The Cubs Are Like a Bad Rom-Com Boyfriend Right Now

Any clear-eyed decision-maker came to the conclusion that the Cubs need to be sellers at this trade deadline three weeks ago. Some of the world's most hopeless optimists (equal emphasis for each word in the phrase) root on the North Side Nine, though, so even entering the All-Star break, there were those who thought this team might reprise the success they had in the second half of last July, saving their season and forcing the front office to become trade-deadline buyers. That was an indefensible position, but we all hold some of those.

Hopefully, even those folks had the scales fall from their eyes this weekend. The Cubs eked out one more win than they deserved in a three-game home series against a solid but unspectacular Diamondbacks team, which is to say, they won one game. In the three contests, they scored four total runs, two of them after the first of their two losses was essentially decided. Too little, too late has been this team's secret motto since roughly the 2018 All-Star break, so it would be unreasonable to feel surprised about it, but eventually, this pattern has to spur action designed to interrupt it. 

Right?

We can all picture an early, almost throwaway scene in one of those romantic comedies from the peak years of that genre (around the turn of the century), where a frustrated girlfriend stomps out the door and shouts over her shoulder something like, "Give me a call when you grow up!" It's a wake-up call, lobbed rudely but righteously at a 20-something man who truly does need to make huge changes in his life, but who isn't yet ready to see it that way. He comes around over the next 90-100 minutes, of course, and the couple often reunites, but the point is what the line establishes: there's an immaturity at work here. It's a waste of the departing girlfriend's time, and even of the audience's, to watch this reasonably handsome, vaguely promising dude do nothing worthwhile with himself.

That's how I feel about the Cubs at this point. It's not clear to me what they're doing that is worth anyone's time, or why anyone should pay attention to them until they demonstrate not only an openness to change, but the real beginnings of it, and a good-faith intention to do more of it.

Shota Imanaga had another stellar start Sunday. Nico Hoerner continues to heat up in July, and Seiya Suzuki came up with a big hit. This team is vaguely promising, for a list of reasons much longer than those three players. They're also not going anywhere, until they grasp the magnitude of the change required here. They're going on six years as a dysfunctional offense, with two different cores of key contributors and plenty of money being spent on those six years' worth of lineups. Do they need to totally overhaul their organizational hitting development? Do they need to fire their hitting coaches (yet again)? Do they need a major overhaul of the player personnel, because something is wrong with the chemistry of this group? Maybe the answer to all of those is no, and they need to find yet another explanation. More likely, the answer to all of them is yes, but incompletely so, and they need to figure out how much weight to give each problem and potential solution.

At any rate, the uninspiring series loss this weekend was just the latest in a long line of them, and the only remarkable thing about it is the number of fans and organization members who persist in the expectation that something else will happen, without some pain. The Cubs have seven more games before the trade deadline, but not one of them matters. Nor did these three. If they don't undertake some form of serious and significant change, nothing they do on the field for the final two months will matter, either. The team is so far behind so many teams relevant to their short- and long-term prospects that they can't reassert themselves as an entity worthy of our attention until they decide to become that kind of relevant team.

Yes, that does mean seriously considering trading Justin Steele, despite his multiple remaining seasons of team control. Yes, it means listening open-minded and open-eared on Hoerner, and yes, it means trading Ian Happ if you can find somewhere he's willing to go. It means a lot of uncomfortable change, because while even Jed Hoyer now understands that his team is not a playoff-caliber one, there's a more important truth that doesn't seem to have settled into the minds of either Hoyer or many Cubs fans: the team isn't even close to being a serious contender for anything worth winning.

Thus, they need to be thinking the same way they were at the 2021 and 2022 trade deadlines, even though (or specifically because) they don't want to end up on as long and dispiriting a competitive timeline going forward as they were on in 2021 and 2022. This roster wasn't built to sell, and isn't well-positioned to do it, but that's because the front office was drastically wrong about the quality of the team it had assembled and developed. They're in a tough position from which to sell, but an even worse one from which to do anything else. They need to grow up and face some tough realities about their own unseriousness.