Chicago Cubs: 3 players who won’t be back in 2021

The Chicago Cubs might not bring back all of their familiar faces in 2021.

The Chicago Cubs are in a weird spot right now. They have Theo Epstein in charge of things for one more season but a good amount of people think that he will be let go before getting to that final year. No matter what, they are losing Theo who has been the best thing to ever happen to the organization. If he does come back for one more year, is he going to start their rebuild or try to win one more time?

Either way, it is a period of transition for an organization that has completely different expectations for itself now. The Cubs went from being the lovable losers to a team that dreads going through a tough rebuild. It seems to be inevitable now that some of their core might be on the way out. They have a lot of decisions to make over the next year or two and a lot of them might not be pretty.

We know who the stars of the Cubs are. Anthony Rizzo, Willson Contreras, Javier Baez, Kyle Schwarber, and Kris Bryant have been the best players on the team over the past half-decade or so. None of them are locked up long term right now but we can’t guess if they will be back or not. There are, however, some players that we can assume are locks to be gone.

They need to make sure that they are able to replace them with good players if they try to win one more time before Theo leaves. If they decide to start their inevitable rebuild, things might be different all around. These are the three players that feel like they will be gone in 2021: