The Chicago Cubs will have no excuses if they fail to win the National League wild card.

Over the last six weeks of the season, the Cubs will play six games against teams with winning records. The San Francisco Giants and San Diego Padres, their main competitors for the wild card, will play 23 and 19, respectively. The Padres have six games left with St. Louis, and a 10-game stretch against San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The Giants will close out the season playing 12 of 15 against San Diego and Los Angeles. The other three games in that stretch are against Houston, a disappointing but talented team that’s quite capable of sweeping a series against any team in the league.

In addition to the luck of the draw, the Cubs have what is easily the best starting rotation in baseball, a lineup without a hole, and a good manager. The question is less, “Can they hang on and win the wild card?” than, “Why are they in a race to begin with?” They are, simply, much better than their rivals.

Aside from Cy Young favorite Jason Schmidt, the Giants don’t have a starter with an ERA below 4.41.Aside from Barry Bonds and Michael Tucker, they don’t have a hitter with both 300 at-bats and an .800 OPS. Their bullpen is a mess – closer Matt Herges’s 5.34 ERA recently lost him his job, and Dustin Hermanson, a mediocre long reliever, was plugged into the role as the best available option. His ERA is 4.47. The Giants’ place atop the wild card standings is an amazing show of exactly how great a player Bonds is; without him, they’d be, at best, the Seattle Mariners.

The Padres are the exact opposite of the Giants. Their strengths are an excellent bullpen and a general lack of holes in their lineup and rotation. In last week’s series against the Cubs, they played sound, opportunistic baseball, taking advantage of ugly misplays by the Cubs’ defense.

In the series opener, the Padres pounced on ace Mark Prior, who was visibly out of sorts, unwilling for some reason to work the edges of the plate with a perfectly good arsenal of pitches. It was clear that rather than being defeated by the Padres, the Cubs were defeating themselves.

The team’s problems are mental. During three games of a recent six-game stretch in which the bullpen gave up 17 runs in 18 1/3 innings, costing the club at least two winnable games, closer LaTroy Hawkins was serving a suspension for exploding at an umpire several weeks ago.

Kerry Wood is serving a five-game suspension now, and Carlos Zambrano will have to serve one soon – Wood for an ugly incident in which he, like Hawkins, had to be restrained from attacking an umpire, and Zambrano for trying to start a fight with the Cardinals by repeatedly throwing at Jim Edmonds.

It’s not just hot-headed young pitchers who have been unable to control themselves. In Friday’s game, pitching coach Larry Rothschild was ejected for violently arguing balls and strikes. In Sunday’s game against the Dodgers, team leader Moises Alou was ejected in the seventh inning for screaming at the first-base umpire Rob Drake about a checked swing call in the fourth inning.

That same game saw the team give away a lead. Reliever Kent Mercker came on in the sixth inning with one out and the bases loaded. He induced an easy double-play grounder with his first pitch, which shortstop Nomar Garciaparra inexplicably held in his glove.

The inning turned disastrous. The Dodgers plated five runs after several more miscues, including a wild pitch from Kyle Farnsworth and inattentive play from center fielder Corey Patterson. In all, four pitchers gave up runs, and the Dodgers never relinquished their lead.

Add this kind of sloppy play to the Bronx-style negotiations currently going on in the Chicago papers between Sammy Sosa and Dusty Baker over whether the miserably slumping right fielder (six RBI in August) will move down in the lineup to accommodate Garciaparra and third baseman Aramis Ramirez, who has established himself as the team’s best hitter – and you have a picture of a team in utter and complete disarray.

There’s no doubt that the Cubs are more talented than the Giants and Padres. And even accounting for injuries, the Cubs should have a lead of several games when you compare the record you would expect from their runs scored and allowed to the records of those of the Giants and Padres.

But in reality, they aren’t even in the lead for the wild card. Games aren’t played on paper, and pennants aren’t awarded for talent or for run differential.

The Cubs are playing baseball too undisciplined and too sloppy to win anything. Given that Dusty Baker’s alleged great strength is in getting his players to give their best every day, if they miss the playoffs he should be counted with Larry Bowa as one of the two great managerial failures of this season.