Is it time for Cubs fans to panic?

One of you greedy fools wished on the severed monkey paw. You were not supposed to do that, for it is cursed. And you wished for the Cubs to win one lousy World Series, just one, without thinking of the repercussions. They won that World Series, but now you’re wondering if the phrasing “just one” constitutes a legal monkey-paw technicality.

Of course it does.

You’ve ruined generations. You’ll never be able to look your grandchildren in the eye.

On the other hand, that World Series sure was cool.

On the other other hand, maaaaaaybe the Cubs shouldn’t panic just yet. Maybe they’re still one of the very best teams in baseball, if not the best team. Sure, they were just swept by the Padres, and there’s no silver lining to that boring cloud. Yes, they’re under .500, and, yes, they’ve been outscored on the season, nearly a year after a thousand drooling features about their ludicrous run differential. But they’re also 2½ games back, with 110 games to go.

Repeated for emphasis: They’re 2½ games back, with 110 games to go.

Just in case you weren’t convinced, though, I’d like to power rank all of the troubling components of the Cubs’ season. These are all the problems that I can see from the outside, and I’ll order them from “least worrisome” to “ruh roh.” A team can’t really go from young and amazing to below-average in one offseason without losing anyone critical.

Right?

He’s hitting .227.

He will not continue hitting .227.

Sometimes it’s right to stare at different FanGraphs pages and pretend you understand what linear weights to tweet you, and sometimes it’s right to point at a low batting average and say, “THAT BATTING AVERAGE SHOULD BE HIGHER.” This is time for the latter.

I promise that I haven’t looked at Rizzo’s batting average on balls in play yet. I have absolutely no idea. But it’s going to be at least 75 points below his career average. Here we go, I’m going to look ... opening the page ... and ...

It’s .284, which is 78 points below his career average. I swear on my Willie Mays bobblehead that I didn’t write the preceding paragraph for effect after doing research. I didn’t even go back and change the part about 75 points. It’s not that I’m good at this, it’s that sometimes, it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Using BABIP as a cudgel is usually a bad idea. This is not one of those times.

He’s hitting .216/.298/.351, which is pretty bad, but he’s still a nuclear-powered defender, and it’s not like his peak was MVP-caliber hitting, either. One hot streak will get his numbers back where they were, and one of these years, he’ll clamber up to the next tier and join the pantheon of Super Young and Great Cubs All-Stars to make you even more covetous than you already are.

But there’s nothing that says he ever has to hit, either. He got just a couple dozen at-bats above Double-A, so this might be his offensive ceiling. I would almost believe that if he weren’t 23.

Oh, he’s been fine, don’t get me wrong. But he hasn’t been the stellar sneaky-freaky-might-actually-get-some-stray-HOF-votes Zobrist that we’ve become used to over the last decade. This might be what he looks like at 36. The average dips because the bat isn’t as quick, and the OBP and slugging dip along with it.

Unless it’s just that stupid, rascally BABIP again, and let me check ... eh, not really. I’d blame age and the fascism of biology. He’s up this high not because I think he’s going to be a drag, but because he might not be the most underrated player in baseball for the 10th consecutive year. He might be rated just fine.

Oh, what has happened to our big, beefy lumber boy, oh, what has happened indeed? Schwarber has been one of the least valuable players in baseball, and the fall has been so dramatic, so unrelenting, that the Cubs might actually send him to the minor leagues to find himself.

Without knowing his exact stats at Middletown High, I would guess that this is the very first time in his life that he hasn’t been able to disembowel baseballs at will. He was probably the best hitter on every little league team, the best hitter in high school, the best hitter on his college team, the best hitter in the minors as he climbed up, Class-A to Double-A to Triple-A, raking at every stop. And he was one of the best hitters in the majors right away, too.

He was the kind of talent who could miss a season, come back unexpectedly for the postseason, and help his team win a World Series, after all.

So the fall is dramatic and terrifying. But I’m going to guess that the slump is extending this far because he’s not really sure how to reverse it mentally, more than the rest of the league discovering what his kryptonite is.

Even though he was always at the right age for his level in the minors, it’s not like he was ever an especially good hitter. Considering that he’s not Kevin Kiermaier in the field, yes, I would at least furrow my brow in his direction if I were running the Cubs.

What you see most definitely might be what you get, and I’m forever skeptical of players who put up better numbers in a short major-league sample than they ever did in Double-A or Triple-A.

Scouts have a term they use for a player like this: “PROFBO.” It stands for “probably fine, but old.” They’ll sit around their scout bars and talk about scout terms, and they’ll say, “Yeah, that guy’s PROFBO” to each other, and they don’t need to say any more. It’s a six-letter way of saying, “Look, his body of work speaks for itself, but let’s not forget that he’s getting older, and time claims all players, as it will claim us all.” That’s a mouthful, so they say PROFBO.

I’ve never actually met a scout, but I’d like to.

And they don’t say that.

But they should!

Lester is probably fine, though. His fastball is down a tick, but it’s actually up from 2014. His FIP and xFIP are in line with what he’s been doing for years, and the only thing that’s different is that he’s walking more guys than he’s used to.

The only reason he’s up this high is because he’s 33 with a lot of mileage. That doesn’t have to mean he’s in the middle of a gradual decline. But it sure means we have to mention he’s 33 with a lot of mileage.

His fastball is nearly 2½ miles slower than it was in 2015, and while velocity isn’t everything, it sure helps a heckuva lot. He’s still missing bats, still throwing strikes, but he isn’t getting the ball on the ground as much as he used to. That’s one part slower fastball, one part the league-wide uppercut fetish. One without the other wouldn’t be a big deal, but I’m guessing the combination is treating Arrieta harshly.

A word of caution: Don’t look at the BABIP and consider the case closed. That works swell for Rizzo up there, but pitchers struggling to adjust to a diminished fastball are a different species. The pitchers will often try to do what worked in the past, and hitters have milliseconds more for what they were trying to do in the past. Milliseconds are all they needed in the first place, which means more line drives until the pitcher re-adjusts.

Arrieta is in this phase, and while he can come out of it clean, Verlander-style, there are never guarantees. Tim Lincecum’s availability is proof of that, even if the only similarities they really have is that they throw with their right arm and used to be much better.

Lackey, who eternally looks like an angry Little League parent yelling at you to put his son in, is the very definition of PROFBO. He’s 38 and allowing all of the dingers. While his strikeout rate is still high (23.3 percent, just a shade below last year’s), his walk rate is slowly creeping up as the homers begin to spook him.

He turns 39 in October, and while his renaissance has been something various teams have enjoyed for five years now, there’s an excellent chance that he won’t pick up another Cy Young vote or All-Star appearance in his career. When a pitcher this old starts allowing bushels of runs, it’s certainly time to be skeptical.

But I’m still pretty sure Lackey will be fine. Arrieta will be fine. They’ll all be fine. The Cubs are fine. I have no emotional investment in this team, and I’m telling you they’ll be fine.

I also projected the Mariners to win the AL West, so ...

You can see the trend in those last three troublesome spots, and it’s worth noting that the Cubs have gotten by without developing any of their own. But if the Cubs season continues like this through July, they’ll have the assets with which to fix the problem. Some of their hitters aren’t hitting, and I’m not as worried about that. Some of their starters aren’t living up to their lofty expectations, and I’m a little more skeptical of that, but not dismissive.

They’re probably fine.

But if you wanted to feast on the goo inside, that’s your prerogative. When everyone else comes around to your way of thinking, you’ll control a disproportionate amount of the goo inside, and then you’ll look extremely wise.

It’s worth thinking about, even if the Cubs are probably fine.