Jon Lester had some words in mind for his critics last year, just before the pandemic took hold. He wasn’t fully ready to use the words yet, not with real oomph behind them. But he knew some felt he was washed up — or maybe on the razor’s edge of it — heading into his sixth season with the Cubs. And he knew his $25 million mutual option with the team for a Year 7 was unlikely to play out in his favor.
Lester didn’t care much about the money part, anyway, not after the Cubs had lavished him with a $155 million contract in the first place. What he really hoped for was to throw his final big-league pitch as a Cub before riding off into the sunset. Would he get the chance? Not knowing put him in an awkward position.
Anyway, he let the words slip out during a long, lazy conversation in Mesa, Arizona.
“When I get done and sit back?” he said, reclining in a patio chair in a Cubs hoodie and shorts, his hands locked behind his bald head. “I’ll look back at what I accomplished in this game. Then maybe I can say, ‘Screw you guys. I think I did all right for myself.’ ”
He did much better than that. It can easily be argued that Lester — who signed with the team as a free agent in 2015, leading to a preposterously elusive World Series championship — is the most important Cubs player in a century and more. And that might as well be ever.
But the Cubs have no use for him anymore.
Lester, 37, has alighted in Washington, signing with the Nationals for $5 million with a mutual option for 2022. The Cubs could’ve had him for a song. Instead, the 193-win lefty will slot into an absurdly talented Nats rotation behind Max Scherzer, Patrick Corbin and Stephen Strasburg and go after championship ring No. 4.
Would the romance of Wrigley Field really have topped that? It doesn’t matter anymore. The man isn’t done yet.
“It’ll be up to me,” he said. “I’ll decide when I can’t do this anymore.”
Lester was self-aware enough to know the last couple of years that his days as the Cubs’ ace were behind him. He was humble enough to be a cheerleader for Yu Darvish and Kyle Hendricks and a mentor to both of them and to anyone else who needed one. The stripped-down Cubs pitching staff of 2021 undoubtedly could have used a mentor like Lester, but the rationale for keeping him apparently didn’t fit into ownership’s seal-the-vault-and-start-over plan.
So the Nats have him now. They have Kyle Schwarber, too. They’ve also signed first baseman Josh Bell, another big-time addition for manager Davey Martinez, who was the Cubs’ bench coach during the 2016 title run. This is what a team trying to win the whole shebang looks like.
And then there are the Cubs. Kris Bryant, Willson Contreras and any other big-name players on the North Side might as well be wearing “Kick me” signs. That’s short for “Are you going to kick me to the curb, too?”
The Ricketts family has pulled one Brink’s truck after another into the neighborhood to expand their fortune, yet they continue to cry poor. They’re counting bags of peanuts now. Meanwhile, their baseball team is a shell of its former self.
The Cubs are bad again. The Cubs are afterthoughts again. The Cubs are a drought-in-the-making again. Just deal with it, OK?
On the other side of town — oh, by the way — the White Sox are going for the jugular. The Sox are heavyweight contenders. The Cubs aren’t even pretenders. That can’t be a fun juxtaposition for Cubs fans.
“Screw you guys”?
That’s the message to Cubs fans. And it isn’t coming from Lester.
