Brewers sending Cubs season into complete chaos is well-earned by Craig Counsell

This is not the season most people expected for the Chicago Cubs to have. They were my pick to win the NL Central. The Cincinnati Reds and the Pittsburgh Pirates were still rebuilding. The St. Louis Cardinals were coming off their worst season of my lifetime. Also, the Milwaukee Brewers were supposed to be trending down, right? Well, not so fast, my friend. They are running away with it now.

Milwaukee finds itself at 50-34 through 84 games. The Brewers have a comfortable 6.5-game lead over the second-place Cardinals. All the while, the Cubs have devolved into being the lovable losers again, saddled at a disastrous 39-46 and in last place in the NL Central. Milwaukee was a team that lost not only ace pitcher Corbin Burnes this offseason, but their trusted skipper in Craig Counsell.

As Burnes is thriving pitching for the Baltimore Orioles over in the AL East, Counsell is managing one of the most uninspired Cubs products I have seen in a while. Admittedly, I have seen more than my fair share of sad bags of crap in Wrigleyville in my entire life, and that doesn't count the three years I lived there. This team stinks! Counsell appears to have made a GOB Bluth huge mistake leaving Milwaukee.

While Counsell has been part of the problem, so has general manager Jed Hoyer, and The Ricketts.

Craig Counsell leaving Milwaukee Brewers was a colossal miscalculation

I can't believe it happened, to be honest with you. Counsell was universally beloved across baseball. He may have had that incredibly weird batting stance during his big league career, but he was an integral part of two World Series champions in my youth: The 1997 Florida Marlins and the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks. He grew up worshipping the Brewers, and then later got to manage them.

Despite being the smallest market in the big leagues, he had been a stabilizing presence in the dugout for them. Milwaukee has been pretty good for the most part of the last 15-plus years, but Counsell had been at the epicenter of it lately. Postseason failures may have contributed to him wearing out his welcome with the Brewers, but nobody outside of Milwaukee saw this coming...

Chicago is the biggest market in the NL Central and the third biggest in baseball. Yes, they split with the Chicago White Sox on the south side, but this is the bigger of the two brands by far. Like all Chicago teams, they are dysfunctional to their very bones. Unless you land a Michael Jordan in the draft, it will never change. What may change is who is managing the Cubs in the coming years now.

Simply put, this season has done irreparable damage to Counsell's brand. His players do not seem to care, despite having signed high-priced free agents like Cody Bellinger and Dansby Swanson who helped build winning cultures in Atlanta and Los Angeles. The dollars don't make sense, and neither does why Counsell is managing this club this poorly. Wrigley is where you go to second-guess things.

Overall, I think this is a great example of you never really know what creates or destroys culture. Obviously, it is a top-down principle from ownership, but on occasion, you can overcome poor ownership and still win games. To me, Chicago is becoming a less attractive job by the day. It is an organization that runs through managers like Spinal Tap does drummers. I am not a percussionist.

All I know is it is impossible to win consistently when everybody is not pulling in the same direction.