A season on the brink (of ending)

I haven't posted in three weeks because the Cubs went on their run and I was terrified of doing anything to jinx it. But with things beginning to fall apart, I'm breaking radio silence; it's hard to imagine I could say anything to make things much worse at this point. I have to admit, this is a lot earlier than I imagined them disappointing me this year. At the risk of overreacting to less than a week's worth of events, it's looking like three-strikes-and-you're-out as far as the Cubs' real chances of contending go:

Strike one: Alfonso Soriano tears a quad, is out a month

Strike two: Aramis Ramirez tweaks his wrist, is day-to-day

Strike three: Team drops to three games over .500 after being swept by Astros; Zambrano rounds into mid-April form once more

If Zambrano starts being a mediocre pitcher again, that's three huge losses (even if Ramirez's injury is relatively minor), and the offense was already not nearly as consistent as it could have been. Mercifully, the Brewers' road woes continued in Colorado, meaning the Cubs will still be just a game back when tonight's inevitable loss is over, but suddenly the Cardinals have shown up in the rear view mirror, and the Cubs could be leading this division by multiple games if they didn't have an infuriating tendency to slump at the exact same time as the Brewers, most of July notwithstanding.

Maybe this is just one bad series. Maybe the 26 strikeouts by the lineup in the first two games was just the result of pressing after Soriano's injury, and they'll figure it out. Of course, with no off day until next Monday, they don't have a lot of time to figure it out, and going to Colorado to face a Rockies team that has played surprisingly well this year and just stomped the Brewers might not be the preferred next destination. Maybe Zambrano just had a couple bad starts in a row and he'll be fine the next time he comes up in the rotation. Maybe this is all a blip on the way to a division title; the 2003 Cubs were just three games over .500 as late as August 31 and lost 9 of 14 between August 16 and 31. Still, looking to the past can only be so comforting. The whole point of spending $300 million was for this Cubs team to be the future, or at least the present, and right now that's being derailed by injuries and a pitching staff that seem to be starting to wear down. This may not ever have been a World Series team, but there's no reason it can't be a playoff team, and yet that's starting to feel like something that's severely at risk. There's a lot of baseball left to be played, but if the next month and half looks anything like the last week and a half, most of it is going to be pretty unpleasant.