Leavin' time

 Wizards are just like us mortals, it turns out. They may not have an expiration date, but their shine sure does.

This might be why Theo Epstein is weighing anchor and leaving the north side of Chicago, or it may not be. In any case, he's done what he can do. The man who engineered the end of 86 years of dramatic suffering in Boston came to Chicago and did the same thing, against much greater odds. After all, the baseball gods only tormented the Boston Red Sox; the Chicago Cubs, they completely neglected.

But Theo came in and built the Cubs into a World Series champion, ending 108 dry and mostly irrelevant years. The Cubs have not been back since, the Series receding from them every subsequent year like an ocean liner vanishing over the horizon. Not even the resident wizard could find a way to sustain the magic.

This in no way suggests Theo's powers are in decline, because he has made the Cubs a consistent winner, and there might be more dazzle in that than in the gleaming wonder of 2016. For 108 years, after all, the Cubs' signature was long stretches of helplessness interrupted by brief periods of OK-ness. If they'd had a team coat of oarms, it would have been Eddie Miksis or Bob Ramazzotti booting a ground ball in front of the College of Coaches, rampant on a field of beige.

Those Cubs are not these Cubs. On Epstein's watch, after all, these Cubs have won a World Series, reached the NLCS three times and made the playoffs in five of the last six seasons. After missing the playoffs last year, they rebounded to win the NL Central in 2020 under first-year manager David Ross, one of the heroes of the 2016 World Series.

But it's been mostly diminishing returns in the playoffs since 2016: The Cubs reached the NLCS in 2017, lost in the wild-card round in 2018, missed the playoffs in 2019 and lost again in the wild-card round in 2020.

None of this can explicitly be laid at Theo's feet, but it does suggest his wizardry has lost some of its potency after nine years on the north side. A change of venue, therefore, would seem the best remedy for that -- for both the wizard, and for the team that so benefited from his skills.

Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn't. That's what Old Lodgeskins said at the end of "Little Big Man."

Theo's version was to repeatedly observe that baseball executives are good for about ten years in one place, and then it's time to move on.

Both are right. And both amount to the same thing.