A systematic failure
The Cubs tweaked the roster just enough to ensure a swift playoff exit.
At the deadline, the Cubs were very busy accomplishing very little.
They made four trades and they found a replacement for Ben Brown in the starting rotation, they upgraded the Vidal Brujan spot on the bench, they upgraded the Chris Flexen spot at the back of the bullpen and they added a lefty to the bullpen to take some of the burden off of the rapidly declining Drew Pomeranz.
All of that is fine. They incrementally improved the roster. And yet, they fell farther and farther behind the real teams in the National League. The Mets and Padres added to already good bullpens and can effectively end games after six innings if they have a lead. The Phillies found a closer and filled the one big hole they have in a roster already top to bottom better than the Cubs. The Dodgers are still just sitting back and waiting to see if their pitching cavalry can arrive at the last minute from their hiding places on the 60-day injured list.
The Cubs have had a good season so far. They have the second best record in the National League, and they feature a deep lineup, a solid bullpen that is starting to throw a tire, and an ace-less starting pitching staff fully in the midst of coming apart at the seams.
They are a team built to have a good record in the regular season. And to get bounced out of the playoffs as quickly as possible. They had some real needs at this deadline that aren't about the last 54 games of the season, but about the ones that come after.
And they didn't address any of them.
Playoff series are won by teams with a horse of an ace and a shutdown back-of-the-bullpen. The Cubs had neither before deadline day, and they still don't.
But they have such a good offense, it'll all be fine! Right?
When they are hitting well, the Cubs have a formidable top four in their lineup of Michael Busch, Kyle Tucker, Seiya Suzuki and Petecrow Armstrong, and then...not much.
We've detailed how useless Ian Happ has been since mid-May.
Dansby Swanson is famously struggling with runners in scoring position (.174/.230/.266 with 40 strikeouts in 109 at bats. Forty!), but other than May, when he hit .293/.360/.495, he's hitting .234/.299/.381 with 97 strikeouts in 312 at bats. So, to his credit, his struggles aren't limited to having runners on.
Carson Kelly's OPS is .860 and Boog won't shut up about it, but since May 6 he's slashing .234/.307/.380/.687 with five homers and 13 RBI, in 171 at bats. That's in 51 games.
That's why they needed to trade for a bat. Kelly at catcher and Dansby at short is fine, but you can't rely on them for offense, and so your left fielder being useless is a pretty big deal.
I don't think adding Willi Castro is going to do anything other than give Craig Counsell a better bench option than he's had. One that history says he probably won't use all that much. Certainly not in a role that takes a meaningful amount of at bats away from Happ. Even as mid as Willi is (103 OPS+) he is a solid upgrade over Ian. His .245/.335/.407 is unspectacular, but he's out hitting Happ by 17 points, out on basing him by 10 and outslugging him by 28.
See how easy it would have been to trade for an upgrade over the shit offense Happ's given you? And Jed didn't do it.
Tucker's going to get pitched around massively in the playoffs (both games of it). As streaky as Busch, Seiya and Petecrow are, unless one of them is on a heater, this is going to look like every playoff series the Cubs have been in since the 2017 NLCS.
The guys Jed did trade for are all solid players.
Soroka was an All-Star for the 2019 Barves and won 13 games with a 2.68 ERA. But he missed basically three full seasons with a blown out Achilles tendon (He tore it in his third start of 2020 and missed all of 2021 and 2022). He was 0-10 with a 4.74 ERA for the all-time horse shit White Sox last season, but was very good in his 16 bullpen appearances. I have a thought about that. If you pitched near the back of the White Sox bullpen last year you had a huge advantage. The other team was tired from running around the bases so much earlier in the game, and bored by the time you got to them. Soroka made 16 starts this year for the Nationals where he leads the NL in hit batsmen with 14. Fourteen is a fucking lot.
I'm sure he'll get the Ben Brown starts now and he'll be an upgrade because who wouldn't be? But this needed to be the lesser of the two starting rotation moves the Cubs made and it was the only one. This isn't enough.
This is like the 1984 Cubs trading for Rick Sutcliffe, Dennis Eckersley and Scott Sanderson, but actually only trading for Sanderson, and telling the Indians and Red Sox the asking prices were too high for the good ones.
Andrew Kittredge was fine for the Cardinals last year and he's been fine for the Orioles this year. He missed April after he got one of his knees cleaned out and struggled a bit in his 17 May and June appearances. He was very good in July with a 1.88 ERA in 14 innings allowing just seven hits and two walks against 14 strikeouts. He'll probably share seventh inning duties with Ryan Brasier and this should keep the Cubs from having to make Brad Keller pitch two innings like he did Thursday in Milwaukee. This move is fine.
Though, I wondered why my first reaction was that Kittredge sucked. Well, it's because the Cubs lit him up last year. He had a 7.20 ERA against them in five appearances and gave up three homers in five innings. That's why.
Taylor Rogers is the hard throwing lefty Rogers twin. His brother Tyler is the submarining righty. They are no relation to the Orioles Trevor Rogers or to either Kenny Rogers, the one who walked Andruw Jones with the bass loaded in game six of the 1999 NLCS and lost the pennant, or the country singer with the tasty roasted chicken.
Taylor has been one of the best lefty relievers in baseball for a decade. The only season he struggled was 2022 in Milwaukee (pitching for Craig Counsell) when he came over from the Padres in the Josh Hader trade. He'll take some of the high leverage lefty appearances from Pomeranz (who looks pretty cooked these days), and that's fine. Except Rogers' walk rate is uncharacteristically high this season at 5.2, the worst of his career by a lot (his career rate is just 2.8). Again, the Cubs needed to add a lefty to the pen and Taylor's a pretty good one.
But...that's all they did. They made improvements in Soroka over Brown, Kittredge over Ryan Pressly (who was mercifully released last night...I hope Ian Happ wrote him a scouting report about how to find the airport), Rogers over Pomeranz, and Castro over Brujan.
But the Mets added Gregory Soto, Ryan Helsley and Taylor's brother Tyler to Edwin Diaz in their bullpen. The Padres added Mason Miller who is an awesome force at the end of games. The one issue with Miller is that with his injury history, the A's didn't ask him to pitch on back to back days. The Padres don't care about that limitation. They kept their other All-Star closer, Robert Suarez so they have two. The Phillies added Jhoan Duran to solve their leaky ninth inning.
And so, you can see where the Cubs got better and still lost ground to all three of those teams.
They also saw up close in Milwaukee this week that while they have a more talented team than the Brewers, they really can't pitch with them. And so they closed that gap by...nothing, basically.
But at least Jed held on to all of his impressive collection of middling prospects. The Cubs' system is ranked sixth by Keith Law of the The Athletic and similarly by MLB.com and ESPN and Better Homes and Gardens, or whatever. But they are there because of their depth of prospects, not because of their impact.
And they traded mostly none of that depth.
Jed told the media after the deadline last night, ""Obviously we didn't acquire (one of the top controllable starters), and no one else did either. ... In the end, the asking price on those guys would have been so detrimental to our future."
We saw this coming, didn't we? It started this spring when Jed kept going on and on about how he wouldn't repeat the mistake of the World Series era Cubs (by winning a World Series?), who in his mind mortgaged their future with trades to try to keep the window open.
But it was all bullshit. We went over this earlier this year. The best prospects the Cubs traded over those years were Gleyber Torres who had six solid and one really good year for the Yankees, but who got too big to play shortstop, and not inconsequentially he was traded for Aroldis Chapman who ended up being a one man bullpen in the 2016 playoffs...so it was worth it. And the other was Dylan Cease who has one really good season (2022), one pretty good season (last year) and five years of wild inconsistency. And that was it. Eloy was a bust. They brought Jeimer and Paredes back and were so wowed by them that they got rid of them again. But in Jed's mind, there was all this talent they jettisoned to support a team that (gasp!) was really good because of it.
Cubs' fans (and I guess, Jed) were terrified that the Cubs would trade top prospect Owen Caissie. But he's not even their top prospect, that's Moises Ballesteros, the lumpy position-less hit machine. And as good a hitter as Moises appears to be, being the Cubs top prospect in 2025 isn't the same thing as being the top prospect in 2014. There is no Kris Bryant, Javy Baez, Addison Russell, Kyle Schwarber or Willson Contreras in this system. Ballesteros, Kevin Alcantara and Caissie are the top three prospects because somebody has to be.
If you let Kyle Tucker go (which it's pretty apparent from this that you plan to) nobody in your system can come close to even adequately replacing him. Your best bet would be to move Seiya back to right and let Ballesteros DH. But it's all so fucking frustrating and exasperating and fucking pathetic.
Caissie didn't even make Law's top 60 prospects in baseball last week. At least Moises and Alcantara did. And if I see one more idiot pine for James Triantos I'm going to stick my head through my laptop. He has 124 extra base hits in 1,578 minor league at bats. He's slugging .355 at Iowa! Iowa! Everybody slugs at Iowa. For fuck's sake that .355 slug is the fourteenth highest, not in the league, ON THE TEAM! Nick Madrigal slugged .678 at Iowa in 2023. The same Nick Madrigal with the career .344 slug in the big leagues.
It is entirely possible that Jed was too precious with Caissie, Moises and Alcantara, and refused to part with them and it cost the Cubs a better starting pitcher as a result.
But it's also possible that those guys, even though they are the cream of the Cubs' crop, just aren't good enough to get you a better starting pitcher. It could very well be that when Jed went fishing in the deeper water for guys like Dylan Cease, Mackenzie Gore, and one of the two Marlins pitchers, nobody wanted any of his bait. None of those four starting pitchers got traded by the way. So maybe it wasn't just Jed. But it probably was.
But if their prospects weren't enough to get a top tier starter, surely they could have gotten somebody like David Bednar to make a bigger difference at the end of games with Daniel Palencia.
The Mariners got Eugenio Suarez, who is going to hit 50 homers this season, for a first base prospect and two pitching prospects. The Cubs couldn't match that?
Maybe not. Because I can't imagine Cubs pitching prospects have much value. We know Mariners' pitching prospects do. The Cubs have developed two decent starting pitchers (Justin Steele and Cade Horton) in the last 23 years. Two. In nearly a quarter century. I'm not exaggerating. That's how long it's been since the last two, Carlos Zambrano and Mark Prior showed up.
This trade deadline was a systematic failure. They had a chance to be bold and aggressive and add on to a pretty good team and make it a viable pennant contender, and they didn't do it.
And they either didn't do it because they were afraid to pay the prices (both in prospects and future salary), or out of sheer incompetence, or because nobody wanted anything they were selling. Any of the three would be awful. There's a good chance it's all three things.
Boog and JD had a shockingly honest assessment of recent Cubs teams the other night in Milwaukee. They were talking with the confidence of ignorance about how Jed was going to reward this team and the fans for a high quality first 108 games by boldly adding to the roster because the Cubs and their fans haven't had a real playoff experience in eight seasons. They were right about that. The late season swoon in 2018 led to the Cubs falling to the Wild Card game and losing it. And then when they made the half-assed Covid playoffs in 2020 they lost both games and there were no fans in the park to watch them score one run total.
It has been a long time, and sadly, it looks like it's going to remain that way.
This is a likable team, with fun characters like Shōta and Petecrow and a true star in Kyle Tucker (who, let's hope is finally hitting again). But I've harbored no real hopes for their postseason chances all season. They look to me like a regular season team that has too many guys in their lineup that can be pitched to, and who can't beat good pitching (other than Freddy Peralta, they've beaten him twice now but hell, he's the Brewers third starter now), and who don't have the front line pitching you need to mount a real run.
The deadline was their chance to change that, and to allow for some true excitement and confidence in this team's ability to make a run.
And they completely fucked it up.
I don't care what the excuses are.
We were in on Mackenzie Gore until the very end and we'll revisit that in the offseason. No you won't.
The prices for top end pitching were just too high to pay to sustain our future. Your future is more of this. Why would you want to sustain it?
We'll be getting Miguel Amaya, Jameson Taillon and Javier Assad back, and that's like three impact trades.
No. It's not. Because you were due to get them back anyway. You were supposed to make impact trades AND get them back. Besides, Assad hasn't pitched in a real game in ten months, and Taillon was due to blow his back out again before he strained his calf, so all it means now is that he'll come back and finally get to the back injury.
And unless Amaya was rehabbing to train to become a top of the rotation pitcher, none of them will provide what you really needed.
You went into the trade deadline as the second best team in the National League behind the Dodgers, and the Dodgers are leaking oil all over the place. It's hard enough to repeat as champions, but with their injuries they are a wounded animal staggering to the finish. And you didn't pounce. And now, after the deadline you are, charitably, the fifth best team in the NL behind the Dodgers, Phillies, Mets and Padres. And, the Brewers have the kind of pitching you refused to go out and add.
I know what this really is. This was all your strategy to mold your team into one that could accomplish your only real feat of the last eight years.
As currently constituted, you have a great chance to have the fifth best record in the National League in the second half for a record fourth straight season.
Congratulations on your dynasty.
