CLEVELAND — Every time Cubs general manager Carter Hawkins walks through the team offices next to Wrigley Field, he’s greeted by images of the 2016 World Series, a reminder of the championship that slipped through Cleveland’s fingers when he was still in their front office.
It was one of the first things Hawkins commented on after the Cubs hired him in October 2021.
“That’s motivation for you,” he said during the Cubs’ three-game series against the Guardians this week. “You walk in every day and you’re like, ‘Oh, that was a kind of painful memory.’ ”
The Cubs are an extreme long shot to return to the World Series this year. Their playoff odds have been in the single digits since late July, according to FanGraphs. And though they played the Guardians close this week, with a 6-1 loss Wednesday, they suffered a three-game sweep and finished the road trip 5½ games back of the final National League wild-card spot, pending the result of the late Braves game against the Giants.
“It’s been fun to see us play a little better baseball here of late,” Hawkins said earlier this week. “Guys are grinding, and to see the bullpen start finding some consistency, and the lineup lengthening out a little bit, and playing some solid defense, it’s no surprise we put some wins together. And we’ll look to continue to do that through
August and September.”
Whether or not the team pulls off a late comeback to sneak into the playoffs, its performance over the last two months of the season will help inform the front office’s offseason moves.
After president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer broke up the 2016 championship core at the 2021 trade deadline, he promised sustained success from the “next great Cubs team.” And he brought in Hawkins to help him achieve that goal. Barring a mad dash up the wild-card standings to achieve an improbable playoff appearance, this season will at least represent a bump in the road.
If that’s all it is, and the Cubs are competing for the division title next season and a World Series championship down the road, fans may forgive another season of disappointment. Missing the playoffs next year, however, would be a disaster.
With that in mind, the front office will have pressing questions in front of it this offseason. And evaluating the offense is a particularly puzzling task. The Cubs’ offensive personnel has been relatively consistent over the last two seasons, but they went from one of the better run-scoring teams in the majors last season to one of the worst for two months this year.
“The question is always, how good are they going to be in the future?” Hawkins said. “And the things that you look at are the things that are most predictive; most of the underlying stats are most predictive.
“How a guy hits with runners in scoring position, not very predictive. How a guy hits the ball in terms of, how hard he hits it, what angles he hits it, what pitches he swings at, relatively predictive. So it’s just making sure that we’re not getting caught up in the noise as we make those decisions.”
The Cubs also will have to reinforce their bullpen.
That 2016 Cleveland team didn’t necessarily shape Hawkins’ team-building philosophy more than other years — except for one notable exception.
“Outside of, potentially, just how valuable a shutdown reliever can be in the playoffs,” Hawkins said. “The ability to leverage that reliever over and over and over again was something that Tito [former Cleveland manager Terry Francona] did masterfully.”
At what point in a team’s cycle does it need to make sure it has that kind of reliever?
“When you know you’re going to be in the playoffs,” Hawkins said. “That person can come from anywhere, can come internally, can come from a minor-league free-agent signing, can come from a trade like we made [to acquire Andrew Miller in 2016]. It’s not necessarily just the big free-agent signing or a big, monster trade.”
When Hawkins thinks of the 2016 World Series, when he was Cleveland’s director of player development, he focuses on how “special” the experience was.
He also has memories of sitting alone in his apartment at 3 a.m. after Game 7.
“The buzz of last month all wearing down,” he said, “just being like, ‘Wow, that was a lot,’ but really, really cool to have gone through.”
What would he have said if someone told him then that he’d join the Cubs’ side five years later?
“I would have said exactly what I said when I walked into the building in 2022,” he said, “which is, ‘Let’s try to replace some of these pictures with a new World Series.’ ”