Chicago Cubs Shred Their Championship Lineup
In 2016 Kris Bryant , Anthony Rizzo , and Javier Baez were three of the brightest lights in major league baseball as the trio played like superstars and led the Chicago Cubs to their first World Series title in 108 years. If ever any players were on top of their world and idolized by their fan base it was these three guys.
Now , in a span of 24 hours, all three of them have been traded to other teams.
First it was Rizzo to the Yankees, and then today, Bryant to San Francisco and Baez to the New York Mets.
For these three stars, and they still are stars even though they all have had ups and downs since 2016, the Cubs got back a handful of minor leaguers , none of which are considered sure fire future major league stars.
This is baseball in the 21st century. If you are 8 or 9 games out of first on the trade deadline day you dump your stars if they are approaching free agency and start all over.
To hell with what the fans who pay all the bills and salaries want.
This is a reason I dont follow baseball that closely anymore. You never know who's going to be on your team after July unless you are in a close fight for first place.
When we were kids a team kept its core players for their entire career in many cases , and only occasionally were star players traded and then it was usually for other star players .
Now teams just give them away.
I will happily await the firing of Cubs GM Jed Hoyer if his "plan" doesnt bear fruit in the near future.
I'd say that Hoyer is probably the least popular human in Chicago.
If the Cubs were a poor team it might be somewhat understandable , but they are one of the most monetarily valuable teams in baseball, no worse than the 4th richest team behind the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Red Sox. They should never be in a "rebuilding" posture and they said they were not going to be. Now with three of their four best players instantly gone (Contreras, the catcher, would be the fourth) what the hell are fans supposed to think. How will they be anything but rebuilding next season?
The Cubs are trying to get by on the cheap and that is not going to sit well with a lot of people.
As faithful as Cubs fans are I can well imagine how this is going to go over.
General managers in baseball have too much power. They try and make themselves more important and popular than the players, but very few of them pull it off.