The
Chicago Cubs Are a Baseball Travesty
JULY 31, 20214:33 PM
The Chicago Cubs just
completed a fire sale, shipping out star closer Craig Kimbrel and a trio of
franchise cornerstones: Anthony Rizzo, Javier Báez, and Kris Bryant, all of
whom were key contributors to the club’s 2016 World Series title. For the Cubs,
this is clearly the end of an era, but it didn’t have to be this way. One of
those moves—the trade of Bryant to the San Francisco Giants for
a pair of minor leaguers—feels particularly rotten even if it’s not surprising.
If you know anything about the Cubs and their owner, it was inevitable that it
was going to end this way.
Bryant’s major-league
career began in 2015, but not at the beginning of the season. Although he was
clearly the Cubs’ best option at third base, they held him in the minors for
two weeks. By keeping him off the big-league roster, they ensured that Bryant
wouldn’t complete his sixth full year in the bigs, the
threshold for free agency, until the end of the 2021 season. Magically, after
12 days in AAA ball, the Cubs decided Bryant was ready to hack it at the
highest level; if he’d come up one day earlier, he would’ve accumulated a
full year of service time. Bryant then won Rookie of the Year, before following
that up with an MVP season and leading the Cubs to a championship. That Bryant
later lost a grievance over the Cubs’ service-time shenanigans does
not invalidate what anyone could see. The franchise’s key decisionmakers—
former team president Theo Epstein, his successor Jed Hoyer, and most
importantly chairman Tom Ricketts—were screwing with their best player to save
money.
Since his debut
season, Bryant has been the third-most-valuable position player in
baseball, behind only Mike Trout and Mookie Betts. For the
Cubs, he was the epitome of a franchise player: He had elite numbers, a
gorgeous swing, and great rapport with the fans. He was also willing to be a
billboard for the team and the sport as a whole. The 2017 ads he did with
Rizzo—who just got dealt to the Yankees—were some of the best sports
commercials ever.
There’s nothing more
that Bryant could’ve possibly done to earn a rich, long-term contract from his
rich and successful team. But it doesn’t appear the Cubs ever got close to
offering Bryant a reasonable deal, despite him making it clear that he
was interested in staying in Chicago. And because the
Cubs also didn’t invest in keeping a great team around Bryant,
they are out of the 2021 pennant race. So, they traded Bryant to a team that’s
in contention. His last action as a Cub was to stare wistfully out at Wrigley Field from the
dugout after a loss on Thursday. Bryant likely didn’t play in
that game because the Cubs feared he might get hurt, tanking his trade value.
The player who led the Cubs to their first title in 108 years didn’t even get
one last at-bat and one last raucous ovation.
There’s nothing
inherently wrong with bad teams moving potential free agents at the trade
deadline. It’s part of the life cycle of modern sports, and the haul of
prospects the Cubs just brought in will surely help them rebuild. Bryant, too,
is a client of the famously hard-charging Scott Boras, who might have advised
him strongly against taking any deal at all. Bryant also struggled badly during
last year’s pandemic season, and he’s been good but not an absolute superstar
in 2021. At age 29, it’s unclear how many more elite seasons he has left in
him. And so, maybe when we look back at this trade five years from now we’ll
conclude that it made the Cubs better.
But even if you’re
willing to concede some or even most of that, the Bryant deal is still
incredibly bleak. To appreciate the scale of this crime against baseball, you
have to understand two things. The first is how wildly promising the Cubs were
five years ago. The second is how rich the Ricketts family is.
The baseball playoffs
can be fluky, and a title isn’t a guarantee of future success—just ask the
Kansas City Royals. But the 2016 Cubs were different. Most of the key hitters
on that team––Bryant, Rizzo, Báez, and rookie masher Kyle Schwarber among
them––were between 22 and 26 that season. The pitching staff was older, but the
Cubs still looked like a dynasty in the making.
A bunch of the Cubs’
plans went awry after 2016. Outfielder Jason Heyward forgot how to hit, and it
turned out that shortstop Addison Russell didn’t belong anywhere near a major league clubhouse.
But the Cubs still had that core group of stars, and they also had an owner
whose deep pockets could at least theoretically fix whatever problems
inevitably arose. The Ricketts family—led by Tom, the chairman––bought the team
and a few related assets for a reported $900 million in 2009. The Cubs
are now worth several billion dollars. Even apart
from that profitable investment, the Ricketts clan has long been one of the richest families in America. No team
has an excuse not to spend heavily to compete. But the Cubs really, really don’t
have an excuse.
After 2016, the Cubs’
roster did get more expensive, owing to young stars getting into their
arbitration years (after three full seasons in the majors, typically, but two in Bryant’s case) and costing a few
million dollars each instead of hundreds of thousands. The team was as high
as third in the league in payroll in 2019 (an
estimated $204 million on Opening Day), which is about where a team in the
Cubs’ position should be. Whether because the Heyward contract was
a bust or, more likely, Ricketts wanted to avoid a hefty luxury tax bill, the Cubs
never gave a long-term contract to one of their big young hitters. The Cubs’
big free-agent move in this period was a six-year, $126 million pledge to
starter Yu Darvish. They salary-dumped him to the San Diego Padres before this
season, and he’s been one of the league’s better pitchers—as usual.* By Opening
Day 2021, they’d pared their payroll to $147 million, 12th in
the league. And the Cubs are now getting what they’ve paid for: This year’s
sub.-500 outfit will make it four years in a row without a playoff victory.
While the Cubs were
sitting on their hands, their competition was investing. The Los Angeles
Dodgers in essence bought the rights to Betts, the
second-best position player alive, from the salary-shedding Boston Red Sox.
(And L.A. just added more stars right as the Cubs were
doing their house-cleaning.) In the Cubs’ same division, the Milwaukee Brewers
signed outfielder Lorenzo Cain for five years and $80 million in advance of the
2018 season and would’ve made the World Series that year if the Dodgers hadn’t
been so good. The St. Louis Cardinals traded for elite third baseman Nolan
Arenado and have left the Cubs in the dust spending-wise (though the
Rockies are helping with Arenado’s contract). Even
the Cincinnati Reds paid $64 million for Nick Castellanos, a Cubs deadline
pickup in 2019 whom Chicago did not re-sign.
For the last few
years, the National League Central franchise the Cubs have most closely
emulated is the Pittsburgh Pirates. And the Cubs should know better than
anybody that you do not want to emulate the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Ricketts has the right
to run his team how he sees fit, just as Cubs fans and everyone else have the
right to see him as a loathsome cheapskate. If one of the richest clubs in all
of sports won’t make a serious run at retaining one of the best players in
baseball—a fan favorite who came up through the team’s farm system as the No. 2
overall draft pick and brought the team glory it hadn’t seen in
generations—then something is fundamentally broken in Chicago. And it’s not
just Bryant. The Cubs treated Rizzo, an inferior but still great
player, the same way.
The Cubs finished
below .500 every year between 2010 and 2014. During that run, if you’d have
told a diehard fan that they’d make the playoffs five of the next seven years
and win a World Series, I can guarantee they would’ve taken that deal.
(Actually, if you’d have said the Cubs would’ve win a single World Series and
accomplished absolutely nothing else, they would’ve taken you up on it.) But
even so, what’s happened to the Cubs is massively disappointing, for fans and
for the sport. If they’d signed a few big free agents to fill lineup or
rotation holes during Bryant’s run on the North Side, not keeping him around
would feel more understandable. If they’d found a way to hang onto Báez, or
extended Rizzo earlier in his career, it might have softened the blow. But the
Cubs did not do any of those things, and now a potential golden era has thudded
to an end.
After trading Bryant,
Rizzo, and Báez, Ricketts issued a statement to “personally
thank” the players for their “critical role” in recent seasons. He didn’t take
questions, but if he ever does again, someone should ask him why any Cubs fan
should believe he’ll ever spend to support a winning team—whenever it is that
he has one next.
Correction, July 31, 2021: This article
originally misstated that the Cubs didn’t add any big-ticket free agents after
the 2019 season. They added star pitcher Yu Darvish to a big contract, before
dropping him after one season.
