Willson's finally free...sort of

Former Cubs' catcher Willson Contreras was finally traded by the Cardinals Sunday night. He's off to Boston where he'll now play for former Cubs director of pitching--or whatever Craig Breslow's phony title was.

The Cardinals signed Willson to a five-year, $87 million contract after the 2022 season and they managed to fuck him over nearly as badly as Jed Hoyer, David Ross and yes, Craig Breslow had with the Cubs.

Contreras was a three-time All Star with the Cubs and one of the very best catchers in baseball. Nobody had his combination of power and average at the plate, plus an arm strong enough to knock his first baseman into right field on routine bunt plays in front of the plate.

When it was clear that Jed was keen on shipping out every talented player he had on his roster in 2021, Contreras seemed to be one he could get a lot of value for. Willson was only 29, and catchers who can hit at all, much less with consistent power are worth a lot.

But then there were rumors about how Willson was actually bad at catching, even though when you watched him, he sure seemed to be good at it, and there were rumors that his personality was too volatile for him to focus during games enough to adequately execute the Cubs thrillingly complicated pitching game plans, or some shit.

And then, probably not surprisingly, we found out that the rumors about Willson's alleged inadequacies were coming from inside the house.

They started with Breslow and the rest of his stooges within the Cubs' vaunted pitching infrastructure, who always needed somebody but them to blame for any poor pitching performance. Normally they would leak to friendly media that, "we identified all the ways to make this guy great, but he can't execute them" for any pitcher that struggled. But suddenly, they realized if they blamed it all on the catcher it would be so more efficient.

Their insecurity was (and is) such that they couldn't wait until after they traded the catcher before they started the smear campaign.

It didn't help that Ross was still pissed that his playing time was cut during his final, strange, completely unwarranted final victory lap 2016 season once Willson showed up to play in the big leagues in June. It wasn't lost on any of us when, during a losing streak that killed the 2021 season (they lost 11 games in a row after throwing a combined no-hitter against the Dodgers that was so weird that the last of the Cubs' four pitchers, Craig Kimbrel, didn't even know he had just thrown the final pitch of a no-hitter), Willson criticized the team (correctly) for a lack of effort and intensity. Those Cubs were begging for someone to step up and act like a leader, and Contreras did, and then Ross immediately publicly criticized him for it.

I've always thought that Ross' real problem with Willson was that the media made a huge deal out of how much Jon Lester might fall off in 2017 without his personal catcher and sherpa Ross guiding him through his starts. And then in 2017, with Willson as his primary catcher, Jon was just fine and then in 2018 Lester was even better and led the NL with 18 wins.

The Cubs didn't trade Contreras at the deadline in 2021 though they traded pretty much everybody else (well, not the great Ian Happ), but they also didn't trade him at the deadline in 2022 for...reasons? At one point they were close to trading him to the Astros for Jose Urquidy, but Dusty Baker had bought the Cubs' slanderish bullshit and he told his GM to pass. The Cubs ended up with a comp pick, which they used on Jaxon Wiggins with the 68th pick in the 2023 draft. Wiggins is presently (and I wish I were exaggerating) the only real pitching prospect in the Cubs' minor leagues. So at least there's that.