Justin Steele in-game tantrum could be the final straw for Cubs deadline plans

As the Chicago Cubs fall further out of the NL Wild Card race, starting pitcher Justin Steele's outburst on Saturday should be seen as a rallying cry, rather than a tantrum aimed solely at his teammates.

Steele's frustration is warranted, as the Cubs are 10.5 games behind the Milwaukee Brewers, good for last place in the NL Central. While they remain in the Wild Card race for now, they cannot afford to continue their losing ways. Chicago has lost six of their last 10 games.

“I love every single person in that locker room,” Steele said. “I know how good we can be. I know what it takes. Yeah, it definitely comes from a good place. It comes from a place of love and passion. I want to win baseball games. That's what I show up every day to do.”

Cubs could be forced to sell at the trade deadline

The Cubs recent struggles has some fans wondering if Jed Hoyer will sell at the trade deadline, rather than adding to a club that was expected to compete for the division crown at the season's outset. Hoyer doesn't have an easy answer for the fanbase, and it would be criminal of him not to consider every option if Chicago is out of the running come late July.

“You never know when a team's going to get hot and turn it around,” Hoyer said. “We did it last year when certainly no one was expecting us to do that. I think that the best way I can say it is, this has dragged on a lot longer than we had thought. And now we've locked ourselves into a really tough stretch of schedule.”

The Cubs are running out of time to make an impression on the front office, which has been unwilling to part ways with valuable assets in the past unless there's a clear path to the postseason ahead. Chicago is within four games of the final NL Wild Card spot as of this writing, but there are also a litany of teams ahead of them. As Hoyer mentions, the schedule doesn't get any easier from here.

When the Cubs signed Craig Counsell to the richest managerial contract in MLB history this winter, the expectations were set high. The team has not met that bar, and even Counsell knows Steele's heart is in the right place.

“He said something coming into the dugout, essentially like, ‘Let's go,’” Counsell said. “It was an emotional inning. We played poorly that inning. We made some mistakes. And he's just voicing his emotion from a place of love.”

It's not too late for Steele and the Cubs, but they are running out of time, and thus far haven't shown the necessary urgency to be trade deadline buyers.