

(Photo: Is Javier Baez part of the core? Or a means to acquiring pitching depth?(Photo: Arturo Pardavila III

A year ago, the Cubs were baseball’s most dominant team, first putting up 103 regular-season wins and then capping the achievement with their first World Series win in 108 years. (So I was told a few times along the way.) The question wasn’t whether the 2016 Cubs were the best team in baseball — that was obvious — but whether the 2016 Cubs were one of the best baseball teams we’ve ever seen.

No one is going to ask that question of the 2017 Cubs.

This year’s version certainly wasn’t a bad team by any stretch of the imagination. They won 92 games, took the NL Central title again, and were only eliminated in the NLCS when they ran into a 105-win buzzsaw. They were fourth in the majors in runs scored and seventh in runs allowed. The Cubs were clearly one of the best teams in baseball this year.

But compared to what they were a year ago, they looked vulnerable. The offense was still fine, led by a couple of the game’s best hitters, but the supporting cast mostly stagnated or regressed. Dexter Fowler‘s 128 wRC+ and solid defense in center was replaced by Kyle Schwarber’s 102 wRC+ and weak defense in left. Ben Zobrist finally looked old, going from +3.9 WAR to +0.3 WAR. They lost +2.5 WAR from Addison Russell, who was supposed to be breaking out instead. Javier Baez was still the same guy as last year, which is okay but not the superstar for which people have hoped.

And then there was the pitching. Jon Lester failed to crack 190 innings for the first time in a decade while also allowing home runs at a rate unprecedented in his career. Jake Arrieta’s regression continued, as he turned more into a good-stuff-with-bad-command guy rather than the ace he’d been previously. John Lackey was the pitching staff’s version of Ben Zobrist, finally showing his age.

In the bullpen, everyone had flaws. Wade Davis, Carl Edwards Jr., and Pedro Strop were the reliable ones, and they combined for a 12% walk rate, foreshadowing the inability of anyone in Chicago’s bullpen to throw strikes in October. Hector Rondon and Koji Uehara threw strikes but gave up dingers. Mike Montgomery stopped missing bats, and Justin Wilson just fell apart after being acquired to shore up a shaky relief corps.

And the defense didn’t help nearly as much this year. The Cubs were special in 2016 because the club featured not only the best hitters but also the best fielders, too. This year, the defense was merely good. And with fewer batted balls landing in gloves, the pitching staff allowed 130 more runs than the previous season.

Living up to the 2016 standard was always an impossible task, but we were among the many looking at the Cubs as a potential dynasty in the making, and against that kind of expectation, this year’s Cubs team can’t help but feel like a bit of a disappointment. And while they get a clean slate next year and won’t have to deal with any World Series hangover effect, a lot of the things that went wrong for the Cubs in 2017 lead to questions about what is next for the franchise in 2018.

Arrieta, Davis, Lackey, Uehara, and Brian Duensing are all free agents, so the pitching staff is going to experience significant turnover. The position players are more stable, with only Alex Avila and Jon Jay hitting the open market, but that doesn’t mean things on that side are settled. The outfield, in particular, is kind of a mess, with a bunch of flawed candidates offering just enough upside to justify regular playing time, but no one from the group looking like an everyday guy.

If they want to play Ian Happ regularly, does he displace Schwarber or Heyward in a corner (unlikely on both counts) or do they again sacrifice defense and stick him in center? Will they platoon their two lefty-hitting corner outfielders, neither of whom probably provides enough value at this point to justify starting against most left-handed pitchers? Would they be better off with Happ at second base, potentially trading either Baez or Russell for an outfield upgrade?

Or, perhaps more likely, they could trade one of them for another starting pitcher. Right now, the rotation is Lester, Jose Quintana, and Kyle Hendricks, with pitching coach Chris Bosio probably as qualified as anyone else in the organization for the No. 4 spot. The system isn’t brimming with high-level pitching talent to plug the holes in the staff — which is why they traded for Quintana to begin with — and almost all of the team’s once-vaunted farm system is now either in the majors or has been traded for major-league upgrades.

So the team needs at least two starting pitchers, and given how many arms it takes to make it through 162 games these days, probably more like three or four. They’ll have money to spend, but maybe not enough to sign anyone they want: the organization will owe about $125 million to the 13 players either under contract for 2018 or eligible for arbitration and likely to be retained. The Cubs have spent about $170 million the last couple of years, so there’s cash to spend, but when you need two full-time rotation guys, a closer, and a bunch of solid pitching depth, $40-$50 million goes quickly.

There are obviously enough core pieces in place to just make some minor adjustments and still come back as the favorites in the NL Central. If they spread the money around and round out the depth pieces, they’ll likely project as a 90-win team again next year.

Or they could go all out, throwing $30 million per year at Yu Darvish in the hope that Shohei Otani decides to join him, believing there’d be enough pinch-hitting at-bats in the NL for him to hit most every day. Put Darvish and Otani in this rotation, and all of the sudden, the Cubs look like the scariest team in the land once again.

Of course, it’s pretty likely the Cubs wouldn’t be the only team with that plan this winter, and there’s no guarantee they’d get either, much less both. And if they ended up with Darvish but not Otani, they’d be an injury away from long-term disaster, with too much money going to declining (or already declined) players who weren’t capable of supporting the team’s two stars. Betting big on aging free-agent pitchers to fix your organization isn’t generally a great idea, after all.

So the Cubs, who were supposed to be set for the next few years, might already be at a crossroads. At the very least, they’re likely going to be forced to decide whether Baez/Russell is their middle-infield tandem for years to come or whether they need to use one of the two to upgrade elsewhere. And with so many holes to fill on the pitching side of things, the choices the front office makes this winter could have a significant impact on whether the team’s hopes of multiple titles from this core comes to pass or whether 2016 represented the moment at which the organization peaked.

A year ago, it looked like the Cubs could mostly just put things in cruise control and win their division for the next half-decade. A year later, it’s clear the Cubs have some legitimate issues to try and resolve this winter. The front office will be tasked with upgrading an already flawed team while also likely saying goodbye to several of their better performers. Getting back to being a behemoth isn’t going to be easy.