Woof.
This stinks.
Kyle Schwarber—the guy who blasted those home runs against the Pirates and Cardinals in the 2015 playoffs, the guy who sparked that 10th-inning rally in Game 7 in 2016, the guy who told Theo Epstein in a pre-draft interview in ’14: “It really fucking pisses me off when people say I can’t catch” and seemingly brought that mentality to everything he did before and after he said those words—has been non-tendered.
What does this mean? At its most basic level, it means the Cubs aren’t willing to pay Schwarber the roughly $7M they would have had to pay him through arbitration. At its next-most basic level, it means the Cubs couldn’t find someone willing to give them cash or talent they deemed worth the trade. But it means more than that, too.
It means, barring the Cubs signing Schwarber back off the open market—which is possible, but not likely—that Schwarber is gone. Schwarber, who averaged 2.9 fWAR over 2018 and ’19; Schwarber, who posted that 131 wRC+ over 273 plate appearances in 2015; Schwarber, who was always the counterpoint to any arguments about the Cubs needing more urgency in the last seasons of the Joe Maddon era. A bulldog. A competitor. Tough, classy, dedicated. Cut.
It means more than this, though, too. It means the Cubs’ front office is either 1) extremely low on Schwarber, 2) under pressure to transform the roster for the sake of transformation, or 3) under pressure to dramatically cut costs. This third appears the most likely, and while the Cubs aren’t alone in the pandemic market (the Twins cut Eddie Rosario, there were a few other surprises), it’s disappointing nonetheless. Are any of us in a place to blame the Ricketts family? Not really. They’ve spent a ton of money on payroll since buying the team. But at the same time, it’s likely they have the money, and the question exists of why one would own a baseball team of all the assets if $7M was a price too high for making that team both better on the field and a better product to sell to fans.
And it means still more than that. Schwarber wasn’t the only former star prospect cut. Albert Almora’s gone too. Almora, unlike Schwarber, never did produce offensively, but given his lower ceiling on that front, it’s fine to lump them together in the ranks of Cubs hitters who didn’t pan out as expected. Bleacher Nation had a good point on Twitter yesterday, saying the Cubs “failed many of their hitters” over the years since 2015 (I’d argue it was since 2016 or ’17, but that’s beside the point). The firing of John Mallee remains puzzling, and the Chili Davis hiring may have been the stupidest thing Theo Epstein ever did (and for how great his career has been, I’d guess he’d admit he’s done plenty of stupid things), but it’s hard to know what else went wrong, and it seems likely it was even more than hitting coaches. The Cubs failed to develop their guys.
In 2016, Kris Bryant ranked ninth among qualified hitters in wRC+. Anthony Rizzo was eleventh. In 2017, Bryant was again ninth, but Rizzo dropped to 26th, with no other Cubs in the top thirty. In 2018, Javy Báez was the best offensive Cub, coming in at 24th. In 2019, Rizzo was back to 13th, with Bryant 24th. In 2020, Ian Happ was the best, at 34th. All of this together means since 2017 the Cubs have had just one top-20 hitter on their roster: Anthony Rizzo in 2019. They’ve had just three—one per year, on average—in the top 25. After the barrage of prospect debuts (Bryant was 17th in wRC+ in 2015—his rookie year—and Rizzo was 11th that season) and one MVP, from the 103-win team in 2016, the Cubs failed to produce even one top-ten hitter over three seasons. Over that stretch, 15 or 16 teams produced at least one top-ten hitter (depending how you count Manny Machado in 2018). The Cubs managed zero. And only one was particularly close.
Obviously, the World Series is appreciated, and winning a World Series is hard—requiring luck even if paired excellence. If a team had the best record in baseball for six straight years, winning just one or two World Series would be the reasonable expectation. But looking at the talent the Cubs developed in the minors, it’s baffling that they stopped winning their mediocre division for those two years. It’s baffling that they dropped, as a team, from fourth in wRC+ in 2016 to eighth in 2017 to eleventh in 2018 and 2019 to 21st in the abbreviated 2020. And now, they wave the white flag with one of the three formerly promising hitters around whom we thought they were building a dynasty. They choose not to even try to salvage a guy who posted a 120 wRC+ in 2019, swatting 38 home runs. They choose to…start over?
This is one of the hardest parts about this Schwarber thing. It’s unclear what the plan is. Sure, it’s still being figured out, and these things take time, but it’s unclear where exactly on the trajectory the Cubs are, or what trajectory they’re even on. Enough foreboding was done that we weren’t surprised by Schwarber’s non-tender, but we should have been. FanGraphs has him projected for 2.3 fWAR in 2021. That’s a lot of fWAR, and would only require his production landing somewhere on the bottom half of where it’s been for the last three years. And yet the Cubs didn’t want him at a fairly below-market-level price.
And so, we cannot see what the Cubs are doing, and we begin to see what they’ve done, which is fumble away an historic opportunity they built for themselves. We don’t know what comes next. We don’t know when the next year is the Cubs are trying to contend, or if they’re even putting a number out there, as opposed to just cutting costs this year and considering winning later. All we know is that whatever the plan is, Kyle Schwarber is not, at the moment, part of it. And it stinks.
