For months, the Cubs were thrilled with how much went right.
Even with big hurdles to clear – an early-summer offensive downturn and an avalanche of pitching injuries – they finished the regular season with the highest scoring offense in baseball, far and away the best defense in the sport and the best individual player in the game in Pete Crow-Armstrong.
And yet, team president Jed Hoyer had to explain how everything went so wrong just two days into October, a month his team didn’t even reach after a shockingly quick playoff exit.
“It feels like we let something slip away,” Hoyer said Friday. “We let home-field [advantage in the wild-card round] slip away by playing poorly in September, especially the last week. And we let a chance to go deep in the playoffs – and really get this team playing in the postseason – we let that slip away by playing poorly in San Diego.
“It feels like we let an opportunity slip away that we won’t get back. We have to work really hard to get back to that place.”
In other words, the Cubs blew it.
The bats went quiet during the regular season’s final week and in the two playoff games in San Diego, combining to score just 16 runs over their final eight games.
It cost the Cubs a chance to host that opening-round, best-of-three series at Wrigley Field, something Hoyer pointed to as a critical lesson from the season’s sour ending.
“We had home-field [advantage] and we gave it up in the last week,” he said. “We have a real home-field advantage here. They have a real home-field advantage in San Diego. That really hurt us.”
Hoyer – who spent big on Alex Bregman in the offseason and made win-now trades to boost the starting rotation, both last winter and at the deadline – doesn’t strike as deserving a heaping helping of the blame.
But the man at the top never escapes unscathed in this results-oriented business.
“We put resources into this team because we believed in this team, simple as that,” he said. “There were long stretches where we looked like we could be a dominant team, and as a result … we pushed.
“We traded prospects away to supplement this group at the deadline, and we did that because we believed in it.
“We fell short and let that opportunity slip away. That’s the part that will gnaw at us for a long time.”
As Hoyer is forced to turn his attention to next year far earlier than hoped, what needs to happen to ensure a different outcome in 2027?
Despite the lineup’s collective outage over those final eight games, Hoyer’s focus is almost entirely on improving the pitching staff.
Yes, the Cubs could be faced with plugging holes in both corner-outfield spots, with Ian Happ and Seiya Suzuki ticketed for free agency.
But the season-long takeaway for Hoyer was that his team’s pitching was not good enough, leaving the Cubs miles behind the Brewers in the NL Central and preventing them – over the course of a summer that lasted much longer than a couple postseason games – from delivering on what they could do with the bats and gloves.
“Our position-playing group was the best in baseball,” Hoyer said. “From a pitching standpoint this year, it was sort of a struggle from the get go.
“We’re leaning on our defense too heavily, and the overall quality of the pitching has to improve. … When I think about our offseason, when I think about seasons to come, that has to be the goal, to get our pitching infrastructure and pitching quality to the level of our position-player group.
“It’s safe to say that the biggest part of our focus going into the offseason is going to be on pitching. Whether that’s 100-to-0, what that ratio is going to be, has not been determined yet. But certainly, the great majority of our focus is going to be on pitching acquisition.”
The to-do list could be lengthy.
The Cubs might have to replace their entire starting rotation, and with Hoyer grading himself poorly on how he built the bullpen, perhaps another overhaul is in the cards there, too.
The specifics of a couple bad games in San Diego that ended the Cubs’ season won’t do too much to color Hoyer’s approach to putting his team in a better position heading into next season.
But things will be different. That’s reality.
For better or worse, the Cubs team that thrilled Wrigleyville this summer and looked so capable, at times, of achieving championship-level goals, is a thing of the past.
“We have a lot of good players that are free agents. We’re not going to be able to bring back all of them. That’s clear,” Hoyer said. “We can’t retain everyone. The team’s going to look and feel different next year. In a lot of ways, that’s a good thing.
“We do have a lot of good players that are going to be free agents, and we’ll be in touch.”
