(670 The Score) Cubs president of baseball operations Theo Epstein is nothing if not a rational thinker, except when he's emotional about the failure of the baseball team he's put together.
Those identities may soon conflict directly in the aftermath of the 2019 Cubs, their fate soon to be sealed as an also-ran after spending the better part of six months solidly in position to reach the playoffs. Make no mistake -- this was an epic collapse, rivaling any in their history with it's astonishing velocity and totality, and it's fair to wonder how the jolt it's delivering affects the reckoning to come.
By the numbers, it makes the mind reel, a series of unlikely outcomes detailed recently by Cubs television voice Len Kasper on 670 The Score, using data produced by Fangraphs.com. Consider that the Cubs hadn't owned playoff odds lower than 35 percent since they ended the 2014 season at 73-89 and were entering their four-game series with the Cardinals with a 58 percent playoff probability. The odds of getting swept were only 3.4 percent, those of the Brewers winning four themselves at 12.5 percent and there was only a 0.4 percent chance that the two would happen concurrently. But that 1-in-240 is what actually hit, and that's how the Cubs began their series in Pittsburgh having their playoff chances essentially erased, dropping to under 3 percent.
An entire season and what feels like part of an era just vanished over the course of four excruciating days. They were all one-run losses to the Cardinals, all featuring the Cubs' signature blend of high-leverage bullpen implosion, an inability to plate routine runs, shoddy defense and outs given away on the basepaths. The Cubs gave it all up, and their divisional rivals just picked up and ran away with it, as if scavenging swag from a Fortnite kill.
The recency effect appeared to influence Epstein last season, when the Cubs' slide out of the divisional lead into the wild-card game and then out of the postseason entirely inspired his memorable call for urgency and accountability and another purge of the coaching staff. If Epstein has another of those raw and candid press conferences next week (and if the persistent rumors of Red Sox's simmering interest in rehiring him are nothing more than that), the sheer intensity of their disintegration may still be felt.
And what does that do to the actual moves to come, in either the number of them or the star power involved? There can be no hiding anything anymore, with this week exposing all that's going wrong. A playoff appearance of some kind might have helped gloss over some fundamental issues with roster construction, player development, scouting and management that have conspired to inhibit their evolution, and they must now be confronted directly.
In formulating decisions about the direction of the Cubs, Epstein has been a deliberate and thorough executive committed to putting his head before his heart. But last November, we saw his frustration build in a way that actually informed the way this team took shape, and it's reasonable to think a brutal conclusion to the 2019 season could reverberate well into another disconsolate winter.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's Bernstein & McKnight Show in midday. You can follow him on Twitter @Dan_Bernstein.
