Kyle Hendricks’ Brutal Decline Is the Absolute End of the 2016 Cubs
Kyle Hendricks’ Brutal Decline Is the Absolute End of the 2016 Cubs
The veteran starter, now banished to the bullpen after a horrid start to the season, is the last thread connecting the current Cubs to their 2016 glory.
Kyle Hendricks was never supposed to become one of baseball’s best pitchers. The tall righty out of Dartmouth — an Ivy League school that has produced only nine major leaguers in the draft era (since 1965) — was taken in the eighth round out of college in 2011, and topped out as just the No. 11 prospect in the Chicago Cubs’ farm system coming up. In the majors, his his strikeout rate is 14% below league average, he’s never averaged more than 88.3 mph on his fastball and he has been the sixth-softest-throwing starter in baseball1 over the course of his career.
And yet, Hendricks was a Cy Young candidate at his peak, finishing among the Top 10 in voting twice and winning the National League ERA crown in 2016. He finished sixth in pitching Wins Above Replacement2 in 2016, was Top-30 in 2017, 2018 and 2019, and climbed back to ninth in 2020. In total, Hendricks was the 10th-best pitcher in baseball by WAR over that span, and he was easily the ace of the Cubs. His 1.42 ERA for Chicago in the 2016 postseason also led the team as it won its first championship in 108 years.
All of which is to say, Hendricks has already far exceeded expectations in his MLB career, providing a consistent counter-example to the idea that crafty pitchers can no longer thrive in the modern game. But no one can get MLB hitters out on command and guile forever. While he bounced back from a pair of underwhelming seasons to produce a 3.74 ERA with 2.1 WAR last year, Hendricks was pulled from Chicago’s rotation this week after he posted a 10.57 ERA in his first seven starts of the 2024 season.
Because of his struggles, Hendricks went into Thursday’s action on pace for -3.7 WAR this season. And according to data from Sportradar, that ERA was 14th-worst of any pitcher (with a minimum of 20 innings) through his first seven starts of a season since the 1994 strike:
(A subsequent shaky relief appearance in Thursday’s loss against the Atlanta Braves — he allowed 4 hits, a walk and 2 earned runs in 2 innings — actually lowered Hendricks’ overall ERA for the season to 10.47.)
The Cubs, who sit second in the NL Central and have designs on legitimate contention, could have used a better performance from their one-time ace — even though their rotation ranks seventh in WAR as it is. (Hello, Shota Imanaga!) But the real significance of Hendricks’ sharp early-season decline and demotion is symbolic.
He is the last remaining player from that curse-breaking 2016 Cubs team who outlasted Cleveland in a seven-game World Series for the ages. All of the other members of that squad were scattered across the majors years ago — most notably at midseason of 2021, when Chicago shipped away icons Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo and Javier Baez (and then released Jake Arrieta) within a matter of days.
Let’s chart out a timeline of how the 2016 Cubs’ roster was dismantled over time, using Win Shares3 to track the percentage of that team’s value that departed the team by a particular season:
In this accounting, 21% of the 2016 Cubs’ value was produced by players who were no longer with the team by the start of 2017; an additional 17% was lost by the 2018 season, and so forth. The halfway threshold was crossed by 2020, as 55% of the championship team’s Win Shares were gone before the start of that season. By the end of 2021, 86% had departed — and Chicago was back below .500, where they’d started out in Hendricks’ rookie season of 2014.
(That 7% still in blue in 2024 belongs to Hendricks, who had 22 of the team’s 309 Win Shares in 2016.)
By all rights, that Cubs era probably should have produced more than just the one championship — or at least something better than a 4-9 postseason record from 2017 onward. But through it all, Hendricks was (mostly) a stabilizing force in the rotation; it wasn’t his fault that Chicago couldn’t parlay its dynastic potential into reality.
Now he serves as the last reminder of that period’s glories and missed opportunities. The future of the Cubs belongs instead to names like Javier Assad, Hayden Wesneski, Michael Busch, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Cade Horton, Matt Shaw and Ben Brown. The question is whether Hendricks can bounce back enough to still contribute something to the Cubs’ next playoff run, or if this is the end of the line for him — and the championship legacy he carries with him.
Filed under: Baseball
Among those who threw four-seam fastballs at least 40% of the time — sorry, R.A. Dickey.
Using my JEFFBAGWELL version of WAR — aka the Joint Estimate Featuring FanGraphs and B-R Aggregated to Generate WAR, Equally Leveling Lists.
Which simply takes WAR, adds back in replacement-level value in proportion to playing time, zeroes out negative values and scales so that the sum of a team’s Win Shares is always 3 times its number of wins.