The year Anthony Rizzo made his debut with the Cubs, they lost over 100 games. Four years later, they were World Series champions. Rizzo was a part of the fabric of the 2016 team that changed what it meant to be a Cub forever, but he was one of the only players who had gone through the lean years of the early 2010s.
Rizzo, who returned to the Cubs on Saturday on a one-day contract to officially retire with the team before becoming an ambassador, has had a few years to think about the legacy of that 2016 team.
“It’s overwhelming. It’s amazing,” Rizzo said. “When we won that [World Series], that global impact we had on a fanbase, on generations of Cubs fans, is still lasting.”
In Rizzo’s decade-long tenure with the Cubs, he saw them through the rise out of the losing seasons of the first three years of his Cubs career. And by the time Craig Counsell took the reins of the Milwaukee Brewers as a new manager in 2015, Rizzo’s personality and style of play had already impacted the team so much so that as an opposing manager Counsell could sense it from across the diamond.
He described Rizzo as the heart and “the engine of those Cubs teams.”
“It was because [it] felt like he was impacting everything,” Counsell said. “From the team’s personality to their play on the field [and] what you felt from them on the other side. And that’s a real tribute to Rizzo. You don’t try to do that, it’s just kind of who you are, and he made a big impact in that way, and you felt it from the other side.”
Cubs fans got the thrill of seeing what the Cubs teams of 2015-2017 could do, and then they lived through saying goodbye to many of those players at the 2021 trade deadline, including Rizzo. That might this weekend’s reunion all the sweeter. Rizzo has been back to Wrigley, in 2024 as an opposing player, but on Saturday, Rizzo got to live out what is probably a dream of many a Cubs player: He took in most of the game from the left field bleachers, enjoying a few beers and even getting in on a cup snake.
He chose his spot in the bleachers well; the second-inning Moises Ballesteros home run (the first of Ballesteros’s career) went into the left field seats, where it glanced off of Rizzo’s hand before another fan grabbed it.
That was Rizzo’s plan, as he shared before the game, but what came as a surprise to fans was the fact that he was passing out coupons for a drink on him and that he would sing the seventh-inning stretch from those seats with Eddie Vedder and Cindy Crawford at his side.
Rizzo’s natural sense of levity — a trait he attributes at least in part to his mom’s annual New Year’s resolution of “Live it up” — was on display Saturday, giving the Cubs faithful a boost on what turned out to be a disappointing afternoon. The Cubs lost 5-4 to the Rays, despite taking a 3-0 lead after four innings. And they squandered runners on first and third with no outs in the ninth inning.
But days like that are a part of winning baseball in the long run. Before the game, Rizzo said the rainy days are as important as the sunny ones. The tough losses also help us better soak in the big wins.
“You have to go through the storm, and those dark days were some of my favorite days, honestly, as a baseball player,” Rizzo said. “Of figuring out who you are as a person. You can’t appreciate the sunny days without a lot of rainy days. And I really live by that, because those dark days teach you and they make you grow.”
Rizzo can, of course, speak to dark days as a baseball player and as a man. As a part of a team, he’s been through losing seasons and big disappointments. As an individual, he fought through a lymphoma diagnosis as a minor leaguer in the Red Sox farm system.
Those experiences, coupled with his naturally jocular disposition, made for the right combination in a team leader. Rizzo first asserted himself in that role as a young player in 2012, when he was ready to take on the entire Reds dugout, but Rizzo said he felt like he truly took on the role when he learned to invest in his teammates as the veteran in the clubhouse. That was something he said he experienced as a young player, when guys like Starlin Castro, Alfonso Soriano, and David DeJesus modeled things for him, and later in his career, Rizzo became that guy for others.
Players like Ian Happ, who debuted the year after the Cubs won the World Series, said there are two moments from early in his career in particular that stand out to him: One, when Rizzo insisted on having Happ’s locker near his, even going so far as to remove another player’s nameplate from a locker to replace it with Happ’s; and two, when Happ homered in Pittsburgh on Father’s Day in 2017 and Rizzo was one of the first guys to give him a hug because he recognized the significance of what had happened. Happ lost his father Keith to brain cancer in March 2016.
“He just always had that ability to know what was going on around him, regardless of what was happening with himself,” Happ said.
Almost a decade after that World Series title, there are some parallels between the Cubs teams Rizzo thrived with and the 2025 club. This year’s team has gone through a few tough seasons, like the 2021 selloff that sent Rizzo to the Yankees and the 88-loss 2022 team, and they have had some good-but-not-quite seasons in 2023 and 2024. But with two weeks remaining in the regular season, the Cubs are back in the playoff picture.
But it’s not quite the same. The down years were much fewer than in Cubs eras past, and even the not-so-good years were still winning seasons. Happ has been there for all of that, and he senses a difference from how things might have gone before Rizzo helped shift the paradigm.
“We didn’t have to go through the endless losing and rebuilding and selling,” Happ said. “I’ve been really lucky to not have to do that, and that’s because of [Rizzo]. It’s because of those guys. It’s because of Theo [Epstein] and Jed [Hoyer] and guys that have set the standard on what this organization is supposed to be and that expectation.”
With a couple of weeks left, the Cubs are still safely in the top wild card spot, which would mean they would host the wild card round the week after the regular season ends. This would represent the first playoff appearance for the Cubs since 2020 and the chance to win a postseason game for the first time since the 2017 National League Championship Series.
That might seem like a long time, but in years past, Cubs fans might have been delighted to only have to wait five years in between playoff berths. And all things considered, there’s something to be said for even being in meaningful games so late in the season. Losing a 5-4 game against the Rays on September 13 means something because the Cubs have postseason seeding to think about.
“It’s September baseball now. They’re right in the thick of it,” Rizzo said. “You’ve got to enjoy it. You’ve got to lean on each other the most.”
Getting a wild card spot might not be so bad, either. Rizzo and the 2015 Cubs made the playoffs as a wild card team and advanced all the way to the NLCS. They were swept by the Mets that year, but that experience undoubtedly played a role in preparing them for what was to come the following season.
“You get into October, I think as a young ballclub, going through the wild card route is almost more beneficial than having that first round bye just so you can get hot and get those nerves out. If you can win two out of those three, you roll into the division series, and anything can happen,” Rizzo said.
