, 4-3. Willson Contreras smoked a double. Rafael Ortega hit a double hard. Patrick Wisdom drew a walk, drove in two, and didn’t strike out. Manuel Rodríguez hit 100 mph in relief in his debut while striking out two over a 1-2-3, fifteen-pitch eighth.
***
Around the Division:
Not a lot of big moves from the division-mates. The Cardinals did get Jon Lester, though.
Standings, and for what I think might be the last time given the number you’re about to see, FanGraphs division championship probabilities:
1. Milwaukee: 62-42, 92.5%
2. Cincinnati: 55-49, 6.6%
3. St. Louis: 52-51, 1.0%
4. Cubs: 50-55, 0.0%
5. Pittsburgh: 39-64, 0.0%
I would rather the Cubs get hot and play competitively than secure a draft slot a few spots higher, but that might be dumb, and in an objective measure, FanGraphs currently projects them to finish 74-88 and grab the eleventh pick. We’ll be keeping an eye on that, I guess.
As far as I’m concerned, the Brewers have the division wrapped up until further notice, so this portion of our notes will be focused more on them and big news for the other teams than day-to-day pitching matchups, results, and even standings.
The Diaspora:
Anthony Rizzo homered in his Yankees debut. Ryan Tepera gave up a run in a near-effective sabotage effort with the White Sox, letting Franmil Reyes go yard before allowing a smoked single and a walk and exiting before he could finish the job.
Up Next:
Game 2 with the Shell of the Nationals.
***
Whom:
Cubs vs. Washington
When:
6:05 PM Chicago Time
Where:
Our nation’s capital.
Weather:
Temperatures around eighty at gametime, wind blowing generally in an outward and leftward direction at about five miles per hour.
Starting Pitchers:
Kyle Hendricks vs. TBD (Joe Ross?)
The Opponent:
The Nats are going through it too. Still have Juan Soto, Stephen Strasburg, and Patrick Corbin, but don’t have a whole lot else right now. Farm system ranks 23rd in baseball, per FanGraphs.
Ross recently came off the IL. He’s been good at times and mediocre at times, with a 3.80 ERA but a 4.10 xERA and a 4.45 FIP.
The Numbers:
Those that have a line have the Cubs as a +104 underdog, on the aggregate, with the Nationals at -114, so implied win probability of about 47%. Over/under’s at 7½.
Cubs News:
I think a better thing to do than to list out the transactions is to just walk through the entire roster as it now stands, so here goes:
Rotation
Kyle Hendricks
Adbert Alzolay
Zach Davies
Alec Mills
Jake Arrieta
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cubs hold onto Arrieta through season’s end, now. Worth noting that evidently nobody wanted Zach Davies or his return was so small that the Cubs ran out of time. He’s having a terrible time with his control. That all said, the Cubs might shut down Alzolay at some point or spell him or others as they start getting Justin Steele and Keegan Thompson and Cory Abbott some starts. Maybe other spot starters too.
Lineup
Generally speaking, here are the starters:
C: Willson Contreras
1B: Patrick Wisdom
2B: David Bote
SS: Sergio Alcántara
3B: Matt Duffy
LF: Ian Happ
CF: Rafael Ortega
RF: Jason Heyward
Bench
And the bench is as follows:
C: Robinson Chirinos
1B: Frank Schwindel
UT: Andrew Romine
OF: Johneshwy Fargas
Bullpen
Ordered by FanGraphs projected FIP:
Codi Heuer
Manuel Rodríguez
Trevor Megill
Adam Morgan
Rex Brothers
Michael Rucker
Jake Jewell
Kyle Ryan
Dan Winkler
That might explain why Winkler didn’t move.
10-Day Injured List
Nico Hoerner
Dillon Maples
Maples is out of options, so if he returns, he has to go to the big-league roster or waivers.
60-Day Injured List – Guys Who Might Return
Rowan Wick
Austin Romine
Jonathan Holder
Wick and Romine are on rehab assignments right now, and the 40-man sits at 39, so we may see some roster crunching in the near future. I’m not sure where Holder’s at but his latest news on RotoWire is towards the return side.
60-Day Injured List – Guys Who May or May Not Return
Jose Lobaton
Kohl Stewart
Brad Wieck
Each of these guys could theoretically return, but I have no idea on that. Possible I’ve missed them being ruled out for the year.
60-Day Injured List – Out for the Year
Nick Madrigal
P.J. Higgins (I think—I think he had Tommy John surgery)
It’s worth noting here what a great return Madrigal is for Craig Kimbrel, even without Heuer attached. FanGraphs had him as the 44th-most valuable player in baseball in terms of trade value entering the deadline. That’s obscene, and demonstrates that he’s a better bet than Nico Hoerner to pan out, even if we’re more familiar with Hoerner. Nick Madrigal is, for better or worse, the new cornerstone. He’s the best future-looking player, accounting for team control and all that. Maybe he’d move around the infield, maybe he’s locked in as the second baseman from now through 2026, but he’s the surest bet to still be a Cub the next time the Cubs are any good, whether that be next year, 2023, 2024…please let it not be later than ’24 (we’ll explore the window in a post soon—not a lot else to talk about in these writeups the next two months so we shall do a whole bunch of future-looking).
40-Man Roster Guys in the Minors – Position Players
Greg Deichmann
Miguel Amaya
Christopher Morel
Alexander Canario
Deichmann and Canario, as you may have noted, are new (Chafin trade, Bryant trade, respectively). Deichmann might be up by the end of the year. Canario, probably not. Amaya hasn’t played since June due to a forearm issue and now maybe Covid? Unclear.
40-Man Roster Guys in the Minors – Pitchers
Justin Steele
Keegan Thompson
Cory Abbott
Tommy Nance
Brailyn Márquez
Alexander Vizcaíno
Anderson Espinoza
Vizcaíno (Rizzo trade) is rehabbing after missing most of the year with a shoulder impingement, and Espinoza (Marisnick trade) is in the process of throwing his first game innings since 2021 after a slew of injury troubles. He’s only 23, though, and he’s been sitting in the high 90’s with his fastball as he’s returned, which is a pretty good sign for a lottery ticket.
*
We’ll see where all these guys land during the offseason, and during the regular season with the aforementioned potential roster crunch. That’s all a matter for another time, though. Keep an eye on Hoerner’s oblique, in particular.
Cubs Thoughts:
Hendricks is pitching tonight, so that’s fun. Rough crew behind him, but so it all begins anew, eh?
