Q factor: Cubs’ competitive window needed Jose Quintana trade ‘like oxygen’

Who needs left-hander Jose Quintana, especially after watching prospects Eloy Jimenez and Dylan Cease start to come of age with the White Sox?

The better question for the critics might be, ‘‘Where would the Cubs be without him?’’

Before the Cubs-lost-the-trade bandwagon starts filling up anew with woulda-coulda grousing at the sight of Jimenez roaming the outfield at Wrigley Field in a Sox uniform the next two days, consider that 2017 Cubs-Sox trade through the prism of a different pair of names.

Not the heralded Cubs prospects — Jimenez and right-hander Cease — who went to the Sox and now appear to be cornerstones in their rebuilding plans, but left-hander Brett Anderson and right-hander Eddie Butler.

Anderson and Butler made 17 combined starts for the defending World Series champion Cubs in the first half of 2017, the former as a low-cost flier for the back of the rotation that quickly failed and the latter as a shaky backup for injured Kyle Hendricks.

By the All-Star break, the Cubs were 5½ games out of first place with a losing record, and team president Theo Epstein later acknowledged he was perhaps one bad week from pulling the plug on the season and selling off short-term veteran contracts at the deadline.

Enter Quintana.

‘‘We needed that like oxygen at the time,’’ Cubs manager Joe Maddon said. ‘‘He stabilized the whole situation among the starters and how we were pitching.’’

Maybe Quintana’s contribution in 2017 gets overlooked because of all the hangover talk, among other storylines, or because of his clunker against the Dodgers in the game in which the Cubs were eliminated from the National League Championship Series.

But they won 10 of his 14 starts down the stretch, including his Cubs debut, in which he struck out 12 in seven scoreless innings in Baltimore, and a three-hit shutout in September against the Brewers.

It’s not a leap to wonder where the Cubs’ competitive window would be now without the Quintana trade then.

‘‘Totally different,’’ Maddon said. ‘‘It would have been hard to survive the latter part of ’17 without him.’’

Never mind last season after free-agent whiffs on right-handers Yu Darvish and Tyler Chatwood.

Maybe if the Cubs had been able to develop even one starting pitcher in the first five years of Epstein’s regime, the need wouldn’t have been so urgent, the cost so high.

Quintana made 32 starts for the sixth consecutive season in 2018. Only three other active pitchers have done that at any point in their careers: Jon Lester, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer (four if you count free agent James Shields).

‘‘There are certainly arguments on both sides, and I understand fans who are upset about the deal,’’ Epstein said. ‘‘But basically we made a series of decisions [the last two years] to continue to invest in this group, whether it was with complementary free-agent signings or trading that next wave of prospects in order to give us the ‘now’ pitching that we needed. It was part of the plan.

‘‘When we went over our international-bonus [limits] strategically [in 2013 to] sign Eloy and [infielder] Gleyber [Torres], part of the narrative we told ourselves to justify it was that we hopefully could create a lot of prospect value in this group to be able to add to this core that we started to really believe in.’’

The Cubs traded Torres, who became an All-Star shortstop, to the Yankees for three months of closer Aroldis Chapman in a deal that put them over the top during the 2016 championship season.

With contract control through 2020 on a club-friendly deal, one way for the Cubs to look at Quintana’s value as a 30-starts-a-year pitcher is this: He has given them a 3.92 ERA in 60 starts for a little more than half (roughly $17.5 million) of what they’ve paid Darvish for his 4.75 ERA in 23 starts ($33.8 million).

‘‘It would have been interesting to see how it would have turned out the other way, trying to preserve all of our prospect depth along the way,’’ Epstein said. ‘‘But at some point in a really competitive environment, especially as focused as we’d been internally on hitting [and] knowing we’d have to bring in pitching from the outside, those were the types of deals we anticipated, and we tried to execute as well as we could along the way.’’