Cubs suspend Bradley for remainder of 2009 season

To say Milton Bradley’s fist season with the Chicago Cubs hasn’t exactly gone to plan, would be a vast understatement. The Cubs added the switch hitter because they needed another left handed bat. However with the Cubs Bradley is only hitting .231 from the left side, and .257 overall. That is a stark decline from the .321 he hit last year with the Texas Rangers. While that was bad enough last Thursday Bradley was pulled from a game with knee inflammation, after the game Bradley didn’t want to talk about it, and had a nasty exchange with the media.

On Saturday Bradley had a scheduled interview with a local Chicago area newspaper, and used that forum to further derail his team, and to speak openly about how unhappy he was playing for the Cubs. Apparently that was the straw the broke the camel’s back, and Cubs GM met with Bradley in his hotel room and informed him that he would be suspended for the remaining two weeks of the season.

In essence Bradley’s comment about his team centered on the fact that they were far to negative, that there were far to many reporters with microphones in his face, and that all this was the reason the Cubs had not won a World Series for the last 100 years.

While there is some truth in those words, Bradley should have been prepared for a media circus. Playing for the Texas Rangers is not the same thing as playing for the Chicago White Sox. There is a lot of media in Chicago, and the Cubs are an historic franchise. All that aside though an employee should not be bad mouthing his employer in the press. That is a conversation that should have taken place behind closed doors, not on the front page of the Chicago Newspapers.