Cubs need not look far for a plan

Baseball's annual amateur draft was a signal Monday of what the Cubs must do.

Building or rebuilding a major-league baseball team into a winner isn't rocket science.

It's a lot more complicated.

The sacrifices are severe. The pain is excruciating. The work is endless. The hurdles are high. The odds are long.

In other words it's everything the Cubs already are.

The mission isn't impossible, however, and what choice do the Cubs have anyway but to initiate their estimated 22nd five-year plan since winning their last championship.

The two big ifs here are whether Cubs ownership has the guts to try it and the baseball people to execute it.

The Ricketts family, in their second season as owners, likely hope naively that they can contend by easing young players in with veterans.

Sorry, can't be done unless a franchise is willing to exceed an unlimited budget for free agents.

Otherwise the product needs to be torn down before it can be built back up, though some might wonder how much further down the Cubs can be taken.

The answer is lot further. They can lose a lot more games, a lot more fans and a lot more of everything … all in the name of eventually winning that elusive World Series.

If the Cubs need a blueprint of how to rebuild, they need only peek a quarter-century back in time and eight miles south to Comiskey Park.

You think a team can't be any worse than the Cubs are? Wrong! The White Sox were back in the late 1980s.

Over four seasons through 1989 the Sox averaged 1.2 million in attendance, 18 games below .500 and 22½ games out of first place.

This competitive and commercial depression was pretty much by design. Expenses were slashed to parallel the loss of revenue prompted by pathetic baseball.

Larry Himes was the Sox' general manager, and he traded costly veterans for cheaper youngsters. Anyone whose contract the Cubs can trade should be traded.

The most prominent Sox deal was Harold Baines, a favorite of chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, to Texas for a package that included prospects Sammy Sosa and Wilson Alvarez.

The key, though, was being so bad that the draft could be good. The Sox lost enough to pick in the Top 10 four straight years.

In order, Jack McDowell came at No. 5, Robin Ventura at No. 10, Frank Thomas at No. 7 and Alex Fernandez at No. 4.

(By the way, the Cubs took Mike Harkey one spot ahead of McDowell and Ty Griffin one spot ahead of Ventura. They'll have to do better than that for this plan to work.)

Anyway, those four Sox picks, along with kids acquired in trade like Alvarez and Lance Johnson, formed the nucleus for a successful run in the 1990s.

The Sox won their division in 1993, were one of the favorites to win the World Series canceled by a work stoppage in '94 and overall compiled one of baseball's best records during the decade.

That's the formula the Cubs should use the next few years, which don't project to be very inspiring anyway.

The Cubs have a head start with the No. 9 overall pick Monday. Three more Top Tens, if solid, and they'll have a core for the next decade.

Patience will be required, but nothing could be worse than the wait Cubs fans have endured for 103 years.

mimrem@dailyherald.com