The Cubs, The Second Half, and Broken Air Conditioning

I experienced some temporary hell earlier this week. The air conditioning in my apartment building broke Sunday morning due to a blown transformer at the start of a week where every day has been be over 90 degrees and at one point Thursday was forecast to hit an even 100. Luckily, the people whose job it is to fix these things did their jobs and by Tuesday we were back to setting the thermostat to a cool 65.¹

The Cubs have been without air conditioning since 2010. They've had losing seasons each of the last four seasons, and this year doesn't look like it will be any different. Heading into the second half, they are exactly where many people expected they would be. They showed a little more fight than in the first half of last year, but they still sit nine games under .500 and project to be worst following the fire-sale of productive and inexpensive veterans during the upcoming trade deadline fervor. It's going to be a long and dreadful rest of the summer for the Wrigley Faithful. For some reason though, this year feels different.

Maybe it's that some of the moves that still-new-in-front-office-regime-years Theo Epstein and friends have made have already borne fruit. Anthony Rizzo has had a tough sophomore campaign but is still an excellent prospect who should be a cornerstone for the next decade. Scrap heap pickups such as Scott Feldman and Paul Maholm were exchanged for promising young arms Jake Arrieta and Arodys Vizcaino. Sean Marshall and Ryan Dempster, holdovers veteran from the last regime, brought back Travis Wood (the team's only all-star this year) from the Reds and Christian Villanueva (currently the farm system's top third base prospect according to Jonathan Mayo of MLB.com) from the Rangers.

Other than Wood and Rizzo (to an extent), none of the players this brain trust brought in are proven in any way. Baez, Almora, Vizcaino and Cuban defector Jorge Soler have all missed significant time due to injury this season. 2007 third overall pick Josh Vitters has been toiling away in AAA and has not developed the way the team expected. Brett Jackson has struck out more than 100 times in each of his three full seasons in the minors (including a whopping 158 in 2012) and has already racked up 77 in just 61 games this year. Both made underwhelming MLB debuts last September.

Even with all that could go wrong, this still feels different. The "Lovable Losers" moniker that has been attached to this team for so many years doesn't feel as appropriate anymore. Even in 2008, when the team won 97 games en route to a division championship, something was going to go wrong.² The Cubs are going to tank the end of this year and have another top-10 pick. Next year will be better, but probably not by enough to really get excited.

2015 is a long ways away. Obviously, not every prospect is going to live up to the hype. Even so though, with Wrigley Field getting set to enter the 21st century with its renovations, this front office is trying to do the same with its roster. A few pocket seasons of success just aren't going to cut it anymore. Many fans have been sitting with broken air conditioning for far too long, and while Theo and company might not be the ones to bring people into the cold, they're at least hiring the right people to do so.

^{1.We don't pay for utilities so we can crank up the air as much as we want. It's amazing↩}

^{2.That something was that the lineup forgot how to hit and both Dempster and Zambrano got shelled in games one and two. Then everyone on the team got really old, really quickly, and there was no one in the farm system to fill in the blanks.↩}