It’s a young man’s game, as Chicago Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer likes to say. The baseball industry tells us that players in their 30s inevitably begin to decline. Finding that right mix of ages will forever be an inexact science.In the version of this season the Cubs hoped for, the club would develop that emerging talent while relying on experienced players such as Dansby Swanson and Alex Bregman to advance deeper into October. The sport, though, isn’t played on a computer screen. Stuff always happens.With a little more than half of the 162-game schedule remaining, the club’s playoff probabilities are less than 50 percent, according to the projection systems run by FanGraphs and Baseball Reference, even after banking two 10-game winning streaks.The Cubs don’t know how good young players such as Matt Shaw and Pedro Ramírez will be in the future, or if they will even have long careers in the majors. Moisés Ballesteros looks like he needs more consistent at-bats, if not a reset at Triple-A Iowa. Kevin Alcántara did not make a great impression during his limited run.Still, a 10-game losing streak in May, combined with the Milwaukee Brewers again running away in the National League Central race, will lead to calls for a shake-up. Pete Crow-Armstrong’s stretches of MVP-level production before his 25th birthday are a reminder that rapid growth and big leaps usually come from players at a certain stage in their development.Cubs manager Craig Counsell recently acknowledged that he needs to create more opportunities for Shaw, 24, a first-round pick who posted an .839 OPS as a rookie after last year’s All-Star break and then got moved off third base to accommodate Bregman. Already this season, Ramírez, 22, has turned himself into a top-100 prospect, made his major-league debut and stayed on the active 26-man roster longer than anticipated.Yet when Hoyer sat down in Wrigley Field’s home dugout this week for a media briefing, he seemed surprised by the amount of time spent on an underperforming offense, the possibility of benching Swanson and Bregman’s lack of impact. From Hoyer’s perspective, the overall health of a battered pitching staff is a much larger concern.“We have a lot of really talented position players,” Hoyer said. “There have been questions about our pitching depth that are fair. That’s something the injuries this year have certainly exposed. On the position-player side, we have a lot of good athletes, a lot of good bats. Having that depth is really valuable. If there are times we can use those young players, that’s fantastic.“But I would also say the sample is still pretty small, and even within this year, those guys have had positive times. So let’s hope those guys kind of work through this. The best-case scenario, the best version of our team, is those guys are hitting and we still play really good defense.”