Cubs Heroes and Goats offseason edition

The offseason began this week with shuffling on the coaching staff. The off-season of course begins in earnest after the World Series when free agency begins and players start finding their new homes for the 2018 season. Al and the other writers will thoroughly cover those stories and the credible rumors ahead of those moves as the offseason unfolds. I’ll surely be weighing in on those stories in the comments sections. But, I plan to continue bringing you Heroes and Goats themed content this offseason. Today I wanted to give you an overview of my plans and to solicit your choice of content for one of the columns.

The first column I will be bringing you will be a look back at the top 10 Hero and Goat games of the year (by WPA). Starting next week, we will look at the 10th-worst Goat game of the year and we’ll count down to the single worst Goat performance of the year. We’ll look back at the game, the significant in game action that lead to the negative WPA for the game, and probably look at some context within the season of the game and those events. After we reach No. 1 on the Goat side, we’ll shift over to the Hero side and count from 10 down to 1 on that side (out with the bad first and then build you back up with the good last). I’ll generally be bringing you one column per week over the off-season early in the week, depending on what other content Al and the other writers have and what other major news is breaking.

The second column will be to take a look back at a historic season from Cubs past and recreate the season for Heroes and Goats purposes. Our good friends at Fangraphs have broken down Heroes and Goats going back to the 1970s and so I’m going to look game by game at a season to be chosen by you the readers to recap. I won’t be writing full length columns on every game, but will show you who was on each podium for each game and keep track of the cumulative standings. It will feel like watching a season in fast forward. Along the way, I hope to talk both about the performances on the field of key contributors and also to bring you some tidbits on most of the players on that particular year’s team. If you are a more recent Cubs fan, you may learn something about some players you didn’t know much about. If you are a longer time Cubs fan, hopefully this will bring you some fond (and probably a few not so fond) memories of players and events of years gone by. This column will also generally run once per week, later in the week and based on where it fits in around other content and the significant news as the off-season unfolds.

As usual, we’ll finish with a poll. In this instance, I want to know which season you’d like to see recapped. I’ve picked four seasons as possible subject matter for this column, I’d like to hear which one interests the most number of you. Please vote and please also let me know below if you have any suggestions about either of these columns.