Chicago Cubs: Three players who won’t be on the Opening Day roster

Change is coming for the Chicago Cubs. When the 2020 season begins, this roster could look wildly different. These three guys won’t even be on the roster.

Only a handful of Chicago Cubs players will be able to fully enjoy the offseason without fear of losing their role on the team. If your name isn’t Anthony Rizzo, Javier Baez, Jon Lester, Craig Kimbrel, Kyle Hendricks or Yu Darvish, then you better buckle up.

Kris Bryant barely falls outside of that group in my mind. It would take an overwhelming haul for Chicago to move the former NL Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player and it’s hard to envision a contender that would get notably better in the immediate future, while also being able to give the Cubs a package Theo Epstein would deem worthy in return.

That’s not to say it’s impossible, but pretty unlikely.

Jason Heyward‘s contract isn’t nearly as unmovable as a lot of folks seem to think it is, nor is Tyler Chatwood‘s – which has just one year remaining on it. Then, you get to the once-heralded wave of former top prospects, many of whom have failed to live up to the hype.

Coming off just 84 wins and finishing the season by dropping 10 of 12, a reckoning is at hand for the Chicago Cubs – and rightfully so. Their contention window is rapidly closing and unless Epstein pulls the right levers this offseason, our memories of 2016 may be all we have to sustain us in years to come.

Chicago Cubs: It’s time to rectify a major misstep

I don’t particularly care what you think about Addison Russell. Unlike a great many people, I believe in second chances only when they’re warranted – and this is not one of those situations.

We’ve seen Russell go from a former consensus top 10 prospect in the game and the starting shortstop for a World Series-winning Cubs team to a guy who makes more headlines for his egregious off-the-field issues than he does with his play on the diamond.

I’ve never minced words when it comes to my feelings on the 25-year-old. I felt the team shouldn’t have tendered him a contract last winter. When they did, it was nothing more than a waste of precious resources that could have been better spent elsewhere – all while continuing to employ a guy who, simply put, just doesn’t seem to get it.

But let’s just focus on what he’s brought (or hasn’t brought) to the Cubs strictly as a baseball player. Last season, Russell appeared in just 82 games – the lowest total in his five years in the bigs. Offensively, he did what he always does: he batted right around the .240 mark (.237 to be exact) while barely keeping his on-base percentage above the .300 mark (.312).

All told, according to Baseball Reference, he was a 0.1 WAR player for Chicago. Per Fangraphs, he was nearly 20 percent below league average as a talent (81 wRC+). He struck out more than he has since his rookie campaign in 2015 and graded out as a solidly below average defensive player, as well – which, to this point, had been the one redeeming quality he possessed.

This team can ill-afford to give away roster spots – especially after the second base position turned in the sixth-worst production in all of baseball in 2019. It’s time – move on from Russell and find a legitimate answer heading into 2020, rather than expecting a has-been prospect to be anything more. 

Chicago Cubs: It might be tough, but it’s time to move Almora

Unlike Addison Russell, who’s given us all kinds of reasons to not particularly care for him, Albert Almora is a genuinely good guy who may very well still turn out to be a quality big league player.

That being said, his performance in 2019 can only be described as abysmal. The former first-round pick struggled on both sides of the ball and really never seemed to recover mentally from lining a ball into the stands in Houston in late May and injuring a young fan.

Who knows if that alone contributed to his struggles, but Almora took several steps in the wrong direction this year. Always a Gold Glove-caliber center fielder, most defensive metrics pegged him as solidly below-average. The routes he regularly took to balls were suspect, at best – and his lack of production at the plate certainly didn’t help matters, either.

In 363 plate appearances, Almora slashed .236/.271/.381. Now, don’t get me wrong, he’s never been an on-base machine. His OBP is annually buoyed by a batting average that, until this season, hovered somewhere in the .280-.290 range which, if you can work counts and get walks, could be a recipe for long-term success.

But Almora hasn’t even shown he’s capable of doing that – and when his average bottomed out in 2019, you really saw how big of a hole in his game this is offensively. His total body of work netted  a ghastly 64 wRC+ and -0.7 WAR, according to Fangraphs. He played a big part in the Cubs’ center field production, or lack thereof, that graded out as the seventh-worst in baseball.

By moving Almora and Russell off the roster, the Cubs could add roughly $7 million back to their budget for the winter. I think Almora winds up traded somewhere he can get a clean slate and the team non-tenders Russell at long last, giving them increased flexibility financially in a pivotal offseason.