Cubs' teardown is a cautionary tale for Nationals

It's a common practice to look at a team in the moments after it wins a championship and wonder if it's good enough to come back the next year and win another. And rarely in recent baseball history has that sentiment been more prevalent than in the moments after the Cubs won the 2016 World Series.

Yes, they broke the Billy Goat Curse with their first title in 108 years, but this didn't appear to be some kind of one-in-a-million convergence of events. The Cubs roster was loaded with young talent: Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant, Javier Báez, Willson Contreras, Jason Heyward and Addison Russell were all 26 or younger. Throw in all the gobs of extra revenue that organization was about to receive from a rabid fan base, and this had all the makings of a budding dynasty.

Which, of course, isn't at all how things played out in Wrigleyville.

The Cubs returned to the postseason in 2017 (and beat the Nationals in yet another agonizing Game 5 on South Capitol Street) but were overwhelmed by the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. They haven't won a playoff game since, losing to the Rockies in the 2018 and the Marlins in the 2020 wild card rounds.

And now, only four years removed from their franchise-altering moment, the Cubs are giving up and rebuilding.

Manager Joe Maddon was fired after the 2019 season. Theo Epstein walked away this winter and handed over the baseball operations department to his longtime lieutenant, Jed Hoyer. Hoyer last night traded Yu Darvish to the Padres for four prospects. He has been entertaining offers for Bryant. Other cost-cutting moves surely are coming as the focus shifts to long-term prospects over short-term winning.

"It's hard for me to fathom, because of what we did," Davey Martinez, Maddon's former bench coach in Chicago and now Nationals manager, said a couple of weeks ago. "Going on to win in 2016, and making the playoffs again in 2017 ... where they're at now, it's tough.

"Obviously, there's so many good players that came through that organization that are still there. But I've been in this game a long time to know that's part of baseball and that's part of this game. Unfortunately, that's just the way it is. There's people running this game that see things the way they see them, and that's the direction they're going in."

Yes, it is. And it should serve as a cautionary tale to the Nationals and everyone in the region who loves this franchise. Take nothing for granted, because success can be fleeting.

The Nats have been a successful franchise for nearly a decade now. They've made the postseason five times, won the division three times and of course won the World Series once. Other than this past summer, they've been a contender and finished with a winning record every season since 2012, and who knows how they would've finished in a full 2020 season instead of a 60-game sprint.

And the Nationals expect to continue winning. General manager Mike Rizzo's goal was never to win one championship and then start over from scratch. He has always strived to sustain success over the long haul, perhaps the most difficult challenge in professional sports.

How do you do it? Well, you have to know which players to keep long-term and which players to part with. You need to be able to replace those departed players with a new crop of young talent, and then you need to develop the next wave of young players to be ready to take over a few years later.

You need ownership that's willing to spend. Not outrageously, but enough to snag key free agents when you need them and enough to convince the players you want to re-sign to actually re-sign long-term.

And, yeah, you also need a little bit of luck. You need everything to come together at the right time. You need the players you spend big bucks on to avoid career-altering injuries. And you need to strike gold with a few unheralded trades and signings that prove far more significant than anyone knew when they were made.

This is a tenuous time for the Nationals franchise. They've already lost a good number of players from their World Series roster (most of them for the right reason) and they're going to lose more in the next year or two. They're banking on an aging and very expensive rotation to lead the way once again without any can't-miss pitching prospects waiting in the wings to help out in 2021.

They made a bold trade last week to address a gaping hole in their lineup, but they've got several more significant holes to fill before the season begins.

And they're competing in a division that includes an outstanding (and still young) three-time defending champion, a big-market club with a new owner desperate to make a big splash, another big-market club with a new team president who has a track record for winning big in the short-term and a former cellar-dweller coming off a surprising postseason appearance with plenty of young talent already on the roster.

The Nationals don't want to find themselves in the position the Cubs now find themselves in. But who in Chicago saw this coming a couple of years ago?

Certainly not the man who used to coach there and now manages here.