CLEVELAND — The Cubs have the sixth-best record in the majors since 2017, second best in the NL. They made the playoffs each of the past two years and would be the NL Central champs if the 2019 season ended today.

Yet, a sense of underachievement enwraps the team, and president of baseball operations Theo Epstein recently pledged changes if the team does not begin to play better. The Cubs waited 108 years to win a championship, but once they did in 2016, expectations rose because the core was in its prime. The “dynasty” word was thrown around.

“We came off that World Series on such a high and believed that team was going to be together for a long time,” Kris Bryant said. “I’m not going to say we failed expectations. We’ve won a lot of games and made it far. Obviously, you want to be greedy and win as much as you can in that time frame.”

So why haven’t they?

“I don’t think something is missing,” Bryant said. “But when we were in 2016 we didn’t know what to expect. We were like, ‘Let’s just keep playing, we’re winning, we’re doing good.’ Now, it is like why can’t we do it again, we know exactly what it takes. We are just putting all of this pressure on ourselves with outside expectations and noise we don’t need to be paying attention to. We are kind of letting it affect us and becoming a little more agitated from losses. In 2016, we just moved on right away. It has been hard to get back to that.”

Milwaukee’s Mauricio Dubon and Cincinnati’s Jimmy Herget made their major league debuts on Sunday.

Why do I mention that?

They were the 1,209th and 1,210th players to appear in a game this season. Thus, there was one more player used in the first half this season than was deployed in all of the 1999 campaign — the first ever that eclipsed 1,200. It has never fallen under 1,200 since, and a record has been set in each of the past six seasons, climbing to 1,379 last year. That was 21 more than the 2017 season. Another 21-player increase would mean 1,400 players used in a season.