Chicago Cubs: The 2018 season still feels like a missed opportunity

Chicago Cubs: 2018 was a big missed opportunity

In many years, 95 wins would be enough to avoid the Wild Card game, at least. Instead, the Brewers beat the Cubs and their disappearing offense, 3-1, in the NL Central tiebreaker game at Wrigley Field, setting up a Wild Card game at Wrigley with the Colorado Rockies. And as expected, the offense failed to show up again as the Cubs lost 2-1 in 13 innings.

Watching that game, it felt like it could have gone 30 innings, and the team still wouldn’t score. It was about as depressing of a way to watch a season end as one could imagine: watching two teams celebrate on your home turf in two days while you’re going home.

As this young core of players nears free agency, and as we witness the decline of key pitchers such as Lester and Quintana, I can’t help but feel like 2018 was a huge missed opportunity. There was so much talent on that team, and though a lot did indeed go wrong, give props to Joe Maddon for somehow guiding this team to 95 wins. For all that Maddon could do, however, he couldn’t grab a bat and hit, and the key offensive players simply didn’t get the job done.

The 2018 season especially feels like a giant missed opportunity as we look at how cash-strapped the Cubs franchise currently is. We all were upset with the lack of moves this past offseason, and it sounds like the next offseason may not be much better. It’s almost inevitable that some of the Cubs’ young core will be moving on within the next couple of years.

This is going to make it especially difficult for the team to compete in the next couple of years under new manager David Ross. There’s still enough talent that they could make the playoffs in 2020 (if we do have a season), but there are so many question marks on the current roster that it’s far from a guarantee.

I hope we have not reached the end of the “competitive” window for this current core of Chicago Cubs players. Yet if we have, I feel like we’ll look back on 2018 as the year that this team should have accomplished a lot more.