It’s so easy for those of us who follow baseball and the Cubs closely to get caught up in minutiae — who’s going to be the 25th man on the roster, how the Cubs will handle a tough late-season schedule, whether Joe Maddon will manage the team beyond 2019 — that I think sometimes we forget that baseball runs in cycles. Always has, always will. Teams have periods where they lay fallow for years (or decades, in the Cubs’ case), eras where they dominate.
What am I getting at here? This was supposed to be the Golden Age of Cubs baseball, once they returned to postseason play in 2015 and won the World Series in 2016.