Why Chicago Cubs Will be Interesting to Follow in September

Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports

If you love the game of fantasy baseball but this hasn’t been your year, you might consider directing your eyes to the North Side of Chicago for the season’s final month. The Chicago Cubs may be giving us a glimpse into the future of baseball and in turn, fantasy baseball.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the call-ups of Arismendy Alcantara, Javier Baez, or Jorge Soler. Resident Cubs fan Craig Melissas has already given detailed opinions of Alcantara, Baez, and Soler and quite frankly, the guy knows his stuff. There’s no real need to repeat all of that. I’m also not going to be talking about Kris Bryant or Addison Russell. Honestly, I’m not talking about any one player as much as I am talking about an idea that may be on its way to Major League Baseball.

According to Gordon Wittenmyer of the Chicago Sun-Times, the Cubs use Jacob Turner, Felix Doubront, Jake Arrieta, Travis Wood, Kyle Hendricks, and Tsuyoshi Wada as their starting pitchers to finish the season. My California education tells me that that’s six guys, one more than most teams use.

But why do I think this is something that could catch on? After all, it’s not exactly uncommon for non-contenders to do unusual things at the end of the year. We all remember the Rockies using the 75 pitch limit + a handcuff/shadow reliever two years ago, right? That hasn’t exactly caught on.

The six-man rotation might have more legs, especially in a year like this one with pitcher after pitcher losing 1-2 years to Tommy John Surgery. In July, David Waldstein of the New York Times wrote about the possibilities in great detail but in the end, it basically came down to the idea that Texas Rangers ace Yu Darvish thinks a six-man rotation is a good idea.

Really, it’s not baseless in professional baseball. In the last few years, we’ve seen guys like the aforementioned Wada, Darvish, Seattle’s Hisashi Iwakuma, plus New York aces Hiroki Kuroda and Masahiro Tanaka make a big immediate impact on Major League Baseball, and that’s only looking at current players. All of them come from Japan, where they use a six-man rotation.

Now, remember that we’re only two years removed from the Washington National shutting down their best pitcher, Stephen Strasburg for the end of the regular season and the playoffs, despite having the league’s best record.

You hear it a lot, the game is a business. Teams see these players more and more as investments. Now, often protecting the investment is synonymous with helping the team on its quest to a championship. But as we saw, the Nationals were far more interested in 2013 and beyond than they were in best equipping themselves to take a very real chance at winning a World Series.

So, I am going to guess that many — if not all — teams, will be watching the Chicago Cubs in September with very close eyes. Remember, a five-man rotation used to be fairly uncommon. Things change in this sport. If the Cubs are a success story, we might see more teams go to a six-man rotation in future years.

I’m not saying we’ll see the majority of teams going to a six-man rotation in 2015. I don’t even think the Cubs running the table with perfect games would do that. But a success story will put the wheels in motion with some organizations.

Click Here for Part 2, what will happen to this Silly Little Game of Fantasy Baseball if pitchers are going every six games instead of five?