The Cubs either can't or won't find young pitchers

The Cubs did manage to run their losing streak to 10 games last week, which gave them their own slice of history when they joined the 2017 Los Angeles Dodgers as the only teams in Major League Baseball history with two 10-game winning streaks and a 10-game losing streak in the same season.

You probably remember that the Dodgers won the pennant last year at Wrigley Field, and went on to lose to Alex Bregman's trash can banging aficionados in Houston in the World Series.

The Cubs bounced back by winning three of next four, they won the final two games of the Pissburgh series and then went to St. Louis and split the first two, before forfeiting the Sunday night game.

OK, they didn't officially forfeit, but starting Jordan Wicks doesn't exactly reek of "We really want to win this one."

Wicks was the Cubs' first round pick in 2021. It was the first full draft with scouting director Dan Kantrovitz in charge, and we were told just how great Kantrovitz was because of all the great picks he made as scouting director of the A's, even though it turns out that now that we can look back in totality at his years in Oakland from 2014-2019, he really made one good pick, and it was catcher Sean Murphy, the A's third round pick in 2016 who was an All-Star in 2023 with the Barves, and who has played in just 170 games in the three seasons since. Kantrovitz got a lot of credit for Matt Olson, which would have been a great pick, had he actually made it. Olson was drafted by the A's two years before Kantrovitz got there.

(Kantrovitz's first ever draft was not terribly auspicious, as the Cubs drafted Ed Horton in the first round ahead of both Petecrow Armstrong and Jordan Walker in the five-round COVID draft of 2020. But hey, Matt Mervis! Or something.)

Wicks made his big league debut barely two years after he was drafted and he won his first three big league starts, and pitched well in a no-decision in his fourth start.

Since?