Jay Mariotti: Milton Bradley Reduces Cubdom From Sad to Wacko

CHICAGO—We’ve long moved past the sympathy-for-the-lovable-losers stage. Now, the Cubs must be treated like any other patient with an acute mental illness: send them to the funny farm, load them up on Prozac, lock them in a rubberized room and hope they don’t kill each other. It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before this forlorn franchise collapsed from the burden of a 101-year drought without a World Series title.

Still, who knew the Cubbies would crack up and go utterly mad?

It was almost better when they’d lose 97 games and fans were in it just for the beer, the seventh-inning singer and the post-game mating rituals. What happened this past weekend just might be rock bottom in the bottom-feeding, increasingly dismal existence that is Cubdom. Not even in the most psychotic of sporting soap operas—Yankees, Cowboys, Lakers—do you see a three-day rage in which: (a) serial knucklehead Milton Bradley attacks a water jug in the dugout and is ordered to go home by his angry manager, Lou Piniella; (b) Piniella follows him down the clubhouse tunnel, where he rips Bradley as “a piece of (bleep);’’ (c) the Cubs accuse visiting clubhouse workers at U.S. Cellular Field, home of the crosstown rival White Sox, of leaking the “piece of (bleep)’’ quote to a reporter, prompting outrage from the equally loony Sox manager, Ozzie Guillen; (d) catcher Geovany Soto, your reigning National League Rookie of the Year, is busted for a positive marjiuana test during the World Baseball Classic, which might explain his sluggish season and desire for munchies; (e) Piniella volunteers that he “smoked dope’’ once (though, honestly, who in this world smokes dope only once?); (f) Piniella and Bradley have a hug-it-out session in which both admit to crying; (g) the Cubs lose two of three, extending their woe to six losses in seven games and dropping them to 35-37 in the NL Central; and (h) watch a player who never should have been traded away, Mark DeRosa, get snapped up by top divisional rival St Louis.