After nearly 5 years, the controversial Yu Darvish trade yields fruit for the Cubs

On the heels of a fan-less, shortened 2020 season, Chicago Cubs ownership went into cost-cutting mode and the biggest chunk of change it could move was NL Cy Young runner-up Yu Darvish and the nearly $60 million left on his deal.

The veteran right-hander was lights-out that year, tying for the NL lead with eight wins and pitching to a 2.01 ERA across a dozen starts. Although his Cubs tenure got off to a rocky start, he was finally rounding into form and pitching like an ace. So, naturally, it was then that the front office jettisoned him via trade.

At the time, everyone was well aware of what the move was: a salary dump. Even so, the return was widely viewed as being more focused on quantity than quality, and the player set to make his MLB debut for the Cubs in the coming days, Owen Caissie, wasn't even the top-billed prospect that came back in the trade. Even so, it's Caissie who gives Jed Hoyer the first fruits of the deal he swung soon after he took over for Theo Epstein as president of baseball operations on the North Side.

That trade was a short-term sign of things to come in Wrigleyville. Within seven months, Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant, Javier Baez, Craig Kimbrel, Andrew Chafin, followed Darvish out the door and the rebuild was officially on.

"At least to me, it was a very clear and obvious decision," Hoyer told MLB.com following that emotional deadline. "We weren't able to reach extensions. So, we could either hold these players for two months and have them compete for a fourth-place team ... Or, we could do everything we could in our power to reset our farm system, to reset our organization, and I think we accelerated that incredibly over the last 10 days or so."

Cubs finally see a return from the 2020 Yu Darvish salary dump trade

When the return in the Darvish deal was made public, it was immediately clear that we wouldn't see any of the prospects impact the big-league roster for years - but Wednesday night's announcement that Caissie would be taking the roster spot of the injured Miguel Amaya means we might be able to better evaluate that trade in the not-too-distant future.

All the eggs seem to be in the Caissie basket when it comes to the Cubs having any shot of recouping any real value from that trade. None of the other prospects are even in MLB Pipeline's latest organizational top 30 prospect rankings, let alone the league-wide top 100. In fact, apart from Caissie, only Reginald Preciado remains a member of the organization after Ismael Mena was released by the ACL Cubs last week.

The hope is that Caissie and his 60-grade power can jump-start a struggling Cubs offense. If he can do that, let alone establish himself as a middle-of-the-order bat for years to come, how Cubs fans look back on that Darvish trade could be wildly changed before we even close the book on the 2025 campaign.