MESA, Ariz. – The graveyard of Chicago Cubs prospect careers brims with tombstones, each a unique homage to two decades of player-development disappointment.

PIE: PECAN > FELIX

PATTERSON: DIED OF ALLERGY TO WALKS

CHOI: WORST HR DERBY PARTICIPANT EVER





It would be unbecoming to blaspheme more expired careers. So a list of names shall suffice and give poor, suffering Cubs fans a bit of acid reflux: Mark Pawelek, Brooks Kieschnick, Brian Dopirak, Kevin Orie, Gary Scott, Lance Dickson, Earl Cunningham, Ty Griffin. This is the detritus of past youth movements. This is the gravamen of Chicago baseball misery.

So it is with understandable skepticism that people see what's happening this spring at the gorgeous new Cubs Park and wonder whether it's too good to be true. Javier Baez's swing can't be that fast. Kris Bryant's power can't be that natural. If the last 105 years have taught us anything, it's that good things don't happen to the Cubs.

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Well, Baez and Bryant are good. Really, really good. And they are happening sooner than later.

Do not take Bryant's reassignment to minor league camp Wednesday as anything other than the normal progression of a 22-year-old entering his first full season of professional baseball. He will take his lanky, 6-foot-5 frame to Double-A perhaps, amble into the batter's box with his closed stance, do his little timing toe-turn and transfer his weight just so, making contact with gymnast-quality balance and launching to center and right and left and everywhere, because spraying the ball around is not mutually exclusive with hitting it over the fence for truly elite hitters.

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Baez, 21, remains with the Cubs, and so remains, for now, the most incredible swing in the game. Not the minors. The whole game. To see Javier Baez swing a baseball bat is to see the most compelling argument yet why God gave human beings wrists. Bryant's swing is understated beauty; Baez's is what Bamm-Bamm Rubble grew up to do. His high school coaches tried to temper it, Baez said, only to find a rigid truth: "I just can't slow it down. It's my swing. I can't swing nice and easy."

It's a big leg kick, and a torso angled forward at about 15 degrees, and a back elbow bent so high his bat, for a split second, is pointing at the second baseman, and then somehow his wrists propel it from that awkward position down through the zone where it whip-cracks like it belongs in a torture dungeon. Baez's hips separate, he carves the path of his uppercut swing and the ball is read its last rites. The pain ends quickly.

In today's game, with great pitching and bullpen specialization and fewer pumped-up steroid monsters, power is the single most valuable attribute. And in Baez and Bryant, not only do the Cubs have two of the best embodiments of it in the minor leagues, they could share the left side of the infield together for years to come. Bryant is a third baseman by trade and is sticking there, even if his size portends a position change at some point. And Baez plays shortstop, if a bit erratically, and is likely to try out second and third base over the last couple weeks of spring training before his likely Triple-A landing spot for opening day.

Sometime this season, both could arrive in Chicago. Whether that happens this year or next, Wrigley Field will see batting practice the likes of which have been missing since Sammy Sosa left. Albert Almora, another of the Cubs' core four everyday prospects that includes Cuban outfielder Jorge Soler, has hit with Baez and Bryant and can't peg who hits the ball farther.

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