Infielder who was a disappointment with the Cubs is now an All-Star in Detroit

Former Chicago Cubs utility man Zach McKinstry just made his first All-Star team as a member of the Detroit Tigers.

McKinstry rounds out a list of now six Tigers to appear in the 2025 Midsummer Classic, including Gleyber Torres, Riley Greene, Casey Mize, Tarik Skubal, and another former Cub, Javier Baez. The 30-year-old McKinstry is enjoying a career year as the Tigers pace the entire league with 59 wins entering the final weekend of the first half.

McKinstry has managed to amass an impressive 2.7 bWAR while playing seven different positions for Detroit, primarily third base and right field. His defensive abilities aside, McKinstry is also on pace to shatter his previous career-highs in virtually every offensive category. The guy is doing it all in style and he is definitely deserving of his spot on the All-Star reserve list, which was made possible after Houston Astros shortstop Jeremy Pena dropped out of the game.

It's really cool to see McKinstry take this kind of step forward with a clearly special Tigers team, but it does make me wonder if the Cubs made a huge mistake by letting him go a few years ago.

The Cubs could really use a guy like Zach McKinstry on this team

The horrific state of the Cubs' bench is what makes McKinstry's season so bittersweet for Cubs fans. Vidal Brujan, Jon Berti, and Justin Turner have honestly been pretty terrible at the plate, and you have to look no further than each man's wRC+, which measures a player's overall offensive production (100 is average). Turner is the most respectable at 70, but Berti is at an abysmal 43. Brujan can hardly be taken seriously at a whopping wRC+ of 2. That's right... 2.

All of them are virtually automatic outs on the rare occasion Manager Craig Counsell uses them to pinch hit, and those opportunities are justifiably becoming fewer and farther between. Combine this with the fact that none of these guys are particularly great defenders at their respective positions, and the bench becomes almost useless.

Just having McKinstry on this team alone would solve so many of these problems. His ability to play center field would negate Chicago's need to roster Brujan, who is the only backup center fielder on the team. Not to mention McKinstry has a good throwing arm, plate discipline, and he can swipe bases.

And the killer is that the Cubs could still have him on their team. Back in 2023, Chicago was essentially at the point where they could either keep McKinstry or Miles Mastrobuoni, and they chose the latter. They traded McKinstry to the Tigers before the 2023 campaign for a minor league pitcher named Carlos Guzman, who is not even in the organization anymore. This decision always kind of rubbed me the wrong way because McKinstry was more versatile than Mastrobuoni.

Granted, both of them were pretty bad at the plate during their time in Chicago, as McKinstry slashed .206/.272/.361 in 155 at-bats for Chicago in 2022. But still, the ability to play virtually every position aside from catcher is something that is pretty rare in baseball and now that McKinstry is hitting well enough to make an All-Star team, the full weight of that bad decision by the Cubs' front office has come to fruition. Maybe the team can upgrade the bench at the trade deadline.