As the baseball calendar flipped to 2019, you didn’t have to look hard to find a veritable hype machine for the depth of the National League’s Central Division.
The Chicago Cubs seemed eager for another chance for their emerging core to add to their 2016 success, the Milwaukee Brewers boasted the best player in the league and were poised for a second consecutive playoff run, and the St. Louis Cardinals had just landed Paul Goldschmidt in an attempt to end their minor postseason drought. The Pittsburgh Pirates were the Pittsburgh Pirates, but even they looked poised to rally around their underdog image for one more season, as the Chris Archer deal from the previous summer suggested.