Monday, July 03, 2006

a timeless monument to evil stupidity

scott williamson is in trouble for telling the truth.

it should come as very little surprise to anyone that the manager of the chicago cubs is -- if you'll pardon the anglo-saxon invective -- an unqualified dumbass who thinks angel pagan and neifi perez are good players and who necessarily relies on habit far more than intellect out of a scarcity of the latter.

Williamson said he meant no disrespect to Baker when he told WSCR: “They have their guys they like, man, and for certain reasons — I don’t know why — but they do and they rely on them. They go to ’em and go to ’em and go to ’em, and it’s good to be that guy because then you get that opportunity to keep playing, and if you mess up, you get to go back out there.

“But the bad part is that if you are not one of his boys and he doesn’t have much confidence in you, then you wear it.”


indeed, mr williamson -- this is why and how neifi is going to get more than 300 at-bats on a team that carried six middle infielders for a significant part of the year. it's been said before and often that baseball by its nature is a haven for overgrown boys whose brains would otherwise condemn them to digging ditches or fading away in a state penitentiary but for a smidgen of physiological luck. dusty baker is apparently one of those.

but his continued employment only hints, like the tip of an iceberg, at the monumental stupidity that is the baseball operations of the chicago cubs which lays invisible below the waterline -- a titanic, gigantic, all-consuming leviathan of stupidity. and jim hendry today drew back the veil of marketing deceptions that purports to hide the infernal machinations of that destructive stupidity -- and, in so doing, essentially offered any thinking cub fan a get-out-of-any-intellectual-or-emotional-involvement-free card.

“To be successful next year, it’s not a blowup in order,” Hendry said Sunday before the Cubs’ 15-11 victory over the White Sox improved their record to 30-51.

“We need to obviously go back and look at how we might have done things that haven’t been successful and keep the parts we think are going to be successful. But if you look at it constructively, you still have a lot of people that are quality major-league players that are not old that can help you next year.”

“I certainly feel we’re capable of making some moves before the end of July,” Hendry said. “With the situation we’re in now, we certainly still feel like we’ve got a lot of quality people we can still build and turn it around quickly with.

“The people that may not factor in next year that may be able to help a club in a pennant race certainly could be available. Our intent would be to just try to make some logical trades and decisions based on moving forward toward ’07, what we might be able to acquire or look into to make our club better for the next year.”


the tribune elaborates -- phil nevin and scott williamson might go, and williamson now all the faster even as baker proves him right again by sticking with relief disaster ryan dempster.

folks, if i may presume to delve into informality for just a moment -- i grew up in a rural area in the nearby midwest. in fact, i took my first paying job on a farm. i'm a pretty cosmopolitan fellow, but i know my roots and ended up marrying a farm girl.

so i know a little bit about horseshit.

and what jim hendry is saying, friends, is horseshit. this team needs a ticking nuclear device to be put out of its misery, not a band-aid and a useless hope for next year. this franchise is closing in on 100 losses with one of the worst teams it has ever fielded in any era. even if it should expand its payroll markedly, it is several years from being anything like a consistently successful franchise. at best next year can be another flighty stab at capturing lightning in a bottle, a "strategy" that has ensured decades of entrenched losing -- and, given the decline in the fortunes of its parent company, one must ask what odds there are of that in light of another likely contraction in overall payroll for 2007.

this page made its plea for sensibility along with many others, asking the management to break up the cubs, and such words have clearly fallen on deaf -- or, more likely, evilly hubristic and stupid -- ears. instead, we are to be treated to yet another display of idiocy as cruller jim and the commodore macsweatervest attempt in a this free agent year to pilot what is quite possibly the worst team in either league and remake it into a contender with less money than they had at their command this season.

such an effort, dear reader, has the potential to be a timeless monument to evil stupidity that will require its own chapter in the book of bad baseball management and whose tragicomic consequences may well echo through many years of the future of the team.

please note this: hendry today gave you -- the critical, thinking fan -- an out. he told us all in no uncertain terms that the cubs are an irremediable catastrophe because he and the commodore have no conception of what their problems are, much less how deep they run. statements like these are such a breathtaking instance of complete incompetence that they amount to new information -- a revelation of the kind that forces a re-evaluation of even deeply-held beliefs and loyalties.

consider it, friends. even in an atmosphere in which the cubs might be spun off and sold, consider it.

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