SAN DIEGO — Judgment day is here.
Judgment week, maybe?
Or how about judgment month? The Cubs, indeed, would prefer the latter.
This is the big time — the only time that matters — for the Cubs and their brain trust of team president Jed Hoyer and manager Craig Counsell.
October is where legacies are made.
The Cubs started what they hope is a lengthy playoff journey Tuesday in California, the ultimate test of what’s been built over the last several years.
MVP favorite Pete Crow-Armstrong said last week that this team was “built for the weird s–t.”
That they’re still standing after foul balls to the face and banged-up shoulders and weather-caused scheduling chaos is certainly something.
But more than being “built for the weird s–t,” these Cubs were built to win it all.
Will they stay standing long enough to do that?
Hoyer has spent the last year making the necessary moves and smashing narratives about free-agent spending and clinging to prospects.
He handed out big-money extensions to Crow-Armstrong and second baseman Nico Hoerner. He gave $175 million to Bregman, who has proven worth the expenditure, shaking off a slow start to become his team’s second best hitter and a tough, inspirational leader.
On the trade front, right-hander Edward Cabrera had bad days, bad blisters and a bad hamstring, not the top-of-the-rotation arm he was supposed to be.
Getting aggressive at the trade deadline to land righties Gausman and Clay Holmes seemed a home run, though their late-season performances — and Gausman’s nagging shoulder — have thrown into question how much they’ll deliver in the postseason.
But the moves were what they needed to be to craft a championship contender.
The Cubs aren’t favored to reach October’s end, not after once more getting left in the Brewers’ dust in the NL Central, which casts a spotlight on Hoyer’s most consequential move: poaching Counsell from the division-dominating rivals three years ago.
Counsell gets rave reviews from players and was recently credited by Crow-Armstrong with helping him evolve into the player he is today, someone who can make a greater impact on a game, a series and this postseason than maybe any other player in the sport.
During a roller-coaster season — the Cubs like to cite two 10-game winning streaks and a 10-game losing streak to illustrate the ups and downs — Counsell steered the team through an avalanche of pitching injuries that threatened to bury it. At one point, the Cubs had an entire rotation and back-end bullpen group on the IL at the same time, yet they survived.
“He’s had a lot to deal with, obviously, starting from a pretty early point in the year,” Crow-Armstrong said Monday. “A manager’s job is how many different kinds of skills you have to have. That’s not necessarily making decisions in the game or anything like that. It’s about continuing to get to know people, continuing to build trust.
“He’s obviously battle-tested, and he’s had so much different experience through the game of baseball, as a player and a manager. We all just trust him, and that definitely seeps into how we trust each other.”
But merely surviving was never the intended outcome, and Hoyer’s move to land Counsell in the first place was made with only one goal in mind: getting the Cubs another World Series trophy.
What will become of their legacies this postseason?
Will they achieve their ultimate goal, hoisting a trophy that validates it all and dials up another championship party in Grant Park that shoots Hoyer and Counsell into the same stratosphere Theo Epstein and Joe Maddon reached a decade ago?
Or will they leave us asking whether these Cubs can ever get back to that place, whether they can do better than wild-card berths, and wondering how many more chances Hoyer and Counsell — both under contract beyond this season — get to turn in a better finish in the results-oriented, high-expectations business of baseball?
And so, welcome to judgment day. Week. Month. Whatever.
Both men have done impressive work in getting the Cubs to this place, but simply getting here was never the end goal.
This is where we find out if that work was enough.
