What if this is who the 2017 Cubs really are?

Fans try to catch a home run ball hit by the Cubs’ Kris Bryant against the Cardinals on Friday at Wrigley Field. (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

The Cubs are a 2.0 grade-point average on a four-point scale. They’re a .250 hitter, a two-star movie review, neither the first kid picked for the game nor the last.

They’re a .500 team through and through so far this season.

What if that’s who they really are? If not the middling club we’ve seen to date, then a pale, maddening imitation of their former selves, the team that won a World Series seven months ago?

Would everybody be OK with that?

I didn’t think so.

But it is possible. If everything went so right last season, it’s within the realm of possibility that lots of things could go wrong this season. “Wrong,” with a team as talented as the Cubs, is the 27-27 record they were sporting after Saturday’s 5-3 victory over the Cardinals. “Wrong’’ would be, gulp, not making the playoffs.

The Cubs opened a 10-game homestand Friday on a beautiful spring afternoon. Their division rival was in town, former Cub and current Card Dexter Fowler received his World Series ring before the game, and something important seemed at hand at Wrigley Field. Would it be the struggling home team finally drawing a line in the sand? Or surrendering further to mediocrity? Something.

There are two ways of looking at what has happened to the Cubs so far in 2017. The first, that they are only two months into the season, has been belabored to within an inch of its life. There’s plenty of time for the team to right itself, we’ve been told. Everybody is saying that — manager Joe Maddon, the players, the club’s broadcasters and Clark the mascot, who can’t talk but remains optimistic, I’m told. No middle finger from him.

“If we win this division 10 games under .500, we still win the division,” first baseman Anthony Rizzo said. “That’s the goal. Obviously, [winning it under .500 is] not going to happen, but we want to be in position in September to win the division. It’s June.”

The second way of looking at this is that the Cubs are two months into the season, the calendar has indeed flipped to June, and maybe it’s time to say that what looked like an aberration is actually the team’s identity. This would not be considered the popular view.

Cubs president Theo Epstein tried to calm the masses during the week, saying there’s too much talent on the roster for this team not to succeed and that he expects the players who are underperforming to start acting like themselves soon. I imagine the 2014 Boston Red Sox were saying similar things. The year before, they had won the World Series, but injuries, youth and poor pitching brought them down in ’14, all the way to a 71-91 record. It was so bad, they dealt Jon Lester and John Lackey at the trade deadline. Those names sound vaguely familiar.

Ah, but the weather here is improving, we’re told, as if higher temperatures somehow affect the Cubs more positively than they do other teams.

Yes, but the Cubs are home for 10 games now, the true believers tell us. After 54 games last season, they were 22-7 at home. Fifty-four games into this season, they are 16-11 at home. The party room the Cubs built inside Wrigley to celebrate victories is being rented out to a temperance movement.

There is every reason to believe that some of the hitters — including Rizzo (.226) and Ben Zobrist (.237) in particular — will start heating up. That list might not include Kyle Schwarber, whom Maddon finally, mercifully moved down to the seventh spot in the order Friday and then to the ninth spot the next day. He showed signs of life with a grand slam Saturday. If his slump continues, I wonder if he’ll start to feel “tightness” in a hamstring that will require a rehab stint in Triple-A.

The starting pitching is not a given. The ridiculously good combined effort the Cubs received last year from Jake Arrieta, Kyle Hendricks, Lester and Lackey seems unlikely to return. That means the team’s mighty run differential last season (plus-252) isn’t coming back. So far this season, the Cubs have scored 248 runs and given up 245.

Lackey did his part in seven innings Friday, giving up two runs, one coming on a solo homer by Fowler to start the game. That lowered Lackey’s ERA to 4.90, which, if a number can be a personification, would be the Cubs the last two months. Lester gave up three runs in six innings Saturday.

“I definitely believe it’s going to be a different path to get to the end of the year and win it again,” Maddon said. “It’s hard to imagine our starters pitching [as well as they did in 2016]. I definitely imagine a high level. That was almost a surreal level, the way we pitched and played defense last year. So there’s going to be some regression, and I think there has been, obviously. But I also believe we’re still really, really good.”

The National League Central is average, at best, which gives the Cubs some comfort. But Rizzo’s assertion that the most important thing is to get into the playoffs, while true, implies the Cubs are the type of team that can turn it on when it matters. One, we don’t know if they are that type of team. Two, it matters now.

“We know we’re good,” Rizzo said.

Now would be a good time to prove it.

Follow me on Twitter @MorrisseyCST.

Email: rmorrissey@suntimes.com