The End of the 2016 Cubs Is Coming

These are the saddest of possible words,
Bryant to Báez to Rizzo.
Seeing projected WAR cut into thirds,
Bryant to Báez to Rizzo.
Quickly declining in other team’s hats,
by plate discipline or by powerless bats,
concussions and sore backs turn comebacks to splats,
Bryant to Báez to Rizzo.

The 2016 season was one of the greatest in the history of the Chicago Cubs, a franchise that dates back to 1870, before the National League even existed. After winning the World Series and ending a championship drought that dated back to 1908, there were a lot of reasons to think this team would continue to make deep playoff runs for another five or six years. Sure, they had a fairly old starting rotation, with only Kyle Hendricks expected to stick around for a while, but the lineup looked like it was equipped for a long stretch of dominance. Addison Russell was 22, Javier Báez and Kyle Schwarber were each 23, Kris Bryant, Jorge Soler, and Willson Contreras were all 24, and Anthony Rizzo was still just 26. The team’s big free agent signing from the previous winter, Jason Heyward, didn’t have a good first season in Chicago, but at 26, a bounce-back campaign wasn’t out of the question. Still, this version of the Chicago Cubs would turn out to only have four postseason wins and a single playoff series win (the 2017 NLDS) left in them. What’s more, the three brightest stars in that constellation, Bryant, Báez, and Rizzo, were all traded at the 2021 deadline ahead of reaching free agency. Now, years later, each faces a very uncertain future.

The 2016 team started losing pieces almost immediately. As expected, the pitching staff faded away, with Hendricks quickly the last man standing. To replace the closer they rented for the 2016 run, Aroldis Chapman, the Cubs sent Soler to the Royals in return for a single season of Wade Davis. Russell was injured for much of 2017, struggled in 2018, and then was suspended due to serious charges of domestic violence; he last played in the majors in 2019. Heyward never really got back to being the player he was before signing with Chicago. The rest all departed via trades or in free agency, with Contreras the last one to leave Wrigley Field following the 2022 season. The team was in the mix for a playoff spot last year and still could get back into the fray this year, but if they do, it will be with very little of the DNA of the 2016 team remaining.

Remember when I mentioned that Báez, Bryant and Rizzo face uncertain futures? All three left 2023 with a worse outlook than they entered the year with, and 2024 has only continued that unpleasant trajectory. In 146 combined games this season, they’ve hit .203/.265/.299 with 11 home runs in 588 PA, “good” for -1.9 WAR. Sadly, there’s little reason to be optimistic about any of them turning the corner.

Báez’s 2024 has turned into a disaster fairly quickly. Signed to a six-year, $140 million contract by the Detroit Tigers in the winter of 2021, he disappointed in his first season with the team, posting a .238/.278/.393 slash line. Unfortunately, that now looks like it might be the highlight of his stay in Detroit: Báez dropped to a .222/.267/.325 line last season and is setting a new standard of underperformance this year, hitting .183/.209/.247, with a back injury and a high salary likely all that’s keeping an old English “D” on his cap.

ZiPS has always had concerns about Báez’s plate discipline and the extra risk associated with it, but around the time the Cubs won the World Series, the computer still expected him to make at least some contribution in the early-to-mid-2020s:

At this point, however, the full-fat ZiPS projections don’t see a comeback in the cards for Báez in 2025 or, well, ever:

Things haven’t gone much better for Báez’s former teammates. Bryant’s 2024 season barely got started before he landed on the IL with a back injury courtesy of a collision with the outfield wall on April 13. Less than two weeks after returning in late May, a ribcage injury from another intimate encounter with a wall put him right back on the IL, and he was eventually also diagnosed with an oblique injury; there’s no timetable for his return.

Unfortunately, this has been a recurring theme for Bryant in Denver. Signed to a seven-year, $182 million deal, Bryant initially hit well for the Rockies, but he missed significant time in 2021, mostly due to two IL stints resulting from back problems. Healthier in 2022 — at least until problems with his right foot cut his season short — Bryant’s offense just about disappeared, and his anemic performance at the plate stretched into the start of this season. As with Báez, ZiPS has very limited expectations about Bryant’s future:

It’s a projection that stands in sharp contrast to the computer’s expectations in 2016. ZiPS thought that if any of the Cubs were going to put together a Hall of Fame run, it would most likely be Bryant. A first-round pick in 2013, Bryant blasted through the minors, and his 2015 projection was the best ZiPS had ever given to a rookie (after Mike Trout). Bryant won an MVP award in 2016 to go along with his ring, and ZiPS expected him to be a superstar for a long time to come:

That projection would have been enough to get Bryant a career WAR in the high 60s, more than 2,000 hits, and nearly 400 homers. He nearly matched his 2016 season in 2017, and everything appeared to be going as planned. Hitting .319/.467/.536 in 2018, Bryant was hit in the face by an errant Germán Márquez pitch and missed a week. Whether or not that injury shares any of the blame, Bryant never returned to his 2016-17 form again. While he was certainly a good player for much of the rest of his time in Chicago, his very respectable 17.4 WAR from 2017 through 2021 was considerably less than his 28.1-WAR projection (32.4 before taking the shortened 2020 into account).

ZiPS never really liked his deal with the Rockies, seeing Bryant’s best days as being well behind him and projecting him for only a few more seasons as a decent starter in left field:

As uninspiring a projection as that is, Bryant and the Rockies would almost certainly prefer my computer’s vision of the future to the one that has come to pass, at least so far. Now, the main question isn’t how he’ll do on the team, but rather the circumstances under which he’ll leave.

As for Rizzo, he has also fallen short of his projections, but he’s had a less eventful decline, at least until 2023:

After 2021, Rizzo signed a two-year, $32 million contract with the Yankees; after exercising his opt-out clause following the 2022 season, he signed another low-key pact, this one a two-year, $40 million deal. His 2022 and 2023 numbers don’t look that dissimilar to what ZiPS expected for this stage of his career back in 2016 — that is, until Fernando Tatis Jr.’s hip connected with Rizzo’s noggin during a pickoff attempt in early 2023. Rizzo initially passed a battery of tests, returning to the lineup after just a few missed games. But his bat disappeared for two months and after he described fogginess, the team ran tests that found cognitive impairment; he was placed on the IL with post-concussion syndrome and missed the rest of the season.

While he was able to get back into the lineup this season, his bat didn’t return, and he only hit .223/.289/.341 until another collision, this time with Brennan Bernardino, resulted in a fractured arm that looks to keep him out for two months. The Yankees called up Ben Rice to take Rizzo’s spot on the roster; he’ll share first base reps with DJ LeMahieu for the time being. At this point, ZiPS actually sees Rice as the equal of Rizzo, projecting a 106 wRC+ for both players for the rest of the season, which suggests that the Yankees won’t lose anything in the win column as a result.

Without a long-term contract motivating his team to give him comeback attempts, the end looks like it’s coming for Rizzo more quickly than for Báez or Bryant:

People tend to get very annoyed with ZiPS when it projects decline for players while they’re at the peak of their stardom. But it does that because cases like Bryant, Báez, and Rizzo aren’t actually outliers when you look at baseball history. Superstardom can be surprisingly fleeing, and you can field an impressive lineup of Hall of Famers who mainly earned their entry to Cooperstown for what they did in their 20s. Ken Griffey Jr. wasn’t invincible, nor were Albert Pujols or Miguel Cabrera.

Outside of Schwarber, things aren’t going well for the few other remaining 2016 Cubs, either. Hendricks had a solid outing on Wednesday, but that only served to get his ERA below 8.00. Contreras got off to a dynamite start, but he had to have surgery on his arm after a brutal fracture; it remains to be seen if he’ll return to form. And while Heyward has had a bit of a second wind in Los Angeles, he’s a role player these days. The tsunami that was the 2016 Cubs has been reduced to a gentle ripple that just barely laps the walls of sand castles.

So, what lesson should teams draw from the 2016 Cubs? It’s not that you shouldn’t value your young stars, but rather that no matter how bright your future looks, there’s zero guarantee it’ll end up being as dazzling as you expect. Today’s Orioles strike me as one of the teams in particular that should take note of this. Yes, the O’s have a very young, very talented core, but if they’re conservative about making deals next month at the trade deadline or supplementing their roster later this winter, they may come to regret it. The 2023-24 rosters could very well be the best Orioles teams of this generation, and there might never be a better opportunity for this squad to get to the World Series. Seizing the day isn’t just a lesson for baseball, but a lesson for all of us.