More Cubs observations
Well. I really didn’t expect to get to this point. The Cubs are one of the last four teams still playing baseball in 2015. There’s plenty of coverage out there on the team, and I’ll try not to repeat it. I’ll merely applaud manager Joe Maddon for the job he’s done with a below-average defense, a really scary bullpen, and-here’s the key-only two high-level starting pitchers. Having mentioned that key, I will now predict what the main discussion topic will be if the Cubs don’t prevail against the Mets.
One of the kind-of-arbitrary limits that baseball teams must deal with is the interleague trading deadline, which is at the end of July. Once August begins, you can move a player from one league to the other only if that player clears waivers, a process in which other teams in the originating league can claim the player. I think I’m done with that quasi-explanation, so you can wake up now. The point is, at the end of July, teams that think they can make a push for the playoffs make deals to make themselves better right now, generally by giving up their top upcoming prospects and/or getting a player who would be a free agent at the end of the season. This approach worked like a charm for two American League teams, Toronto and Texas, who got players that took them from out of the playoffs in July to in the playoffs at the end, at the expense of Los Angeles/Anaheim and Minnesota, who went from in to out. The Mets also picked up free-agent-to-be Yoenis Cespedes, who immediately became the team’s biggest offensive threat.
The Cubs, however, did very little at the trading deadline. Under the ownership and management in place for the last few years, the Cubs have completely rebuilt their organization, which is now stuffed to the gills with young talent. Despite this, the Cubs made only two minor deals, for pitchers who are not even on the playoff roster (although that could change shortly, as the Cubs figure out how to replace injured shortstop Addison Russell). I believe that the Cubs could easily have outbid Kansas City for pitcher Johnny Cueto, who this week won for the Royals the game that advanced them past the Houston Astros. Now, the Cubs have a huge dropoff in starting pitching after John Lester and Jake Arrieta, and the Mets have at least three starters who are good enough to win in the playoffs.
I’m not going to second-guess the decision to back off from splashy trades. I am merely saying that this second-guessing will be done by others if the Cubs don’t go any farther. Here’s an historic example of a trade that worked, but didn’t. In 1987 the Detroit Tigers, having worn down somewhat after their 1984 World Series win, made deadline deals that got them back into the playoffs, but they lost in the first round to the eventual champions, the Minnesota Twins. One of the deals got the Tigers pitcher Doyle Alexander, who won a lot of games down the stretch but was getting to the end of his career. To get Alexander, the Tigers swapped a pitching prospect to Atlanta. His name is John Smoltz. He was a key to the Braves’ pitching dominance in the 1990s and beyond (during which time the Tigers mostly languished), and he recently entered the Hall of Fame.
Back to 2015. In late July, the Cubs were a few games over .500, clearly improved over what the team had been in recent years, having fun, showing that the first few young players from the new regime were quite good, and at least flirting with the outer reaches of playoff contention. For me, at least, what seemed like a reality check came in a series at home against the Phillies, who had the worst record in all of baseball. The Cubs lost all three games, with one of them being the first no-hitter thrown against the Cubs in almost 50 years (it was pitched by Cole Hamels, one of the last holdovers from Philly’s championship in 2008, and he was almost immediately traded to Texas for the Rangers’ playoff run). At that time, I saw the Cubs as still a work in progress. I doubt that management was affected by a single series; statements over the past several months by execs Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer suggested that the real push to become a contender would be in the upcoming offseason, when free agents would be pursued to fill gaps such as the ones in the starting rotation. (Some of the players who boosted teams like Toronto and Texas will be on the market then, and could be signed with only money, rather than acquired in trades for Cubs prospects.) It’s not that Theo & Jed wanted the Cubs to miss the playoffs; they apparently just didn’t expect the team to go this far, this soon.
In the abstract, it’s fine that the team has been rebuilt so well, with the expectation that it will be a championship contender for the next several years. I, however, have seen plenty of teams that were good on paper and had nothing to show for it at year’s end. Never mind the Cubs teams of the past, just look at this year’s Washington Nationals, maybe the best on-paper team in the National League at the start of this season. The Nats completely flamed out in the second half and missed the playoffs by a mile.
There seem to be two attitudes within Cubs fandom. The first is typified by the following sentiment: “Gosh, it’s great that the young players are getting playoff experience, just think how this will help them in the coming years, when they’ll really have a chance to win.” The second can be expressed more succinctly: “Win the whole thing now.” If the Cubs get past the Mets, I suspect that Cubs fans will be shifting more quickly from the first attitude to the second.