MLB Spring Training is here and many sources have reported over the last two days that 2016 World Champion is on the Injured List, again. At first I thought nothing of the news then Sports Mockery covered the story and I decided we needed to cover the story for today’s Binary Response. Please sign up to get our Binary Response articles directly in your inbox!
Kris Bryant’s latest setback with the Rockies isn’t just another injury blurb on the crawl; it’s the final confirmation that a Hall of Fame trajectory got derailed by a body that couldn’t cash the checks his talent kept writing. And if you’re a Cubs fan still using that as fuel to call him soft, that says a lot more about you than it does about him.
The Sports Mockery piece gets one thing exactly right: by the end of year five, Bryant had a Cooperstown path in front of him. In his first two seasons, he stacked Rookie of the Year, MVP, and a central role in ending a 108-year title drought, with numbers that matched the best player on the best team label rather than just riding along for the parade.
From 2015–2019, Bryant wasn’t some streaky, empty-calories slugger; he was a complete offensive player who got on base, hit for power, and played all over the diamond while doing it. The strikeouts that were nitpicked in 2015 turned into a guy posting OPS in the high .800s and .900s and ranking among the game’s elite bats before injuries started chipping away at his availability.
One of the most frustrating parts of Bryant’s Chicago story is how quickly a portion of the fanbase turned quiet guy who doesn’t do drama into he doesn’t care. The narrative that grew out of the extension saga turned contract talks into a character indictment, and once you paint a player as rejecting life-changing money, it becomes a personality referendum, not a fact-based discussion.
That’s where the soft label found life. Suddenly every nagging injury was evidence he didn’t want it enough, as if someone with his résumé and competitive history woke up one day and decided, Actually, I’m good on greatness now. It ignored the reality that you don’t grind through the minor leagues, play all over the field for the sake of roster flexibility, and then just tap out because criticism got loud.
If you’re a Rockies fan, the frustration is easy to understand. You watched your team commit seven years and massive money and got only a fraction of the games and production that were expected, with stat lines that don’t resemble the player Chicago watched from 2015–2019.
Once the degenerative back issues and chronic lower-body problems became public, the narrative should have shifted completely. This isn’t a guy milking injured list stints; this is someone whose body is literally breaking down in his early 30s, after repeated trips to the IL for plantar fasciitis, heel problems, back strain, and other related injuries that all connect back to the same fundamental health decline.
When Bryant talks about waking up every day to test his back and never getting the relief he’s hoping for, that’s not the language of a disinterested millionaire. It’s the language of someone watching the thing that defined his entire life slip through his fingers in slow motion, knowing the criticism is coming anyway.
Zooming out, there’s a bigger pattern here. Chicago has a strange habit of turning its stars into villains on the way out the door. With Bryant, the revisionist history is particularly aggressive — suddenly the guy who was central to 2016 and who posted star-level offensive numbers for most of his tenure is remembered primarily for not signing the extension and underperforming late.
Part of that is the way the Cubs’ front office handled the era. When you break up a core without immediately replacing winning with more winning, fans need somewhere to aim the disappointment, and the guys who left — Bryant, Rizzo, Báez — became easier targets than ownership or the baseball operations group. Another part is modern sports culture; hot takes travel farther than nuanced ones, so soft, overrated, always hurt gets more engagement than elite player whose body betrayed him.
The Colorado chapter gives those narratives numbers to hang onto. You can point at the slash lines, the games missed, the lack of power, and pretend that’s who he always was, instead of realizing that’s what’s left when chronic injuries and a degenerating back grind down a former MVP. It becomes convenient proof for people who already decided what they wanted to believe about him.
If you only know Kris Bryant as that bad Rockies contract, then anger makes sense. But if you actually remember his play as a Chicago Cub, anger isn’t the honest response — sadness is.
He deserves to be seen as the Rookie of the Year who immediately justified the hype. As the MVP who was the best player on a team that did the one thing everyone said the franchise couldn’t do. As the versatile defender who played third, outfield, and wherever else he was needed without public complaint. As the star who, by all reasonable accounts, stayed out of off-field drama and handled an absurd spotlight with professionalism while his character got dragged over contract narratives he never publicly weaponized.
None of that is undone by what happened in Colorado. If anything, the revelation of just how bad his back is — and how long he’s been trying to push through it — should make Cubs fans more protective of his legacy, not more dismissive. What we’re watching now is not a superstar checking out; it’s a superstar paying the bill for years of max-effort baseball on a body that, in the end, couldn’t hold up.
Here’s the thing, folks: Calling it a damn shame is exactly right, but it’s important to be clear about what’s shameful. It’s not that Bryant failed Chicago, or even that he failed Colorado. It’s that the game failed him in the most unforgiving way it knows. Taking away his health long before it should have, then handed the microphone to people more interested in being right about their early skepticism than in telling the full story of a great player whose career arc got bent by forces he couldn’t outwork.
With that… If you’re a Cubs fan, you don’t have to pretend the Rockies contract is anything but a disaster to also admit this: Kris Bryant gave you some of the best baseball of your life as a fan, and the way his story is ending doesn’t erase what he was. You can acknowledge the disappointment in what came after Chicago and still choose to talk about him first as a champion, an MVP, and one of the central figures in the most important team this franchise has ever had.
If you cannot play with them, then root for them.