3 days ago, the Rays, coming off a World Series appearance, traded their best pitcher, Blake Snell, to the Padres for a bunch of very good prospects. This is who the Rays are. This is who the Rays have been for more than a decade. And sure, it might seem like a harsh blow to a fanbase that continueus to not be able to justify getting emotionally attached to any player, but if they haven’t learned by now, when will they? So really it’s their own fault for caring.
Anyway, that’ll all be moot when the team moves to Montreal in a few years, so what does it really matter?
2 days ago, the Cubs, coming off an NL Central title, traded their best pitcher, Yu Darvish, to the Padres for a bunch of decent prospects. This is not who the Cubs are or have been in the recent past. The Cubs are a rich, large market team with the financial resources to contend every year. It was certainly tougher in 2020 than in other years, but owner Tom Ricketts got several huge tax breaks and, if he’d been interested, could have found the money to continue putting a strong team on the field.
Friends, Cubs owner Tom Ricketts was not interested in putting a strong team on the field.
Now, it’s important to note that this team might well be good enough to win the Central again. The NL Central is likely to be the worst division in baseball in 2021, and it’s possible that even with a deliberately weakened rotation, the Cubs will still be the least bad team and win by default. After all, the Pirates are nowhere near contention, the Reds gave up after making the playoffs last year, and the Brewers aren’t putting a lot of resources into contention themselves. If the only team the Cubs have to get by is the Cardinals, well, stranger things have happened, right? So why not implode your team? You’ll pay less money and still maybe contend. It’s a win-win!
The reason you don’t do that, of course, is that people don’t want to pay to see a bad product. If Tom Ricketts isn’t spending money on this team, a fan is fair to ask, why should I? It’s one of the main reasons that the Rays will never draw fans in Tampa, even if they manage to build a non-dogshit stadium. Fans don’t — and shouldn’t — trust them. It’s the same thing the Marlins did a few hundred miles to the south, and how’s that turning out? The well is poisoned, and everyone knows it.
Talking to reporters, Jed Hoyer, the Cubs’ President of Baseball Operations, claimed that this decision wasn’t made to save money. He then also said that the Cubs weren’t going to spend a lot of money in free agency, and also that this relatively mediocre package of prospects (plus one serviceable non-star major league pitcher) was the best the Cubs could do. So if you put that all together, well, the deal was definitely done to save money and that money is not going back onto the field and that’s just how things are.
Back in 2015, the Cubs, in a very standard baseball move, kept Kris Bryant in the minors for the first couple weeks of the season in order to be sure they would keep him for an extra season. This decision rightfully pissed Bryant off, and he since filed (and eventually lost) a grievance over it. It is one of the spectacular ironies of the Darvish trade that the season they alienated Bryant, their best player, over — 2021 — is the one they’re now half-assing.
If I’m being honest, the Cubs are probably not in long-term danger because of this deal. If there’s any fanbase that has made a virtue of embracing a bad team that doesn’t deserve it, well, they’re on the North Side of Chicago. But a weak division is an opportunity to step on the throats of the other teams, and they’re letting it go by. These chances don’t come up that often, and with Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, and Javier Baez all in the last year of their deals, the clock is ticking on the core of the last Cubs championship team.
Some ownership groups — good ownership groups — would throw their support behind that group, trying to get their fans as many memories and wins as possible. The Cubs, instead, are quitting while insisting they didn’t. It’s cowardly, but hey, at least they saved some money.