Chicago Cubs: Remembering the worst performances of the decade

The Chicago Cubs had some great single-season performances in the 2010s, yet they also had some bad ones. Here we look at ten of the worst.

The Chicago Cubs had some great single-season performances in the 2010s. We would expect that from a team that made the playoffs four times and won a World Series championship in 2016. Indeed, we highlighted some of those performances in a previous column.

We’ll remember all the good ones for many years to come. There was Jake Arrieta, who was unhittable down the stretch in 2015 as he led the Chicago Cubs’ rotation on their way to the playoffs and the National League Championship Series.

We’ll remember Kris Bryant‘s MVP season for the 2016 champions, as well as those great performances all season long by starting pitchers Jon Lester and Kyle Hendricks (though neither one of them would win the NL Cy Young Award). There was also Javier Baez finishing second in NL MVP voting in 2018.

Yet, as we would expect from any team, there were also some poor performances throughout the decade. In considering ten to highlight here, I tried to pick players who we expected to be solid contributors, or who had been in the past, who struggled for whatever reason for at least one year. There were some poor performances on both the good and the bad Cubs teams of the 2010s.

Below, I have listed ten poor performances, not in order necessarily from “best” to worst, but in chronological order. There’s a good mix of hitters, starting pitchers, and relief pitchers. With that, let’s take a look at ten performances that we’d like to forget once the decade is over.