(670 The Score) All the professed urgency can only do so much for a team that is the sum of its parts, so far still adding up to less than it should be.
If this is a reckoning, the conclusion is obvious, sitting right here in front of us. For a full season-and-a-half, the Cubs at this stage of their contending phase have proved to be a good team but not a great one, probably still the best of a weak division but now outstripped by multiple National League counterparts that do a better job both scoring runs and preventing them, generating consistent offense and deploying pitchers that miss bats.
2019 has been a whipsaw of highs and lows both for the outcomes of Cubs games and the fortunes of certain individual players, with clusters of wins and losses concurrent with both bold and energizing acquisitions and quiet minor league demotions for erstwhile top prospects developing more tarnish than gleam. And some with fine season numbers have been all-or-nothing performers, operating in the binary from month to month with the switch either on or off. It has all been strange and disquieting, unreliable and unpredictable, made more awkward by the in-season personal sabbatical of a veteran mainstay in Ben Zobrist and the uncertainty regarding the future of manager Joe Maddon.
It's almost September, and the Cubs still haven't sustained a level of play that seems commensurate with the amount of talent aggregated, not after yet another complete purge of their coaching staff, the latest effort to give this core group of players everything it needs to do its best work.
And it's here at this edge -- the place where confidence and serenity meet the gnawing discomfort of ongoing underperformance -- where conflicting forces continue to battle, ones we noted well before spring training even convened.
To use one of Maddon's signature aphorisms, this is the pressure and the pleasure fighting it out.
Maddon's laid-back vibe was overridden by marching orders from baseball operations president Theo Epstein when the latter offered a lengthy public commitment to renewed seriousness almost a calendar year ago. Things got heavier then, with the additional weight applied on purpose to effect results. Denying Maddon a contract extension only reinforced the message from the top.
This desultory season has indeed ridden emotional peaks and troughs seemingly without end, never settling into something from which a reliable identity can be discerned, unless that's the answer itself.
A team always told to relax and play a game was instructed to treat March like October. Two out of three was no longer just fine, not if the third win would potentially be the one that made the difference in the end. Results matter more than reputation or pedigree, with accountability reflected in subsequent opportunity.
The Cubs feel like we thought they might when these countervailing themes were first presented, like a team caught in between.
Players with championship rings can look around that clubhouse and insist that something else is in there. They must know it should be, at this point.
But here we are, looking at it after six more months of evidence with nothing all that complicated to deduce. If the Cubs were going to be something beyond what they are, they would have already been.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's Bernstein & McKnight Show in midday. You can follow him on Twitter @Dan_Bernstein.
