Welcome to mid July at Wrigley Field, where all eyes are on August and October.

The trade deadline is Aug. 3. It’s then that team president Jed Hoyer faces his last big chance to bolster a Cubs roster with championship-level expectations.

That means pitching, pitching and more pitching as the team emerges from the All-Star break in playoff position but still hobbled from an avalanche of pitching injuries.

“We’re not ruling out any kind of position-player transaction,” Hoyer said Friday, “but the expectation is we will focus on our pitching staff.”

A team’s ability to compete in October is what drives decision-makers to be aggressive or conservative during trade season. An expanded postseason has meant more teams are, mathematically, able to consider themselves contenders.

The Cubs, though, are a contender with sky-high goals.

The question facing Hoyer is does he think this team is capable of achieving them? And if so, does that spark him and his front office to go big in August to try to assure a longer October run than last year?

“I try to not get overly emotional about it,” Hoyer said. “I try to stick to the numbers and make sure we’re doing things that make sense on paper. But I think our position-playing group is really, really good. … That’s a group that could win a lot of games in October.

“Obviously, the challenge for us has simply been pitching and pitching injuries.”

It’s a restating of the obvious from the Cubs’ baseball boss, who everyone knows will have pitching at the top of his shopping list.

In addition to a team ERA of 4.33 that ranked 21st in baseball coming into Friday, injuries hammered the staff during the first half. Lefty Matthew Boyd is back from his long layoff, and righties Jameson Taillon and Edward Cabrera will restock the starting rotation at some point.

But while some could suggest that improved health could be akin to a trade-deadline haul, Hoyer isn’t necessarily among them.

“You can’t have too much pitching. You never have enough,” he said. “The hope of guys coming back off the injured list, I don’t think that’s going to temper our need.

“I’d love to go, ‘Oh, we have too much,’ but I don’t see that ever really happening. I don’t think that would impact that considerably.”

So will it be a reliever here? A swingman there?

Or are we talking about the best starting pitcher available?

Hoyer going big might depend on how likely it is that the Cubs can be a playoff team with a first-round bye, waiting for an opponent to slog through a series just to make it to their doorstep. That’s what the Brewers were last year, when they ousted the Cubs in the NLDS.

“You have to go into the deadline, you have to think about it analytically, you have to think about: Getting a bye is effectively winning a series and weakening your opponent in the next series. That’s a really big deal,” Hoyer said. “If the odds say that you can do that, that’s a different equation than if not. You have to be aware of those things, and we certainly will be.”

Hoyer talked up his farm system, but he’s a year removed from balking at the high prospect cost of pitching and not making a move for a front-of-the-rotation arm last summer. However, that’s what he did in the offseason, shipping outfielder Owen Caissie to the Marlins for Cabrera.

Though Hoyer is always trying to balance the present and future, that move signaled a recognition of the Cubs’ ability to win now.

There’s a belief in the clubhouse that this team can do just that.

“If ownership and the [front office] decides, ‘We’re going to make a push, we’re going to do that,’ there’s a ton of belief of, ‘All right, this is the time to do it, time to get hot, time to play our best brand of baseball going into October,’” said righty reliever Phil Maton on the energizing effect of deadline deals, in general. “The expectations are to win a World Series here, and that’s exactly what we should be shooting for with the clubhouse that we have right now.”