Do you want the Cubs to win their remaining games or tank for a higher draft pick?

When the Cubs sold off at the trading deadline, the remnant Cubs lost a lot of games, at one point 12 in a row.

There was talk among some Cubs fans that the team should tank the rest of the season for a higher draft pick.

Honestly, players don’t do that. I have confidence that every time a MLB player steps on the field, he is trying his best to win. Sometimes those players just aren’t good enough to defeat more talented teams.

I mention all this because the 67-83 Cubs are about to take on the 65-85 Twins. If you’re someone who wants the Cubs to have a higher draft pick in 2022, you’d likely want the Cubs to lose those two games, and lose some more, and...

I’m not one of those people. I’d like the Cubs to win as many as possible of the 12 remaining games, especially because seven of them are against the Cardinals, and winning those games might help knock St. Louis out of the postseason.

Via Tankathon.com, here’s how the “bottom 10” teams stand for the draft order in 2022, as of Tuesday morning:

The site looks at this sort of like a pennant race, so the “games behind” column is the most important.

The Orioles and Diamondbacks appear to have locked up the first two picks and will fight it out for the top pick. If the teams wind up tied, I’m not sure what happens. Normally, the No. 1 pick would then go to the team that had the worse record in the previous year... but Arizona and Baltimore had identical 25-35 records in the 2020 pandemic-shortened season.

It would appear that the Rangers and Pirates are pretty much set at picks three and four.

So the highest the Cubs could possibly pick in 2022 would be fifth, and they are six games “behind” the Nationals for that pick. It’s pretty tough to make up that kind of difference over 12 games.

Thus it’s probably in the six-to-nine range for the Cubs, with the Marlins at 86 losses, the Twins at 85, the Cubs at 83 and the Royals at 82. The Cubs currently own the No. 8 slot.

Personally, I’d like to see the Cubs win as many games as possible the rest of the year. If that means they wind up at nine instead of eight? I’m fine with that; really good players can still be taken at that point in the draft, and I’m saying this without really knowing where draft-eligible players will stand next July when selections are made.

There is one thing the Cubs would lose by drafting lower — they would have a slightly smaller pool of money available to spend on draft picks, per current MLB rules. Here are the draft allotments for 2021 — the difference between picks six and nine was about $800,000 out of around $11 million. Does that matter? Maybe, but I still don’t think that’s worth tanking games the rest of this year.