‘We let it slip away’: Where do the Cubs go after falling short in the playoffs again?

This wasn’t the story the Cubs envisioned writing in 2026.

Their goal since last year ended painfully with the decisive Game 5 loss in the National League Division Series was to make a deeper postseason run. Instead, the Cubs’ playoff journey ended with a sweep in San Diego.

Now they must conduct an autopsy on their season and course correct the areas that contributed to their postseason demise.

While the two-game wild-card series is too small of a statistical sample size to glean much even with the poor all-around performance, a common sentiment emerged in the aftermath: The Cubs’ poor play in September — particularly the 2-4 final week of the regular season that cost them hosting the wild-card series at Wrigley Field — was a blow.

“We left a lot of wins on the table in the last month of the season,” second baseman Nico Hoerner said after Wednesday’s loss.

More broadly, though, the best offense and defense in the regular season failed to fully capitalize on those strengths, partly handicapped by a beleaguered pitching staff, while having the expected NL MVP, Pete Crow-Armstrong, delivering a top-two offensive season in Cubs history.

“As I sit here today it feels like we let an opportunity slip away that we won’t get back,” president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said Friday. “We have to work really hard to get back to that place. Losses like this are really motivating, but in the moment right now, I feel for the fans who supported this team so much because I feel like they deserved the long run this year, and we let it slip away.”

For a team that produced the third-best run differential (plus-147) in the majors, trailing only the two teams with the best records in the Milwaukee Brewers and Los Angeles Dodgers, the Cubs’ inability to get anything going in the final week of the season and into the playoffs represented a frustrating development.

“I mean, whatever, you can list off this stat and this stat and this stat, it’s always going to feel like a missed opportunity when you get to the playoffs because it’s hard to get here,” manager Craig Counsell said after Wednesday’s elimination. “Every team is going to have strengths and things they’re really good at. We were good at some things. We weren’t good enough at some other things over the course of the regular season.

“In the end, we’re walking away unfulfilled and disappointed.”

The Cubs know they can’t expect Crow-Armstrong to put up a 45-homer season every year. But they have a clear offensive core returning, starting with their center fielder and third baseman Alex Bregman at the top of the lineup. Their combined 0-fer in the Padres’ sweep won’t sit well for either player during the ensuing months.

And for an offense that managed just one extra-base hit in the series, coming in the final inning, that leaves behind an unfilled filling for an offensive unit that produced so many scoring opportunities in the regular season.

For a franchise that has experienced the playoffs in consecutive seasons five times in its 150-year history, getting there back-to-back years is an accomplishment, even with the Cubs not accomplishing their goal of winning the World Series.

What will it take to get the Cubs to the next level and win a title?

“I don’t know, I mean, I don’t really know if that’s ever a question we’ll be able to answer until we do achieve the ultimate goal and then I can be like, ‘Well, here you go,'” Crow-Armstrong said after their season ended. “We were challenged this year. I think that this team showed a lot of heart and a lot of fight through all the challenges. But I would say to start, like, I show up. I show up when it matters in these games. I think that would help us immediately, but that’s all I got right now.”

Bregman, a two-time World Series champion in Houston, has played in the postseason in each of his 10 big-league seasons. He did not hold back his frustration Wednesday.

“We’ve had playoff years where we lost and then we came back and won the next year so I feel like it starts now for everybody in this organization,” Bregman said of his playoff experience. “Assess the year and come back and be better next year because it wasn’t good enough.

“I look at it as a failure. We need to win.”

Pitching will rightfully get the most offseason attention for a group whose 6.1 fWAR ranked 27th in the regular season, well behind the next-worst playoff team in the NL (Padres, 14.8). Right-hander Ben Brown accounted for 2.0 of that pitching fWAR despite missing 3½ months of the season because of a stress reaction in his neck.

The Cubs have reasons to be proud of their season, especially with how they overcame pitching injuries that would have sunk most teams’ hopes. That doesn’t make how things ended any less painful.

“It takes time to be able to have some actual honest reflection and to be able to really diagnose and understand what transpired,” shortstop Dansby Swanson said. “It just stinks. It never gets any easier when it doesn’t end in a World Series win. … I think it’d be silly to say that we shouldn’t be proud of what we’ve done just as a group collectively what we’ve been able to accomplish — but at the same time, we’re so winning-oriented that there’s a big chunk of us that feels like this is a failure too. And so that’s kind of the constant battle that you go through.”

For all the memorable moments, walk-off wins, two 10-game winning streaks and a 10-game losing streak, injuries and Crow-Armstrong’s historic performance, the 2026 Cubs had plenty of components that made them dangerous entering the postseason. And yet how the year finished will be hard to shake until the they begin anew next season.

“We’re going to have to wait to accomplish the thing we really want to accomplish,” Counsell said. “There’s steps to success, and you’re on a path to success. We didn’t finish it this year and hope that this has to be part of the journey to the ultimate prize.”