The nice thing about having some time off of work and spending it with my daughter is getting to take her to her grandparents’ house in the suburbs. This is nice for me, because my parents are still old-time news consumers and, thus, I get a chance to catch up on the three major dailies.

The bad thing about this is that one of those dailies happens to be the Sun-Times, home of the largest collection of clueless, aimless columnists that ever existed in one newspaper at one time.

Ladies and gentleman, today I present to you the lunatic ravings of one Greg Couch.

Jim Edmonds is 37 years old, can’t run anymore, can’t hit. Those diving, back-to-the-infield catches? Not anymore.

But the Cubs are going to sign him today because they’re so desperate for a left-handed-hitting center fielder. How do you think that makes their current left-handed-hitting center fielder feel?

Okay, nice start. Two paragraphs in and Greg has clearly identified a worthwhile subject.

”The manager makes the decisions and the general manager,” Felix Pie said. ”I don’t. But it’s not bothering me.”

Yes, it is.

Wait, what? Did Couch just report that Pie claims to not be bothered by this and immediately contradict him? I mean, sure one would expect a player to be disappointed and “bothered” that, after 7 weeks of travelling with one of the best teams in baseball, that one would soon be riding a Greyhound from Des Moines to Louisville. So, it’s reasonable to think that Pie is “lying” or just doing jock-speak; if that’s the assumption, though, why ask him in the first place and feel a need to report his answer?

Pie is losing confidence. And if all goes to plan, Edmonds will join the team after tonight’s game, available because San Diego dumped him for hitting in the .170s and being generally washed up. Pie is going to be sent to the minors.

The Cubs have done it again. Another phenom bust.

Really? A bust? Already? Look, I’ve taken grief for expressing patience with Pie myself, and I’ll be the first to admit that he’s been mostly disappointing. But a bust? Why do so many ink-stained dumbasses insist on being the first to make such grand declarations like this? What’s the hurry? Felix Pie has grabbed a bat and gone to the plate 264 times in the big-leagues, almost exactly one-half of one big-league season. He has not performed well. But he’s only 23 and has succeeded at every level of the minors until now. He may still turn out to be a AAAA player, sure, but I would prefer to see a more meaningful amount of games before being comfortable making such a certain conclusion. Not Greg, though. Hey, the Sun-Times can go out of business at any moment, maybe Greg needs to get all of the conclusions out of his system.

”I’m still young, you know,” Pie said.

Yes, only 23. But he spent nearly six full years in the minors,

But he’s twenty-three. He spent six full years in the minors because he was 16 years old when he was signed. So he’s not Alex Rodriguez, who came up in ‘95 and dominated at the age 21. Is that your standard for not being a bust? ARod? ARod also grew up in the States, while Pie is still adjusting to having lived here for six years, after spending the first 17 in the Dominican.

and the Cubs have dedicated so much individual instruction to his hitting. Yet he’s still hitting .222.

At the risk of angering Kerm and PenFoe by “making excuses” for Pie, all the hitting instruction in the world isn’t going to pay off for a kid who’s only in the lineup on a sporadic basis. This was the point of my defense of Pie in April–that he shouldn’t be on the team if he’s not going to play everyday, and thus would be better served in Iowa. I am not, however, too optimistic about Edmonds rendering Pie irrelevant for 2008; but the reason Pie should be sent to Iowa in the first place is not because he’s a bust–not yet, at least–but because he needs to re-establish his ability as a hitter.

Last year, they called him up, sent him down, called him up, sent him down, called him up. But this year, development called for more than that.

“Development” called for it? That is just a horribly weak sentence, and paragraph overall. Sorry.

Manager Lou Piniella said that sometimes you just have to take a step backward before you can take the next steps forward. He made it sound so temporary.

Is it possible that Greg Couch has never heard that old aphorism about “taking one step back in order to take two steps forward” before? And that Lou Piniella, in Greg’s eyes, is the man responsible for a metaphorical piece of wisdom that’s likely been around for a thousand years? And that the concept to Greg, upon hearing it, is that it is “temporary”. Well no shit it’s temporary, dumbass. Who on earth would willingly take a step back without planning or expecting it to be part of a larger process, wherein forward motion is the goal. If it were not temporary, people would just say, “well, sometimes you gotta take take a step back, realize your lot in life is always to be worse than off than you began, and stay confined to your miserable, backwards existence. ”

Maybe so. But for some reason, I keep fighting the urge to talk about Pie in the past tense

Cool. Let us know when you’re able to successfully fight the urge to write mindless pap for a living.

Last year, he was the can’t-miss kid, getting a double off Greg Maddux and throwing out a runner at the plate in his major-league debut.

Greg Maddux!

First of all, 2007 Greg Maddux was a quality starter, but not the same as 1995 Greg Maddux. Greggy’s known to serve up the meatball every now and then. What weiners-for-brains Couch fails to mention is that Pie was also retired by Maddux twice and was 1-6 in his debut. But even still. Even if Pie’s debut was against 1995 Greg Maddux and he went 4-4, it’s still only one game. Does anyone remember Chris Pittaro?

Pie was the next great Cubs prospect. Now, he has missed, like so many can’t-misses before him.

Felix Pie’s trade value has gone down. That’s probably the worst thing about his inability to produce better numbers in the big leagues. Greg believes he’s seen the last of him, of course. Greg also believe that your grandchildren will become sterile if you smoke marijuana seeds. Greg’s not very smart.

Edmonds is finished, but if the Cubs want to throw a couple hundred thousand dollars at him just to be sure, that’s fine. This isn’t about him. It’s about Pie.

And as far as eulogies go, this one sucks.

What do the Cubs think of him? Just 392 days after he had finally arrived, the savior is being traded in for a jalopy. The Cubs are that desperate to get rid of him.

Savior? Holy shit, in order to smash his square peg of a point (whatever it seems to be) into the round hole of reality, Greg has elevated Pie from a “can’t miss phenom” to “savior”.

And “get rid of him”? Do you suppose Greg thinks the Cubs are “trading” Pie for Edmonds? Is that how he thinks it works? Seriously, I’m asking because his meandering really leaves me wondering. I’m not trying to be a dick. I mean, to me the idea seems clear, and I’m really not very smart. Pie’s not ready–if he ever will be–to play everyday. The club has finally come around to this line of thinking and have decided to take a flyer on a player who has been a historically decent left-handed hitter who may have struggled hitting in a known pitcher’s park. He also may be washed up and broken down. Either way, there’s very little risk for the Cubs to sign Edmonds up and see if he has anything left. Meanwhile, Pie can play every day for Des Moines in the hopes of getting his confidence back and, if Lassie busts, they’ll call Felix back up and just go with him the rest of the way with Reed Johnson until and if something better comes along in July.

Is this really. A hard. Concept. To. Grasp. Greg?

”He does a heck of job in the outfield,” Piniella said, which is code for, ”He can’t hit.”

Again Couch goes ahead and makes his own inference on what people are saying, since it fits his…his whatever he’s setting out to accomplish here.

”At some time, you’ve got to be ready to do it. I like athleticism. I like tools. I certainly like speed. … At the same time, we’re not in a rebuilding situation. We’re trying to win. To win, you try to put a lineup out there that has a better chance of winning.”

That’s the cold truth for Pie. The Cubs are trying to win the World Series, having gone into Tuesday night’s game against the San Diego Padres, a 4-3 loss, tied for the best record in baseball. And Piniella seems to say he doesn’t have time to wait for Pie to develop during a pennant race.

I disagree, by the way. Piniella has plenty of time. The Cubs are going to win this division, and this is the perfect time to tinker with the lineup, the roster, to get it right for the playoffs.

I like that Greg stands up and “disagrees” with what Piniella “seems” to say, not what he says. It must be fun debating with Greg, what with all of the imaginary conversations he’s having at the same time.

The problem isn’t time. It’s Pie. He isn’t developing.

Couldn’t the problem be both? Now is not the time to see if Pie can develop, as there are pennants to be won? Oh, I forgot. Couch has already made up his mind on Pie’s career.

Corey Patterson, now leading off for Dusty Baker again and hitting .220 again, didn’t develop. Gary Scott didn’t develop. Lance Dickson, Ty Griffin, Earl Cunningham.

Cory Patterson is bad at baseball. Gary Scott was an overyhped loser. Ty Griffin’s numbers went south as soon as he started hitting with wood bats. Earl Cunningham developed. Into a ginormous bust. Not bad examples, for the most part. But none of those guys were consistent .300 hitters at every level of the minors either. Pie was.

In the ’60s, it was Danny Murphy. In the ’40s, it was Lou Novikoff, afraid of the vines. His wife booed him. There was Karl Pagel, minor-league home-run king on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, now a UPS driver in Arizona.

Okay, I appreciate that Greg’s going old-school. I remember hearing about Danny Murphy. Good thing my dad is still alive, because I was able to ask him about the legend of Lou Novikoff being booed by his wife. That’s a great antecdote even if it’s not true. And one of my earliest personal memories of “Cub prospects” was that Pagel dude, whose brother was the Baltimore Colts’ quarterback.

I like this kind of stuff. Maybe there’s hope yet for this article.

Cubs fans love their phenoms. Everyone gets all worked up over them. And then, poof.

Guh. That’s hackey, right there. Trying to ascribe a universal sentiment like getting excited over prospects as being uniquely “Cub” is not only inaccurate, it’s hacktastic.

This is a more truthful and, I dare say, cleaner sentence that expresses what Greg wants to say.

Sports fans love their phenoms. For fans of the Cubs, however, this love often goes unrewarded.

You’re welcome, Greg.

Was the attention too much?

What attention? This is a solid team, with proven players like DLee, Ramirez, Fukudome, Soriano, and DeRosa that are able to take any attention away from guys like Pie, to where he’s otherwise rarely even discussed in conversations about the team.

”That was good,” Pie said. ”Everybody heard about me [in the minors] and then [got to] see me in the major leagues doing my job. It shows everybody I can do it.”

Did you show that?

Are you arguing with him, Greg?

“I’m young. I have lots to learn. I’m working to make adjustments.”

See, that right there is why I view Pie differently than I do Corey Patterson. Patterson was insistent that he just needed to keep doing what he had been doing. Patterson would do things like whiff at strike 3 in the dirt and not bother running, because it would interfere with the facade of “coolness” that he would maintain as he strutted back to the dugout, while looking to the the outfield Jumbotron to see the replay and see just how many times the pitch bounced on the ground before he swung and missed it, while not even realizing that his home ballpark is the only one that doesn’t have a Jumbotron. Still. his expression never changed.

But Pie is honest and secure enough to admit that he still has a lot to learn. At the very least, it’s encouraging that Pie expects more out of himself.

Pie’s failure is lost in the success of the team. All hope isn’t wrapped up in him. And for once, the Cubs do have some young players doing well on the field in Carlos Marmol, Ryan Theriot and Geovany Soto.

So with eyes off Pie — something Patterson never had the benefit of –

Never? Holy cripes, by the last 500 or so at-bats of Patterson’s Cubs career, I did everything in my power to keep my eyes off of him. Are you kidding?

maybe he can go to Des Moines in peace to work out his issues.

Ya think?

Why hasn’t he developed?

Because he’s either not good, or he hasn’t had a consistent amount of playing time.

”He has developed,” Piniella said. ”It’s not the easiest thing in the world to come up here and hit right away.”

Piniella threw in the disadvantage of playing in Chicago, where all games are on TV and opponents can scout better.

I’ll give Lou a break for maybe not understanding that the Cubs no longer have any definitive advantage in television. Way more of their games are on local cable than WGN. 20 years ago, if you lived outside of the northern Illinois, you could catch nearly all of their games on WGN. Now? You would barely get a third. For all the games, you would need to buy the package, which gives you all Major League Baseball games, and that puts you on even footing with eveyr other team. Being a member of the media, though, Greg should be aware of this and could have helped clarify Lou’s lame excuse.

It was code for ”He can’t hit.”

Oh, Greg’s still doing his “Intrepret Whatever a Guy’s Saying So That It Fits Your Conclusion” bit. So it really didn’t matter what Piniella had said there. Greg’s got a point to hammer home.

Pie isn’t even a top prospect anymore, meaning his trade value has gone way down.

That value will likely go right back up if Pie goes to Iowa and hits like he’s hit there before.

The best thing for him would be playing every day for a few weeks, getting another 75 at-bats. But Piniella just doesn’t think he can afford that now.

Again, as long as he’s doing it in Iowa, then there shouldn’t be a problem. Apparently, in Greg’s world, being sent to Iowa can only mean one thing–you’re finished, kid.

So in comes the jalopy. And if he doesn’t work out?

I actually kind of like his metaphor for Edmonds. Jalopy sounds about right. And, like I said, if he doesn’t work out, no harm done. He can’t perform any worse than Pie and even if he does, the Cubs have a pretty rock-solid lineup otherwise for when Felix comes back, hopefully swinging a better stick. Of course, the idea is that Edmonds will improve on Pie’s offense, and Felix can get one more year in Iowa under his belt. As far as earth-shattering transactions go, this one ranks somewhere between the acquisition of Jody Gerut and the time in 2006 when Hendry traded his day-old elephant ear for two fresh Krispy Kremes–in other words, about as earth-shattering as a mouse fart. Greg needs something to be hysterical about, though, so he feels his take should be that Felix Pie’s career has died at the age of 23 and 264 plate appearances.

Wait till you see that Sam Fuld kid. He can’t miss.

Oh, Greg. You are such a bitch. That Sam Fuld bit is gold. Tell me which day you’re opening at Zanies, because I’ll show up pantsless, crazy man.

Tags: Greg Couch, Greg Couch Sucks

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