The Carlos Silva Affair

There was a time back in the days, when the Cubs were lovable losers, when the team was managed by a succession of genial incompetents who routinely traded away their best prospects for has-beens and hired equally incompetent field managers who were generally long-suffering and sympathetic counterparts of the players they directed. The guys who played what passed for baseball in those days were flawed but likable regular guys who had some degree of talent, but also some fatal flaw that kept them from achieving greatness, at least in Chicago.

Or so it seemed anyway.

Maybe it was never the case.

Nowadays, though, the Cubs bench seems at times to be occupied by more than its share of rather quarrelsome malcontents who lack any disposition toward self-assessment. The team seems to be run by equally thuggish and authoritarian incompetents, none more representative than Jim Hendry and former manager Lou Piniella.

Think about it.

How many current veteran Cubs players can you really muster up a case for actually liking? Lost count before you got to one, didn't you?

I mean, I have to confess to a certain perverse admiration for the crazy enthusiasm of Carlos Zambrano and the stoic perseverance of Kosuke Fukudome, but I know I am in some sort of mental limbo here and I certainly would not hold them up as model teammates.

Maybe Kerry Wood. Maybe Ryan Dempster.

In any case, the Carlos Silva story ended Sunday morning with nobody looking very good.

Everybody knows the highlights. Silva reported to camp massively overweight after being directed to go on a health regime through the winter. Fat and, under the circumstances, unaccountably sassy.

He announced that he couldn't figure out why there was any contest for the fourth or fifth starter's job, given his stellar performance early last season when he was lucky enough to last into the sixth inning of eight or 10 games when the Cubs scored more than four runs.

Silva gave up a dozen or so runs in the first inning and tried to beat up his third baseman for losing a pop fly in the sun, even though he had thrown two gopher balls and virtually every other pitch had been a ball or a rocket hit for the opposition.

His next start was even more atrocious and he went into his third start with an ERA over 50. Surprisingly, he pitched fairly well, which rather threw a wrench into Cubs plans, since there was then only a single spot left in the rotation and it was fairly obvious the organization was committed to Andrew Cashner.

The upshot of the whole sorry mess is that a variety of people in the organization tried to explain all this to Silva. They said they would try to trade him and suggested he should make a couple of starts in the minors to showcase himself, etc.

Silva then popped off publicly on, of all people, Riggins, the pitching coach who seemingly had the least to do with the decisions that determined the pitcher's fate.

Enter Jim Hendry as the stern defender of baseball decorum and civilized behavior, much as he entered in the past to right the wrongs inflicted on these sacred concepts when Milton Bradley acted out in 2009. Conveniently lost in all the bombast is the fact that Lucky Jim is the one person primarily responsible for beginning the succession of horrible and inevitable events. He signed the psychologically challenged Bradley in the first place to the tune of $30 million and was forced to trade him away for a similar, though less obviously challenged Silva.

Somehow, at least in the PR sense, Hendry always lands on his feet. Instead of having to release Silva outright based on his performance, admitting he had blown close to $30 million for a dozen or so quality starts achieved in a lost season, he can nobly release the guy for the good of the team and for the good of baseball, etc.

Oh well, when you are dealing with the Cubs, you do not expect reason or responsibility to prevail.

Just as an aside, Silva did seem to raise some points about the organization's fairness to all the players invited to spring training to set up largely phony competitions for non-existent openings.

I wonder if anyone else feels the same way as I do, that most of this current Arizona spring leaves a bad taste or the perception of ugliness somewhere you just cannot put your finger on.

Actually, in the process of setting up many of these supposed competitions, Cubs management may have shot themselves in the foot. What I mean is that everyone knew the Cubs were going to go north with the six infielders they are taking now, so what was the point of inviting all the Augie Ojedas and Scott Moores and Bobby Scales's—other than to take playing time from legitimate prospects from within the organization?

My point is even more obvious when you look at the pitching competitions.

No one who knows baseball and looks at actual major league performances and the deeper statistics could doubt that Wells would be the fourth starter unless he completely self-destructed in Arizona.

So there only was one spot and that, given the organization's esteem for Cashner's potential, was also pretty much a foregone conclusion.

Inviting guys like Wellemeyer and Looper though, only served to take away innings from younger and less advanced prospects like Coleman and Jackson and Carpenter. So in the long run it actually hurt the team and the careers of the non-roster invitees.

I think that unless he was just lights-out terrific, Silva was only around to be showcased on the off-chance some team starved for veteran pitching would pick him up cheap. Obviously, that didn't happen.

As it stands, the Cubs are going into the season with at least two pitchers who are hopefully just mediocre and potentially just bad—I'm referring to John Grabow and Jeff Samardzija—who are only on the team because of ill-advised contracts signed by Lucky Jim.

I still have a nagging feeling there is something wrong with the soul of this team that you cannot really explain.

I've read enough baseball lore to know that management is always duplicitous and manipulative and that it has not hindered good teams in the past. But what is with this team when even spring training turns into some lurid soap opera?

Anyway, their April schedule is pretty easy, so maybe they will be able to get on a roll and put all this behind them.

A version of this entry has previously appeared on The Bleacher Report.