There's a goal Cubs third-base coach Willie Harris wants to accomplish before his time in baseball comes to an end. One day, he hopes, someone out there will give him a shot to achieve it.

As Willson Contreras and Jason Heyward said goodbye to Cubs fans over the weekend, a group of prospects who may one day fill their shoes looked on.

During a media scrum on Wednesday, exactly a week before the end of his first regular season in Major League Baseball, Seiya Suzuki was asked the question onlookers have wondered from the day he signed with the Cubs on a five-year, $85 million pact to now: “Are you an All-Star player going forward?” “At this stage, it’s where the best...

Trying to sum up the legacy that Jason Heyward will leave behind after seven seasons with the Cubs seems complicated.

But in the grand scheme of things, Heyward's impact goes far beyond the stats and the dollars.

When Hayden Wesneski walked off the mound at the end of his third career start for the Cubs on Wednesday, he didn’t think he had his best stuff all night. He said his slider — and particularly his two-strike slider — wasn’t playing the way he wanted it to, and that’s part of what forced him to grind through five-plus...

Back on July 26, on a sunny, 79-degree day in front of a crowd of 30,978 Cubs fans, Willson Contreras thought he was saying goodbye to the fans who’d shown him so much love since he debuted six years earlier. Contreras, like just about everyone else around Major League Baseball, thought that final home game before the trade deadline would...

For young players making their way through a full 162-game season for the first time, getting to the finish line is always the goal.

Knowing what it takes to get through a season and understanding how they have to prepare their body for that grind is one of those lessons they learn along the way. Then, when they've become "veterans," they'll have nailed out a routine that they know will get them all the way through year, one that just becomes natural for them the further along they get in their careers.

Over the last week, the Cubs made a slew of moves to shuffle around both their active and 40-man rosters.

Adbert Alzolay (activated from 60-day injured list), Jared Young (selected from Triple-A Iowa) and Esteban Quiroz (selected from Iowa) are now on the big league club, while moves involving Frank Schwindel (DFA'd and granted unconditional release), Sean Newcomb (DFA'd and sent outright to Iowa) and Rafael Ortega (placed on 60-day IL) opened up spots on both rosters.

With so little time left in the year, those moves have added another wrinkle to the decision-making the Cubs' front office will be doing this offseason — and more specifically, the decisions they'll make surrounding who to keep on the 40-man roster before the Rule 5 Draft.

Happy Monday, everyone.

After a week off due to Labor Day last Monday, we are back with another set of Monday morning thoughts. Because the Cubs are 24 games under .500 with 22 games remaining, there's not a whole lot of game-level stuff to worry about outside of seeing the continued development of a lot of the youngsters on the team.

Today's thoughts, then, are going to focus mostly on this offseason and the storylines for the Cubs in 2023. That's a year when they hope to be much more competitive than they've been this season. That's a year when offseason additions and jumps from the young guys might actually push them to being much more competitive than they've been this season.

So as we get closer to a very important offseason in this rebuild, that's what we should be talking about. And that's where these thoughts from yours truly are centered on.

Let's get into it. Here are some Cubs thoughts for Monday morning.