The Chicago Cubs got shut out Sunday and dropped below .500. They’ve made the most errors in the National League, their starting pitchers give up too many runs, they’re slugging worse than the A’s, Marlins and Braves, Kris Bryant can’t stop ralphing, Kyle Schwarber is hitting .180 and Jake Arrieta’s ERA is 5.44. At this point last season, the Cubs were 27-10. Today, they are 18-19.

Were a brave columnist to attempt to quantify exactly how much this 37-game sliver means, the digital manifestation of that would look something like this:

(That is empty space. As in, a 37-game sliver to start the season really doesn’t mean anything for this particular team. If you have to explain the joke, it’s not that funny. And if you have to use parentheses to explain the explanation, that’s even worse. Let’s forget this paragraph ever happened.)

Every year, over the first week or two or, in this case, six, the panic meter flares like a Geiger counter on Three Mile Island, and succumbing to seven shutout innings from Adam Wainwright on Sunday did little to wipe away the froth from the mouths of the rabidly aggrieved. Never mind that during one 37-game stretch last season, the 103-win, World Series championship-capturing Cubs went 17-20. That came during the middle of the season and is thus a footnote instead of an attempt to anthropomorphize Chicken Little.

So, please, fans of the …

1. Chicago Cubs, accept this prescription of chill pills and realize that even if the first six weeks of the season prevent the Cubs from finishing the year with triple digits in the win column, their slow start does not affect them in nearly the same way as it does fringe contenders or teams with a surplus of impending free agents.

The Cubs know they are in this for six months. They know there is no reasonable reality in which Schwarber, Anthony Rizzo, Addison Russell and Willson Contreras all finish the season with sub-.400 slugging percentages. And they know that a year after turning 74.5 percent of balls in play into outs, they may not be quite as good, but they’re certainly not the 20th-best team in baseball at it. They know, too, that help is but a phone call away, and even if those phone calls haven’t started in earnest, they know they can any moment.

Here’s the truth about the Cubs: They already are canvassing the significant market of starting pitchers likely to be available before the trade deadline, according to sources. Much of who’s available depends on the next month or so, when the standings shake out and give teams a truer sense of their prospects for 2017. The potential list, though, gives Chicago plenty of possibilities.

Beyond the always-available types like Jose Quintana and Jeremy Hellickson are Gerrit Cole, Yu Darvish, Johnny Cueto, Ervin Santana, Jason Vargas, Sonny Gray, Alex Cobb, Marco Estrada, Matt Harvey, even Zack Greinke. At least a quarter of those dozen will be dealt, and that might be on the light side. Even if the …

2. Cleveland Indians showed last October that a team need not trot out a rotation full of aces to come within a game of winning the World Series, it in no way lessens the benefits of regular-season excellence, whether it’s home-field advantage or facing the disadvantaged wild-card winner in the first round.

And right now, as the Indians linger in second place in the American League Central, behind a Minnesota Twins team that’s winning even though it sort of doesn’t want to – hello, Milwaukee, Cincinnati and Arizona – Cleveland knows exactly why: Its starting pitching has been among the worst in baseball.

Four of its opening day rotation members have 5.00-plus ERAs. Corey Kluber is on the DL. Danny Salazar’s existence seems binary: either strike a guy out or he scores. Great as Carlos Carrasco has been, one-man rotations tend not to be conducive to winning, so the Indians either need to improve – Mike Clevinger has looked good filling in for Kluber – or run the risk of dragging down the excellence of their lineup and bullpen, which has an MLB-best 1.90 ERA.

The Indians’ choice is rather simple: Do they believe, after last October, they are built for another playoff run? When it comes to winning the Central, they needn’t worry. The division, even with mediocre starting pitching, is theirs, barring some sort of catastrophic injury. For small markets, the issue is just how much prospect capital to forfeit in search of a championship. Not that history should have any bearing on Cleveland’s decision-making, but the Indians’ near-70-year drought doesn’t exactly lessen their urgency.

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