Oh AJ, Wrigleyville is wringing its collective hands right now. Fans, reporters, wags, wits and even teething babies are wailing because Milton Bradley hasn’t been traded to the Omsk Oblasts yet.
When he was suspended for the rest of the season in mid-September, it was automatically assumed Bradley’d be exiled forthwith. He’s one of the two most hated Cubs in my memory, the other being the non-hitting, nightlife loving, bird-flipping Todd Hundley. To hear some people describe the situation, you’d think the Cubs will be a shoo-in for the World Series if only they give Gameboard the pink slip.
True. There are more than a few who this moment are calling for the Cubs to forget about trying to trade him — never mind about trying to get a face-saving return in talent for him — and simply fire the fucker. That $21M Tom Ricketts and his sibs owe him? Heck, it ain’t nuthin’ but somebody else’s money.
Monday on Bleed Cubbie Blue, a poster opined that the Cubs ought to keep Bradley, inspiring some 450 comments as of this typing. Most of them were divided over whether they wanted to string up Bradley or the poster. Hungry Jim Hendry also came in for a bit of a tongue-lashing, as if he were intentionally trying to drive Cub-fandom to the precipice by not giving his worst free agent signing ever a free ticket for a doomed Space Shuttle ride.
Like all reactionaries, these panicky Cubs fans are blaming everything on one whipping boy. Lucky Bradley isn’t Mexican or Lou Dobbs would have jumped on him with both feet as well.
Milton may be the first player in history to unite the stat geeks and the “character” lovers. No matter that Bradley ranked second among Cubs regulars last year in On Base Percentage, the holiest of holies among sabermetricians, none but a lunatic or a masochist is calling for Lou Piniella to pencil him into the lineup next spring.
This time — and this one time alone — you and I are going to agree that stats be damned. I don’t care if Milton Bradley gets on base at a 50 percent clip next year (something only five players have done in a season since 1901), he’d better be doing it for anybody but the Cubs.
Oh, come to think of it, I’d take him if he reached base half the time. That kind of production would endear him to me even if he’d voted for McCain/Palin in 2008. Bradley’s not gonna post a .500 OBP, though. He may be a professional hitter, but he’s no Barry Bonds.
The upper limit of his OBP probably would be around .390 or even .400. Nice numbers. Beautiful numbers. Not worth the pain in the ass Bradley inevitably will be.
All that said, at risk of branding myself a masochist or a lunatic, there is one circumstance under which I’d keep Bradley.
It’s my considered non-professional opinion that the man is mentally ill. AJ, believe me, watching him interact with umpires, his manager, his teammates, fans and the press over the length of a year has convinced me that Milton Bradley is certifiably troubled. People want to dismiss him as an asshole or a bad man. These are easy ways out.
One night last season, while the Cubs were at bat during a road game, the TV camera focused on Bradley sitting on the bench. He wasn’t due up that inning and the game, if I recall correctly, wasn’t all that important or riveting. You might expect a ballplayer with ten seasons’ experience in the big leagues to know that that would be the time to relax, mentally and physically, to conserve his energy for the coming pennant race (which the Cubs, improbably, still thought there’d be).
Yet Bradley sat on those wooden slats as if he expected a Johnny Wadd-model plastic dong to arise out of them and ruin his whole evening as well as the muscle tone of his anal sphincter. No lie. The man was a rubber band pulled way too taut. It looked, even on the TV screen, as if every muscle in his body was flexed. His eyes darted madly, not focusing on anything, not seeing the field or the human beings sitting near him. His look was that of the speed freak or, more likely, the madman.
On those rare occasions when he was videotaped answering reporters’ questions in front of his locker, those eyes darted around just as wildly, never focusing on a specific questioner, apparently only on alert for the man with the knife whom he was sure was going to plant it in his back.
Maybe Milton Bradley is too mad to play the game of baseball or even to hold any kind of a job. But pro sports is notoriously tolerant of personalities who’d be fired from any other kind of a job. Dick Allen wouldn’t have lasted a week in an office. Jimmy Piersall would have been homeless. Ray Lewis would be serving a ten-to-life rap — instead, he’s an All-Pro. Maybe Milton Bradley’s demons exceed those of a chain-smoking degenerate gambler with a death wish, a victim of a nervous breakdown or a man who opted to celebrate his appearance in a Super Bowl by participating in a murder.
He may be mad as a hatter (although his sins haven’t turned me against baseball the way Ray Lewis’s have football). Bradley hasn’t got enough control of his emotions to avoid injuring his knee severely just trying to get close to an umpire so he could argue with him. He’s destructively impulsive enough to be thrown out after his first at bat as a Cub in Wrigley Field. He’s burned more bridges than any ballplayer I can think of, including Piersall and Billy Martin.
But what if his demons can be controlled by drugs? What if Hungry Jim Hendry decides to convince Bradley to see a shrink as opposed to trying to convince another team to take the problem off his hands.
What if Bradley has social anxiety disorder, like Rickey Williams? Paxil helped Williams. Would it help Bradley? How do we know Bradley isn’t battling panic disorder, like Jim Eisenreich did? What if he’s bipolar? Would Zoloft, Prozac Weekly, or Wellbutrin help? Or even some pharmaceutical cocktail?
Maybe the guy needs help as opposed to a trade. What a story it’d be if Bradley, under a regimen of antidepressants and psychotherapy, got on base 40 percent of the time next year, helping the Cubs make the playoffs. Nobody would call him an asshole or a bad man then.
