At this point I feel like I don't even have words for some fans. Like... what's the expectation here? Literally the only player the cubs traded away who's playing well is Rizzo and I guess technically Darvish but do we really care about a 35 year old pitcher at this point? And while I don't expect everyone to follow minor league players... the depth the cubs have in hitting in the minors right now is actually absurd. To be blunt, I am far more bullish on this version of a rebuild or whatever you want to call it than I was with the last group. The last group was super top heavy thanks to a lot of high round picks from being terrible but behind those players the organization lacked a lot of depth. The problem of that is when they had to raid the farm system in trades they quickly ran out of fuel.
Additionally, the amount of pitching this version has is vastly superior. With guys like Wicks, Herz, Franklin and Killian they have legit starting prospects and that's to say nothing of names like Keegan Thompson, Steele, Alzolay and Marquez who are MLB ready. Previous crop didn't have that. It was Hendricks and buy a lot of vet pitching/trade for it. And with that amount of pitching even guys who don't make it as starters have a chance to be valuable bullpen pieces. Steele and Thompson have both already shown the ability to pitch well out of the bullpen so much so that they were given chances to start.
And I mean at the end of the day the previous crop of players clearly had flaws. The mets exposed them n 2015. 2016 was fantastic when everything fell into place but then you saw several years after that looked a lot more like that 2015 team the mets exposed.