Cubs News: Another 2017 trade is starting to look much worse

The Chicago Cubs made a trade with the Detroit Tigers in 2017 that is looking a lot worse here in 2020–much worse.

In 2017, the Chicago Cubs made a trade that has received a ton of criticism from fans, acquiring Jose Quintana from the Chicago White Sox for a prospect package that included Eloy Jimenez and Dylan Cease. The Cubs may have won the NL Central that year, but Quintana has been a bit of a disappointment while Jimenez and Cease are on track to be stars.

That year, at the trade deadline, the Cubs made another, less-talked-about move, acquiring Justin Wilson and Alex Avila from the Detroit Tigers for Jeimer Candelario and Isaac Paredes. Don’t look now, but that trade is starting to look like a pretty costly one as well.

Wilson and Avila are long gone, but Candelario and Paredes are making a name for themselves in Detroit here in 2020. Candelario homered for the Tigers against the Twins on Sunday, his fourth of the season, and is batting .299 with 15 RBIs. After getting lots of chances for the Tigers over the past two seasons and struggling to put it all together, it looks like he’s breaking through at age 26. Paredes, at age 21, has also reached the big leagues and is the Tigers’ sixth-ranked prospect.

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The trade wasn’t a total disaster, as Avila drove in 17 runs for the 2017 playoff-bound Cubs, and Wilson was good out of the bullpen in 2018 (after a subpar 2017 showing). And it was perfectly defensible to trade Candelario at the time, as he was blocked at both corners by Anthony Rizzo at first base and Kris Bryant at third.

However, with the Cubs’ offense struggling at times this year, plus Bryant on the shelf, they sure could use Candelario’s bat right now. At least, they could use him at DH, though, of course, no one knew at the time of the trade that the NL would start using it in just three years.

We don’t know whether this will continue for Candelario or whether Paredes will have a successful major league career. What we do know is that, right now, it looks like the Tigers have an excellent chance to win that trade, which will give Theo Epstein critics another strong talking point.

In any case, I’d like to see Candelario and Paredes succeed in Detroit; there’s no point in rooting against them. Still, it will cause that trade to hurt even more moving forward.