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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.