WilcoFan

Wait...one guy throws at a player for no reason, cleans out his locker and "retires" in the middle of the game, and the guy who suspends him (saving the team $3 million, at least until appeal) is the joke? Hendry is a bad general manager...but come on.

ARAM buys into this philosophy, it seems to fit others on the team. And the Cubs would be a much, much better team if they players as naturally good as Aramis instead of ones that have to grit and hustle to maximize what relatively little value they have. Yay for False Choices!

For some, it is because the guy who signed him is named "Theo Epstein" and not "Jim Hendry."

If this team is going to be terrible next year and bogged down with a bloated payroll, with no hopes of getting much better until Hendry gets deservedly fired, the Cubs might as well waste money on guys I like to root for.

Evidence that Sammy is universally considered a jerk? Cause I like and respect him, and I think Hendry's a jerk. Yeah, I get it. You're a contrarian. That's your thing. Congrats. Based on the responses in this thread, it looks like you're stealing my bit. Obviously. Its been clearly one-sided. Everybody loves the steroid user; nobody's criticized him even once in this thread!

Evidence that Sammy is universally considered a jerk? Cause I like and respect him, and I think Hendry's a jerk. Yeah, I get it. You're a contrarian. That's your thing. Congrats.

Amazing. Guy #1: Cheater. Almost universally considered a total jerk. Successful at his job. Guy #2: Nice guy. Almost universally liked and respected. Unsuccessful at his job. Yet, even in personal matters, people side with guy #1. Good to know people can separate on-field from off-field issues.

So there are Hawk Harrelson types on both sides of the SABR argument, apparently.

http://www.arikaplan.com/ I assume this is the guy.

I'd imagine Wakamatsu/Jack Z called the meeting. Our management was too busy calling him a piece of [expletive]. Poor, poor misunderstood Milton. Its everybody's fault but his. This seems like an odd reaction to someone coming to his bosses and teammates asking for help. It looks like he's placing the blame squarely on himself. MILTON finally is, which is great. I hope he gets the help he needs now. However, others are not. They would rather use Milton to take cheap shots at Cubs management in a very Rosenbloom-esque style. There are plenty of good reasons to criticize Cubs management. This one is just kind of pathetic.

I'd imagine Wakamatsu/Jack Z called the meeting. Our management was too busy calling him a piece of [expletive]. Poor, poor misunderstood Milton. Its everybody's fault but his.

That earthquake in Haiti? Piniella's fault.

Yay for silly fan overreactions.

Is there a single major league player on the current Cubs team to whom this doesn't apply?

You mean like he did, ummm, today, when he began his comments with "this is the last time I or Lou will speak about this. We are moving on." Aside from that, do you honestly believe that if Hendry wouldn't have responded, this wouldn't have been a story? Bradley did TWO national interviews over the course of five days trashing his former team. Of course the media's going to run with it. You think Bradley chased down reporters and said "I GOT SOME STUFF TO SAY TO YOU PEOPLE!!!" Bradley isn't exactly media savvy. You realize that these were organized, planned interviews, right? They weren't post-game corrals-this was set up, probably by his agent in consult with Bradley. So yes, in a certain way, he absolutely chased down reporters. Anyone who does a sit down interviews is, in effect, chasing down reporters because they (or their agent) feel that they have something to say. Furthermore, it doesn't matter how the interview was done because the story was written long before Hendry said a word. The moment Bradley spoke up, it was a story. This is a dumb conversation. If you want to believe that Jim Hendry is the devil incarnate, selfish to the core with a master plan for destroying both the criminally misunderstood Milton Bradley and the Cubs (instead of who he is, which is simply a terrible general manager), go ahead.

Whoa Hendry is a nice guy? This changes everything. Stop the presses. Wow did you miss the point. See bold for help.

You mean like he did, ummm, today, when he began his comments with "this is the last time I or Lou will speak about this. We are moving on." Aside from that, do you honestly believe that if Hendry wouldn't have responded, this wouldn't have been a story? Bradley did TWO national interviews over the course of five days trashing his former team. Of course the media's going to run with it.

Watch out for the black helicopters, man. They're out to get you.

This is stupid. Hendry is bad at his job, but, from what everyone in baseball says, seems to be a decent guy. And pretty much a simpleton. One of his biggest failures is that he bends over backwards to accomodate players who don't deserve it. There's no way he thought about his response as a way to deflect attention from his team. Furthermore, his response didn't deflect attention from his terrible job when you consider that he said "Obviously, it was a one-year situation that I brought him in here to try and help us from the left side. Obviously it was a mistake..." It is more than enough to criticize him for doing a terrible job as Cubs GM. But carrying over your feelings about his job performance to his personality is utterly ridiculous.

Jim Hendry is terrible at his job. Milton Bradley is a pud of unbelievable proportions. The quality of Jim Hendry's performance as GM should have no bearing on one's opinion of Milton Bradley as a public figure. In fact, Hendry has been fairly upfront about his failures as GM over the past year, stating categorically that the Bradley signing was a mistake. Simply because Jim Hendry is a bad general manager does not make me side with Milton Bradley in any way, shape or form in his criticism of the Cubs. Hendry's comments about Bradley are the 1 in a million times I agree with Hendry about anything. Bradley needs to just stop talking and the media needs to stop feeding the situation.

Looking for decent info on Sheets and/or a discussion of his merits and this is what I get. Could someone please point me to the threads on the board that don't end in an argument over (a) the value of clubhouse chemistry, (b) the relative importance of strikeouts versus other types of outs for a hitter, or © a donut-related joke about Jim Hendry. Is there a hidden forum where this happens? Because that would be worth reading.

I'm not interested in the tit-for-tat stuff, so I rarely post, but it seems to me that davearm is not defending Hendry's overall tenure here. He is simply dealing in one FINITE area: allocation of funds to established major leaguers. And in this very FINITE area, Hendry fares at or around the level of most big market GMs. His argument seems to be that Hendry fares around big-market team average as it relates to "wasted" money on veteran players. This, of course, is not a defense of Hendry, because his greatest failure as GM is not that he wastes money on overpaid veterans, but that he has been unable to build a farm system of any offensive merit so offset the inevitable mistakes made when pursuing veterans. What differentiates good big market GMs (such as Epstein) from mediocre to poor ones (such as Hendry) is that good big market GMs are able to develop young players who can be much better than replacement level (such as Youkilis, Pedroia, et. al.), whereas poor big market GMs rely almost exclusively on their ability to spend and when, inevitably, the success rate is hit or miss, they have nothing within their system to pick up the slack. The ridiculous contracts of Soriano, etc., are especially noteworthy due to the fact that the best he can produce from the system are players like Theriot (who is a replacement level player at best). So the answer to davearm is not that his point in this case is wrong, but that it not the reason why Hendry should no longer be the General Manager.

Almost as dishonest as those who, due to either an irrational hatred of the general manager, a strident and close-minded adherence to neo-sabermetric principles (without examining the evidence), or just a general contrarian attitude, refuse to admit that his behavior had any negative impact on the team. I think what we're waiting for is one shred of evidence that Bradley's mere presence made the team worse, and nobody seems to have that for us other than to say he's been on a lot of teams. 1. Step One: Create a finite and irrational set of terms on which a discussion must occur 2. Step Two: Demand Evidence 3. Step Three: Ignore evidence provided by other side by declaring any evidence that doesn't fit within a ridiculous set of terms (see Step One) to "not be evidence." 4. Step Four: Profit!

Almost as dishonest as those who, due to either an irrational hatred of the general manager, a strident and close-minded adherence to neo-sabermetric principles (without examining the evidence), or just a general contrarian attitude, refuse to admit that his behavior had any negative impact on the team.

You, mostly.