This story was excerpted from Jordan Bastian's Cubs Beat newsletter.

It’s very much that time of year again, which is to say that it’s time to prepare ourselves for the 2025 baseball season the same way we’ve done it for the last few years – by breaking down the 30 teams into a handful of nebulously defined tiers.

There was an urgency to how the Cubs constructed their roster over the offseason.

Six enormous Japanese lanterns took their place on the warning track, spotlights illuminating them inside the Tokyo Dome.

Derrek Lee can still recite some of the chants that fans created to cheer on his dad during his days playing baseball in Japan.