If you think Milton Bradley is having a rough year so far, how about Jim Hendry?
The Cubs’ general manager is responsible for signing the .238-hitting, currently benched Bradley to a three-year, $30 million contract before the season.
He is responsible for signing “leadoff” hitter Alfonso Soriano, who is in the third year of an eight-year, $136 million contract. He’s responsible for giving Kosuke Fukudome a four-year, $48 million deal in December 2007. Soriano and Fukudome have responded with batting averages of .232 and .260, respectively, this season.
Meanwhile, the manager Hendry hired is under fire for not having enough fire, and his ace pitcher is under fire for having a raging fire that threatens to engulf large portions of the North Side.
Hendry’s team, with a $135 million payroll this season, is an underperformer in the way a back-of-the-magazine aphrodisiac is an underperformer.
Other than that, life’s pretty good for the Cubs GM.
You can say it’s not his fault Bradley can’t hit. You can say it’s not his fault Soriano can’t hit.
Ultimately, however, it is his fault.
Hendry is a stand-up guy, and he takes full responsibility for the way things are going. But just because most of the signings looked good at the time Hendry engineered them doesn’t lessen his culpability. It’s a general manager’s job to decide who will perform and who won’t.
It’s a general manager’s job to predict whether a manager will be effective long term. Lou Piniella, 65, is in Year 3 of his tenure.
It’s a general manager’s job to look into the future and see whether a player with a history of anger issues will be able to perform under the pressure cooker of one of baseball’s most high-profile teams.
It’s a general manager’s job to look at a player from Japan and decide whether his performance there will translate into success in America.
General managers do the hiring and firing, so it’s no surprise they almost always outlast players and managers. But if this team doesn’t turn itself around soon, Hendry could find himself out of a job at the end of the season. New owners — there will be new owners, right? — tend to hire their own people to fix expensive toys.
Know this: Crane Kenney, Cubs chairman pro tem or Cubs chairman pretend — take your pick — will not be making any decisions on his own regarding Hendry’s future.
For weeks, the refrain about the struggling Cubs has been the same: “Despite it all, they’re still only X games out of first place.” That has gotten very, very old. It says more about a weak NL Central than it does about the Cubs. This is not the story of a scrappy team fighting to stay in the race. This is the story of a bloated, underachieving team that hasn’t been able to right itself.
That the Cubs are not five games up in the division brings us back to Hendry and his players.
He deserves lots of the credit building last season’s 97-victory team. The question is whether the heights of 2008 are greater than the depths of 2009. Given the way last season ended and the first three months of this season have played out, you’d have to say no.
It’s true there’s a lot of baseball to be played, but it’s also true a lot of baseball has been played. To date, the season has been a huge disappointment.
All Hendry can do now is hope and pray. He can hope Bradley and Soriano start to come around, and he can pray Geovany Soto starts to play like he did last season. He can swallow his pride and tell Piniella to bench Fukudome and play Reed Johnson in center field when he returns from the disabled list.
While he’s at it, he can admit hitting Soriano in the leadoff spot is a mistake.
Trading Mark DeRosa, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in Bosnia and parts of Herzegovina, is the least of Hendry’s sins. And stepping in before the hated Cardinals swooped in and acquired DeRosa from Cleveland over the weekend wouldn’t have solved the team’s current problems. Cubs fans would like to think that, but it’s not true.
Getting the big-money players to start performing will change everything. Now how does a general manager do that? He doesn’t. The players and coaches do.
Until then, it’s Hendry’s fault. Unfair? No. It’s like the kid who accidentally breaks a window with a baseball. Of course he didn’t mean to do it, but he did it.
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rmorrissey@tribune.com
