It Had to Happen: Cubs Extend Ian Happ

If there’s one thing I remember the Cubs of recent vintage for, it’s winning the curse-breaking World Series in 2016. What, you were expecting something else? But if there are *two* things I remember the Cubs of recent vintage for, the second one is failing to sign their marquee players to contract extensions. Kris Bryant, Javier Báez, Willson Contreras, Anthony Rizzo: all four felt like candidates for a contract extension that made them a lifetime Cub, with a jersey retirement ceremony and fawning coverage from national media for their sparkling career.

Each of those four plays for another team now. The Cubs never turned that dynamic core into a second championship, or even a second World Series appearance. For a team that had dynastic aspirations, it’s a strange look. To the Cubs’ credit, it’s also a look they seem intent on changing. After signing Nico Hoerner to a three-year extension, they took care of another core player, agreeing to a three-year extension with Ian Happ worth $61 million, as Bleacher Nation’s Michael Cerami first reported.

Happ represents a bridge between the 2016 squad that has now mostly departed and the modern-day Cubs team. He debuted in 2017, and while he spent most of ’19 in the minors, he’s otherwise been a fixture in the Chicago lineup ever since. He’s also been a fixture in the field, though not always in the same place. In 2022, however, he settled into an everyday left field role and put up his best season as a professional.

A quick look at Happ’s statline might leave you wanting. He doesn’t hit a ton of home runs or get on base at an unbelievable clip. He doesn’t have a shockingly low strikeout rate for modern baseball. He simply does everything well, with no real holes in his game other than a slightly elevated strikeout rate, and that adds up to solid overall performance even without anything that will blow you away. Here, take a look at it in percentile form, as compared to all qualified hitters:

The funny thing about those numbers is that Happ’s game doesn’t feel middle-of-the-road at all. He’s capable of enormous top-end power but until 2022 had paired that intermittent thump with plenty of empty swings. His career swinging-strike rate is roughly 14%; he shaved that to 11.8%, and the hits flowed like wine. That’s how you can post your lowest career ISO and beat your career batting line anyway.

That’s not to say that it was an easy transition; if everyone could simply make more contact, they would. But for Happ, that tradeoff worked wonders. His power still played, and striking out 24% of the time instead of 31% of the time is a huge tailwind. That adjustment always felt like it was in Happ’s range of outcomes, but seeing him actually do it was impressive nonetheless.

Happ’s excellent season came at a great time for him. He was due to reach free agency after this year, and it’s a notably thin class for bats. Depending on how you feel about Michael Conforto, Teoscar Hernández, and C.J. Cron, Happ might be the best hitter available after Shohei Ohtani. Combine that with his defensive versatility, and he was likely at the top of plenty of shopping lists.

The Cubs knew that, and they also aren’t flush with hitting prospects at the moment. Pete Crow-Armstrong might help out the big league club soon, but the rest of the reinforcements are a ways off still. As they attempt to round back into contention, they are likely in need of a few more hitters, not a few less; they could hardly afford to remove Happ from their lineup without finding a replacement, which as I mentioned won’t be easy to do this winter. Additionally, they needed to retain some players. The continual revolving door wasn’t a good look for the team, and getting a few extensions done is a good way to change that narrative.

That’s one half of the requisite circumstances for an extension. The other half is Happ’s willingness, and he’d made no secret of his views on that matter. “I would love to be a part of the next great Cubs team,” he told MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand, and that doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination. The two sides wanted a deal; all that remained was to figure out what deal that was.

Extensions this close to free agency generally look a lot like the contract a player might get in free agency, and Happ’s deal is no exception. Three years? That sounds reasonable, if perhaps a bit light, for a 29-year-old hitter. Roughly $20 million per year? That’s about right for a good but not great hitter with marginal defensive value. Happ is younger than Rizzo and José Abreu, who both got similar contracts at a less valuable defensive position, but he’s not as good of a hitter. It’s more than Mitch Haniger got, but Happ seems like a better bet to put up above-average numbers in bulk playing time.

More specifically, here’s what ZiPS thinks of the next three years of Happ:

That’s a solid complementary hitter, the kind that every team in baseball could find a place for, at least for 2024 and ’25. For a Chicago team that has struggled to score in recent years, he’s a welcome brick in the offensive foundation. Would he have gotten as much or more in free agency? I think it’s likely. Would the Cubs have signed him if they had a more robust offense and pipeline of hitters coming up behind him? I doubt it.

The bigger question is what the Cubs are building toward. They’ve done plenty of tearing down and rebuilding, but even with Happ in their lineup for the next four years, this hardly looks like one of the best offenses in the NL Central, never mind the majors. Happ, Hoerner, Seiya Suzuki, and Dansby Swanson will have to do most of the heavy lifting. I can see that happening, but it hardly feels like a given; all four feel more like complementary pieces than offensive linchpins. You can make lineups full of players like Happ and Hoerner work, but you need the lineup to be *full* of them, not stuffed with Eric Hosmer, Tucker Barnhart, and Miles Mastrobuoni at the bottom.

The best time to solve this problem was last winter, when Trea Turner, Carlos Correa, and Aaron Judge were free agents. The second-best time to solve this problem was the previous winter. The only other great solution would be for the farm system to churn out a string of unheralded but effective hitters, but that hasn’t started to happen yet, and it seems silly to expect that to change on a dime.

To be fair, I don’t think that this particular flaw in Chicago’s team building changes anything about the Happ extension. What were the Cubs going to do, let him leave and try to make the offense better that way? Like the Cardinals and their pitching pitfall, they found themselves in a tough situation and made the best of it by taking their best extension candidate and making a deal.

Good times will surely come to Wrigley again. The team spends a lot of money and invests in player development, and they’re finally, belatedly, keeping their homegrown hitters in-house. This extension is a good step in the right direction when it comes to doing the easy things to help build an offense. There’s still hard work ahead to finish a team, but at least the Cubs won’t be replacing internal losses as they try to build toward a better future.