Taking a look back at the 10 players who had one really good or great year in their career while they were with the Cubs.
Year: 2008
WAR: 3.3
+3.0 WAR = 90.9% Improvement
The playoff teams of 2007 and 2008 are probably the least memorable of any Cubs teams in my lifetime. The 2007 team had only 85 wins, and benefitted from a weak NL Central. But the 2008 team was dominant, with 97 wins. Ryan Dempster had the best season of his career as a starter, and Ted Lilly and Carlos Zambrano were very good. Geovany Soto earned rookie of the year at catcher. And the Cubs got 20+ home runs from Soto, Derrick Lee, Mark DeRosa, Aramis Ramirez and Alfonso Soriano.
But the position player with the highest WAR for the Cubs in 2008 was a reserve infielder named Mike Fontenot.
Some of his WAR came from his defense, as he had a 0.8 WAR playing almost exclusively second base. This allowed the “primary” second baseman on the team, DeRosa to play 22 games at 3rd and 59 games in the outfield.
But in his limited at bats, Fontenot was a fantastic hitter in 2008, with a .305/.395/.514 slash line, giving him a 131 OPS+. He had 9 home runs and 22 doubles in only 284 plate appearances, and he struck out only 51 times compared to 34 walks.
He managed 2 singles in 6 at bats in the NLDS, a 3-games sweep at the hands of the Los Angeles Dodgers, which was the culmination of 8 straight losses in the postseason for the Cubs that started with the ill-fated Game 6 in the 2003 NLCS. The consecutive playoff sweeps in 2007 and 2008 are probably the reason that those seasons are not particularly memorable – at least for me.
Unfortunately, this series of posts is about players who had one great season, and for Fontenot, 2008 was about it. He followed it up with more regular playing time in 2009 for the Cubs, but only managed a 0.1 WAR, and a .236/.301/.377 slash line. He was disappointing again in 2010, and the Cubs shipped him off to San Francisco for a minor leaguer named Evan Crawford:
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/mike-fontenot-traded-to-giants/
He was released by the Giants before the 2012 season, and played briefly for the Phillies that year. In 2013 and 2014 he was with the Rays organization, then the Nationals, and finally back to Rays, but never appeared in the majors for those teams.
He had a 0.3 WAR in 2007 with the Cubs and 2011 with the Giants, but those were the other high-water marks for his career, which is why he landed at #1 on this list.
Here is an interview with Fontenot from 2 years ago:
And a pinch-hit grand slam from 2010:
Here’s a really good article on Fontenot from Matt Ostrowski at North Side Baseball, published in 2024:
https://northsidebaseball.com/news-rumors/chicago-cubs-history/remember-some-cubs-mighty-mike-fontenot-r563/
And another from Joey Ricotta at On Tap Sports Net from 2022:
https://ontapsportsnet.com/mlb/mike-fontenot-birthday-mlb-stats-chicago-cubs-trade-sammy-sosa/
Cubs in 7 
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