PREPARE FOR WAR

“ This is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure. ”
Winston Churchill
 
From a fan's perspective, each season is a war.

Their army is their team. Their foe is their game opponents. Each series is a battle.
Win each series, you will the battle in the standings. 

Whether your team is equipped for battle like a superpower like the U.S., Britain or China or like Albania depends upon one's opening day roster. But before any war, there is preparation. Training. Developing. Drafting. Preparation. Strategy. A Plan.

The days of soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder to walk across the battle field to be cut down by their opponent ended in the Revolutionary War with American Indian guerrilla warfare tactics and Pickett's Charge in the Civil War. But the Cubs appear to continue this tradition.

There is a growing unease within the ranks of Cubs fans over the state of the club. Cub fans have been taking fire from rival fans in St. Louis, Milwaukee and Cincinnati over the last few years. It is hard to defend a bad team. 

Most military strategists will say that it is either to defend the high ground than climb up the hill to take the high ground. The same is true in the standings. It is much harder to dig out of the hole of last place to fight your way back to the top of the standings than to keep the top of the hill. 

The fans are like the fife and drum corps - - - they have no weapons in which to fight - - - but are front and center in the battles. They get a lot of flack from both sides.

The fan unease is coming to the surface as the Cubs do little change the major league roster into a reasonable fighting machine. Fans look at the 5 year tenure of new owner Ricketts as being a descending spiral of doubt. Fans now look at the 3rd year of the new front office as being narrow minded, arrogant and risky. The team is not spending money at the major league level to improve talent. It is filling roster holes with leftovers from other team's AAAA journeymen stock pile (one cannot argue that Kottaras, Ruggiano or Wesley is a significant upgrade over anyone on last year's team.)

The idea that one day the baseball and business sides of the operation will converge into a glorious championship season is an illusion. You can package dog waste in a pretty box with a ribbon and call it Hope. The business side won't receive any jolt in revenue until a new broadcast deal is struck in 2019-2020. But that assumes that the billion dollar cable network deals will still be viable in 6 years with the ever changing landscape of entertainment media. The baseball side won't sign big money free agents because the front office is banking that all their top prospects will make a huge impact when they reach the majors. Prospects are the most unpredictable aspect of a baseball operation, but the front office tells fans that this plan is golden - - - the secret weapon of success. A strategy that no other major market team has ever done. Is this really thinking outside a pine box?

The Cubs have been hard to watch the last two seasons. Fans have begun to lose interest in their team. The club has been aggressively marketing all things Cubs except for a quality product on the field. Frustrated fans are to the point of asking why their team is not doing enough to reverse the horrible record on the field. Answers such as "be patient," "it's a process," "be loyal," "we have a plan," and "you'd be on the ground floor to something great" have nothing to do with fielding a competitive ball team in 2014. Fans are coming to the realization that the future is now when they are paying premium prices for a bad minor league product. 

Fans look back at the last three seasons as totally lost opportunities. The team traded away a dozen or so veteran players for two dozen minor league prospects. The turnover has left deep holes in the major league roster filled with journeymen players. It is like a farmer who tills in his field before harvest, then hopes that any random soldier stalks of corn will repopulate all the fields by the next season.

If the Cubs just tried to fix one or two positions each off season, the team could have a competitive roster for 2014. Instead, the holes at 3B, LF, CF, 2B continued to be filled with utility players. The Cubs have turned over their starting rotation and bullpen, but have kept very little major league talent in the process. If a team is unwilling to spend money on free agents to fill needs, then the team will be fighting an uphill battle with very little ammo. Hence, the 2012 and 2013 disasters.

And when the team did make a "core" acquisition, the front office signed SP Edwin Jackson to a long term deal.

Even the world's greatest armies have collapsed when their subjects lost trust in their general's leadership. The Union Army was in disarray and defeatist until President Lincoln installed General Grant in command. It is getting to the point of judgment on the Cubs new front office. 

If the Cubs don't care to wage a good fight in the NL Central, they should be aware of the storm clouds of a civil war within its own rank and file fan base if things don't change quickly.