Anthony Rizzo’s return reminds how far Cubs have come, casts spotlight on 2025 team’s winning expectations

Expectations in Wrigleyville weren’t a thing when Anthony Rizzo arrived for his major league debut.

“I came up on a really bad team,” Rizzo recounted Saturday, as the Cubs celebrated his retirement.

That Cubs squad, in the darkest days of Theo Epstein’s rebuilding project, lost 101 games. The next season, it was 96 losses, and 89 a year after that.

But once a rebuilt Cubs team, with Rizzo at its core, reached the playoffs in 2015, there was no looking back. They won it all in 2016 and established expectations of winning every year that exist to this day.

“He was the foundation, the building block of turning the Cubs into [a team that has] the expectation of being in the playoffs and winning,” left fielder Ian Happ, Rizzo’s former teammate, said Saturday. “He always set the standard.”

Fast forward to 2025, and these Cubs carry those expectations, expected to deliver with the kind of deep October run that hasn’t happened since Rizzo was manning first base.

This squad is trying to end a postseason drought and return to winning big after a lull in the franchise’s fortunes. But it’s far from what Rizzo & Co. went through.

For this generation of Cubs, the weight of expectations has been there the whole time.

“It’s not the same,” Happ said. “We haven’t made the playoffs in a minute, and that stinks. Haven’t won a playoff game in a long time, and that stinks. But we’ve been above .500. We didn’t have to go through the endless losing and rebuilding and selling and selling and selling.

“I’ve been really lucky to not have to do that, and that’s because of Anthony, because of those guys … that have set the standard for what this organization is supposed to be and the expectation. I’m lucky [and grateful] to those guys to not have to do that.”

Happ obviously embraces those expectations – or at least prefers them to the alternative – and it shows how hungry this team is to earn the sort of love fans heaped on Rizzo on Saturday, when he toured around the warning track and spent the game in the bleachers.

The afternoon-long party ended on a sour note for fans, though, who revealed what sort of outcome they expect, voicing their displeasure after righty reliever Brad Keller gave up a tiebreaking homer in the ninth inning and walked the next batter.

The Cubs coughed up a lead and lost 5-4 to a sub-.500 Rays team. They were done in by being outhit 14-6, surrendering two late homers and not cashing in with a runner on third and nobody out in the bottom of the ninth inning, not the weight of expectations.

“It’s a really good group, super resilient all year,” Happ said after the game. “We’re in a really good spot. If we’re playing really tough games and losing like this, that’s part of baseball. We’re putting ourselves in position [to win] quite a bit. If we keep doing that, we’ll be all right.”

Once the calendar flips to October, though, outcomes like Saturday’s won’t just be the sort of things that happen during a six-month marathon. They’ll be potential season-enders.

“Today was a tough loss, obviously, but we never quit,” starting pitcher Colin Rea said. “We’ve got a lot of guys who come in every single day, and they’re ready to get the job done. Shouldn’t expect anything else moving forward.”

There are those expectations again, a Wrigleyville staple thanks to Rizzo.

“After we won the World Series, we knew,” Rizzo said. “Being here, you hear all the stories from all the fans. … It’s overwhelming, it’s amazing.

“When we won, that global impact we had on the fan base, on generations of Cubs fans, is still lasting. … Happ got up in ‘17, and he was in the thick of it. He heard all the stories from everyone because he was here.

“For those guys to feel that, it’s what you want here.”