Chicago Cubs: Creating the perfect lineup of the 2000s

Creating the perfect Chicago Cubs lineup using players from the year 2000 to now.

With the baseball season on hold, now is the perfect time to look back. When it comes to the Chicago Cubs, nothing is more fun than looking back at the 2016 championship team, and we are certainly going to do a bit of that here. However, there is more to the recent history of this franchise than that 2016 team.

In this post, we are going to create the perfect lineup using players on the Chicago Cubs of the modern era. Any player who has played for the Cubs anytime from the year 2000 to now is eligible to be selected. Why start in 2000? Well, that’s about the time I really started to obsess over this team. The home run race between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire in 1998 drew me in and I have been hooked ever since. The year 2000 also feels like a nice, round number to start with.

A few ground rules to keep in mind before we get started. While any player who played with the Chicago Cubs from 2000-2019 is eligible to be selected, we are only going to take their time with the Cubs into account. Nomar Garciaparra was a great MLB player, but his time with the Cubs did not go well. We can’t just take everything he did with the Red Sox and say, “He’s an all-time great Cub!” That would just be silly.

Also, this lineup is being created to win a season’s worth of games, not just one single game. There may be some guys who could help the Cubs more in a single-game scenario, but we want to take into account long-term success throughout the length of an entire season.

Alright, let’s start putting this thing together. Here is the perfect lineup for the Chicago Cubs, using players from the modern era. We will get started with the catcher position.

Note: All stats for this post come via FanGraphs.