There's always next year; and still this year.

[Little Slide Rooter]

Some posters who will remain nameless have a habit of embarrassing themselves in the heat of a game thread. Though equal parts annoying and comical, I've seen people react a lot worse while watching a game (or string of games) that's not going our way.

 

But to take it the next step and take on this over the top 'oh God, what if we're bad now' anxiety is just irrational.

 

Me, I may not have any kind of advanced stats to explain why everything bad is actually good and everything good is great. But I can tell you that we have a team built to win a lot more games than not both the remainder of this season, and even more beyond that. But what I can deduce is that our big bats remain mostly productive. Soon, we'll have our lead off hitter back. When this happens, the lineup as a whole falls back into place. By this, I mean that with Fowler gone, we've had to compensate at the top of the order at the expense of the bottom, and replacing the bottom of the order with filler. We're not going to have to do that now. Our starting pitching may not return to where it was the first 2 months of the season, but it's going to stabilize in between, and when the smoke clears, we'll have a rotation good enough to give up less runs than produced by the offense on a regular basis. Our bullpen is a bullpen. We have a reliable back end. Edwards seems to be getting more comfortable as a high-ish leverage guy, and I don't not trust Wood and Cahill with a lead of 3 runs or more. The rest is a revolving door, but the other 2-3 guys in pretty much every bullpen are just that. Our big problem there is that we'd relied on Grimm as a near sure thing in the back end, and that hasn't happened. If he pulls it together, great. If not, we'll make up for it via trade. We probably will anyway.

 

So here's what's happening. Worst case scenario, we enter the ASB with a 5.5 game lead. We're going to the playoffs. Probably as the division champs, but if not, there aren't enough teams than are better than us in wild card contention. At that point, we may win, we may not. Now I know that some of you 20-40 somethings have been waiting well over a century for a Championship, but that can never be guaranteed. If we win, awesome. If not, we can take it however we choose.

 

But the fact remains that going forward, we'll have Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Addison Russell, Willson Contreras, Kyle Schwarber, probably Javy Baez, maybe Jorge Soler, another year of Ben Zobrist. There also Jason Heyward, who can't possibly be this bad.

 

We also have Jon Lester, Jake Arrieta, and Kyle Hendricks. Maybe Super Jake's gone forever. If so, we have another year of serviceable, back end starter Jake. And we have the resources to upgrade by a lot.

 

The bottom line is that this team was not built to win A World Series. It was built to remain in position to reach the playoffs for many, many years to come, in which case, it's a crap shoot.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

Counterpoint: everything is ruined forever

[Liam Neeson]

[CubinNY]

I'm not watch until after The ASB. I'm going to pretend the season started in July. And the Cubs have a 5 game handicap b/c all the other teams in the division are jerks.