Written by Derek Harvey at The Comeback
The Cubs were the third best team in the all of baseball in 2015, at least by season record. They toppled the Pirates in the Wild Card play-in game and proceeded to knock out baseball’s best team, the Cardinals, in the NLDS. They put up a fight against the Mets and went down swinging (pun intended) in the NLCS. It was the best season the Cubs have had in years and was just the start of their next competitive window. So expectations among Cubs fans for the offseason plan have been very high. The front office had made some moves earlier, but on Tuesday night, they put really began to implement their plan.
After a relatively slow start to the Winter Meetings, things went off once the Cubs signed the multi-positional Ben Zobrist to a very fair four-year, $56 million deal. They didn’t wait long after that to trade shortstop Starlin Castro (and the remaining money on his contract) to the Yankees for RHP Adam Warren and utilityman Brendan Ryan. So far, the Cubs’ notable acquisitions include:
- RP Rex Brothers one year, $1.42 million
- SP John Lackey two years, $32 million
- SP/RP Trevor Cahill one year, $4.25 million
- 2B Ben Zobrist four years, $56 million
- SP/RP Adam Warren Arb 1
- UTIL Brendan Ryan one year, $1 million
I like each one of these acquisitions. The only noticeable departure is Starlin Castro. But obviously, he’s being replaced with a better player in Ben Zobrist. By the way, in dealing Castro the Cubs unloaded $38 million over the next four years. So in a way, they spent $18 million to upgrade from Castro to Zobrist. Not too shabby.
With the signing of John Lackey, the Cubs improved a rotation that already included the high caliber talents of Jon Lester and Jake Arrieta. Their current fourth and fifth starters are Kyle Hendricks and Jason Hammel. Each had a sub-4.00 ERA and was worth over 2 fWAR. Hendricks was actually worth over 3 WAR. It’s not the Mets’ or Nationals’ super rotation, but it’s pretty damn good.
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