The Other Fifteen

I try not to make my posts on this website Chicago-centric.  I think if you scroll through the previous posts you’ll see that I do a good job of it.  But this posts is strictly for my hometown peeps.  Two things happened in Chicago sports today that I just have to talk about.

First, the good news.  The Bears won their home opener today against the defending champion Steelers 17-14.  The game featured a mistake-free performance from our new QB, Jay Cutler, in which he bounced back from shitting the bed in his Bears debut against the hated Packers.  Cutler led the team on two 4th quarter drives, one that ended in a TD pass to tie it, and another to set up the game-winning field goal by Robbie Gould.  It was a great way to salvage the season for Bears fans like me who had assumed that our season was over after watching Cutler make the worst first impression of any athlete in my memory and having no cushion for the blow of losing Brian Urlacher, our team leader and best player, for the season after only one big hit.  We looked good today.  Cutler looked good today.  Our receivers looked good today.  Our D stepped up in Urlacher’s absence, including Alex Brown (I can go on an epic rant about why Alex Brown is my favorite player and why he should be making Pro-Bowls if you guys want, but I’ll leave it up to you since that can be it’s own article.  Also, I can give you a full story on why my brother’s favorite player is Adrian Peterson… the OTHER Adrian Peterson.)  Overall, it was an extremely entertaining game and a valuable and uplifting win for the Bears and their fans.

Now on to the bad news.  And it’s really bad.  So if you’re not a Cubs fan, or you don’t feel like laughing at the Cubs’ problems, I suggest you stop reading now.

This is the Wrigley home opener. Way to make a first impression, Milton. I mean that. You showed us exactly what to expect from that day forward.

Milton Bradley was sent home for the rest of the season by Cubs GM Jim Hendry after Bradley was quoted as saying,

“You understand why they haven’t won in 100 years here.  It’s just not a positive environment.  I need a stable, healthy, enjoyable environment… It’s just negativity.”

There’s so much I want to say about this, I don’t even know where to begin.  I’m going to have to do this in stages.  First things first, I have to break down that quote.  “It’s just not a positive environment.”  I’m sorry, but anyone who has ever followed the Cubs, been to Wrigley, heard the myriad songs written about our beloved team, or anyone who understands unconditional love despite all evidence to the contrary knows that he is just plain incorrect about this.  It’s not a subjective judgment.  He is wrong.  Cubs fans are as positive as they come in sports.  Ok, I can understand how Bradley thinks this from his perspective.  The fans boo him.  They’ve booed him since after his home debut, in which he argued balls and strikes with the home plate umpire and got ejected and suspended.  He then spent the rest of the year much like that at bat: playing terribly, blaming it on everyone but himself, and missing time for a variety of reasons that can all be chalked up to his fragile body and mental instability.  So he’s right from his perspective, Wrigley field and Cubs fans have not been kind to him.

The problem is, he feels no responsibility in this and thinks that it starts with the fans.  In reality, they were only reacting to a guy who was TERRIBLE when he played, missed a lot of time, was completely belligerent, and made comments befitting a paranoid schizophrenic all along the way.  As for the second part, “I need a stable, healthy, enjoyable environment,” I can’t believe that Bradley can say that and not realize that he’s really talking about his own mental state, and not the fans at Wrigley.  Milton Bradley needs a stable, healthy, enjoyable environment in his mind.  He is mentally unstable.  He is emotionally unstable.  He needs to create that stability, that health, and that happiness for himself.  This is a shockingly negative, disturbingly paranoid, dangerously angry man who lacks any control over his reactions.  No one can control his or her environment, but a person can control it’s effects on them and their interactions with it.  Bradley clearly doesn’t understand that he has the option of controlling himself in order to change his interactions in a given environment, or he just lacks any will to control himself.  In the end, I would say that it’s a good thing that he has to sit and stew on this, except that I don’t think that he can gain anything from it based on his lack of recognition for his need to change, let alone a desire to do so.  The one positive is that he is kept away from the rest of our team and away from the fans who are completely justified in hating him.  He is a person who spreads his vitriol everywhere he goes.  How can he not understand why negativity follows him?  Has he really never once in his life considered that he is the cause of it all?

The second part of this is the problem of Milton Bradley in general.  He is not even a full year into a three year, $30 million contract.  There is literally NO WAY he can possibly stay with our team.  He has alienated himself from the front office, the manager, his teammates (not ONE of which have I ever heard or read coming to his defense all year), the media, the MLB league offices, the umpires, and the fans.  Note: I could have just said everybody instead of listing them, but I really wanted you guys to understand that it really is EVERYONE that he has come in contact with in his time as a Cub (though I left the clubhouse attendants out of this because I’m not sure about them, but I would go all in on them thinking he’s an epic prick).  We have to trade him, but who will take him right now?  The only way I see out of this is a team trading for him as long as the Cubs pay 80%-90% of his remaining contract through its duration.  I mean, we’re talking about the worst person in baseball.  I mean that when I say it.  I don’t think he’d even be a big deal if he was productive, but he’s made himself completely untouchable with the combination of horrible play and constant deplorable behavior.

The other big problem here is GM Jim Hendry.  He’s the guy who signed Milton Bradley.  Let’s break down the events that led to that signing and the rest of the construction of the 2009 Cubs (or rather the destruction of the 2008 Cubs who owned the best record in the NL).  First, Lou Pinella asks him for more lefty bats after the way the Dodgers exploited our righty-heavy lineup in the 2008 playoffs.  So Hendry trades an All-Star quality utility man in Mark DeRosa, trades Jason Marquis (a pitcher who he wildly overpaid for two seasons prior) and refused to offer Kerry Wood a contract, telling him to go get paid while he could despite Wood being set for life financially and begging to remain a Cub for life so he could help us win and be with his family in his adopted home of Chicago.  Two of those three moves are indefensible (DeRo and Wood).  The other move, Marquis, was good simply because Hendry had overpaid for him in the first place.

Hendry made these moves to free up cap space for the power-hitting lefty bat in right field that he and Lou felt we needed.  This is also to point out that Jim Hendry thought he had solved this problem last year when he vastly overpaid for Kosuke Fukudome who turned out to not be a power hitter at all.  So Hendry had three options: Bradley, Raul Ibanez, and Bobby Abreu.  First, Hendry tried to low-ball Raul Ibanez, and the Phillies grabbed the 30+ home run hitter and All-Star for less than we eventually signed Bradley for.  The next step is the most curious.  I have never heard an account of Hendry offering a contract to Bobby Abreu.  Abreu was the best batter on the Yankees other than A-Rod during their tenure in NY together.  He is a five tool player, and his numbers only would have improved by moving from the AL East to the NL Central.  Age could not have been a factor, since Abreu is two years younger than Ibanez.  In the end, Abreu remained unsigned for an inexplicable amount of time and eventually signed for only one year and $5 million with the Angels, for whom he has had a phenomenal season.  So even though Hendry was presented by more consistent, accomplished, durable, emotionally stable, and somehow cheaper options, he instead decided to pay $30 million for Milton Bradley to play right field despite Bradley being a full-time DH for the last two years and being an obvious risk for injury, suspension, and clashes with teammates and management.

The only explanation for this is that Jim Hendry is not a smart man.  I’m not being mean or calling names.  I didn’t say he’s stupid.  He’s not.  He’s just proved himself to not be anything above average intelligence.  My argument for this, aside from his constantly overpaying for poorly evaluated players and his being ripped off by other GMs who are smarter than him (more on this later), is that he clearly tries really hard to understand the statistical analysis of baseball and fails.  He poorly projected Fukudome’s Japanese power stats to the MLB when every Japanese player to come to the States has had a drop in power from the bigger parks and different balls in the MLB.  He then tried to wrap his average mind around Bradley posting an on base percentage of over .400 for two consecutive seasons.  What Hendry did was he tried to “use SABRmetrics” to play “Moneyball.”  But it’s hard to do those things when you don’t understand what they are.  Bradley’s OBP means that he gets on base, but he only had 22 homers and 77 RBI last year.  Hendry wanted a power bat, and instead he got a guy who requires other guys to drive him in.  It should be noted that Bradley was most effective this year when hitting out of the 2 hole, getting on base in front of Derrek Lee.  In trying to play “Moneyball” by using advanced stats, Hendry failed to realize that the key principal in “Moneyball” is getting a lot of production for very little money.  How was he saving money by overpaying for a guy who didn’t fit our needs?  What was the point of trading away all of those players to pay for the most expensive and least statistically accomplished of his three options?  I don’t think Jim Hendry has explanations for these things, because I don’t think he gets where he went wrong, otherwise he would have been able to see what was wrong with his plan before he executed it.

As for the other evidence that Hendry isn’t smart, he was fleeced by the guy he replaced.  Hendry traded three of our best prospects of the last few years in Rich Hill, Ronny Cedeno, and Felix Pie for Aaron Heilman.  Aaron Heilman was a complete liability for our team.  By mid-season he was only being used mop up duty in huge losses.  Meanwhile, Cedeno is hitting and fielding well with the Pirates, Felix Pie has hit for the cycle with the Orioles, who also have a young starter in Rich Hill who could still be a front of the rotation pitcher if he stops walking people.  Baltimore GM Andy MacPhail clearly understands “Moneyball,” as he has fleeced other GMs for young and cheap talent like Adam Jones, and is building a winner through those trades and through his farm system.  Don’t be surprised when the Orioles are a good team two years from now.  This is a GM who won two World Series championships with the Twins.  He didn’t do well with the Cubs due to the constraints of their parent company and his poor adjustment to having money to spend for the first time in his career.

So, although we clearly made the right choice in switching from MacPhail to Hendry and have had three playoff runs to show for it, Jim Hendry is clearly not the answer either to the Cubs quest for a title, now on its 101st year.  Getting rid of him might be just as important as getting rid of Milton Bradley.  He overhauled a contender and turned us into a very expensive non-contender.  That combination leaves us few options for improvement in the near future.  The only option left is to overhaul the front office.  Thanks for the memories, Jim.  I mean that.  Yours was the most successful Cubs tenure of my lifetime by far.  But you are outclassed by your peers.  You have outlived your usefulness and have become a liability.  You gave us a good run, but it’s time to move on.