One of the more fascinating subplots to the Cubs early 2009 season has been the strange coverage of the team by Sun-Times beat writer Gordon Wittenmyer.

Last week, Gordon wrote not one, but two stories where he used some interesting circular logic, and a handful of anecdotes that painted the Cubs fans as a racist bunch of dopes.

It all seemed painfully clear that Gordon was either trying to ingratiate himself to new Cub Milton Bradley, or he was trying to light Milton’s fuse (which doesn’t need much of a flame) or both.

What he got was the ire of the Cubs’ front office who rightly called Gordon on his half-assed attempt to report on the issue, and he apparently did manage to piss of Milton.

I’m sure nobody in Wrigley Field was more excited Wednesday night when Milton struck out late in the game (for the third time that night) and the boos started from the Cubs faithful.

Regardless of his motives, Gordon was going to get his anticipated result, Milton was going to go off, and it was either going to prove to Gordon (if to few others) that he was right about the bigoted paying customers at Wrigley Field, or at the very least Milton was going to lose his shit, and it was going to make for good copy.

The problem is that Milton was pissed off about Gordon’s first racism feature.  About Gordon, to be exact.

Milton had been boycotting talking to the media for several days, and the Cubs finally convinced him that in the long run it would be far easier on him if he’d talk to the media, at least a little.

So, in an effort to talk to the media and be read by as few people as possible (and understood by far fewer) Milton talked to the comely Carrie Muskat of house organ cubs.com.

(And let that be the last time we refer to Carrie and “organ” in the same sentence.)

“It’s been frustrating,” Bradley said after Thursday’s game. “You come in here and all they want to talk about is how often you get hurt and your attitude and everything. I’ve given them an example right off the bat. I just don’t feel like getting caught up in all the negativity.

“I’m a positive person, an upbeat person,” he said. “I’m trying to focus on what I’m trying to do here. My teammates are behind me and the more reporters get in my face, the more I talk, the more things get written the way I don’t say them or they’re taken out of context, and that’s when you lose teammates and you lose fans. The best strategy for me has always been to not say anything.”

“When I turn around and people are standing at my locker every time, I’m trying to figure out why, because I’ve already told them I don’t want to talk,” Bradley said. “That’s the only thing — I never had a problem with the media until I started reading stuff that wasn’t what I said.

Gee, Gordo, who do you think he’s talking about?

It’s been a pretty shitty year so far for Cubs fans who actually want to follow the team and find out what’s going on.  First, the Daily Herald won’t let Bruce Miles travel, and now Milton will only talk to Carrie Muskat.  What’s next, Lou decides he wants George Castle back in the clubhouse?

The worst part of Gordo ramping up Milton’s media-phobia is that there was actual news in what he was saying, and it wasn’t in any of the crap about Gordon trying to use Milton to prove a non-existent point about how mean Cubs fans are.  Bradley admitted he’s not just a little physically injured, it’s pretty bad.  When asked if he was close to coming back to play again, he said.

“I want to say I am, but I’m not.”

Then we get this pile of steaming Gordo hidden in his barely read blog on the Sun-Times site.

Hey Milton, Let’s Talk

If Milton Bradley has a problem with the story I wrote for the April 15 editions of the Sun-Times about the reputation at Wrigley for racial taunting and his perspective on that, then he should tell me about it, rip me if he wants, tell me what he thinks was unfair or inaccurate. We can keep the talk private, or he can make it as public as he wants.

How big of you.  You’ll allow him to rip you if he wants (I highly recommend it to Milton, it’s fun as hell) if he’ll take the time to critique your work for you.  Because really, that’s what a big league baseball player should be doing, trying to help a clueless dipshit learn to write better.

But he should probably start by reading the story – something he said today he didn’t do.

You are dumb as a post, but even you know that most athletes don’t read anything written about them, they read EVERYTHING written about them.  Just because he won’t admit to reading your shite, doesn’t mean he didn’t.

Yet that didn’t stop him from implying this afternoon that it was a big part of what was behind his homestand-long blanket media boycott that ended today only after a disjointed attempt by me and a few other reporters to clear the air with him after the game – and Bradley’s sudden decision to pull aside Carrie Muskat, the Cubs’ website beat reporter for a one-on-one venting session.

So you want to take credit for a “disjointed attempt” to get him to talk, and then when he does what you and apparently several other uncoordinated sportswriters awkwardly requested, you’re mad because he didn’t talk directly to you.  Hell, he probably talked to Muskat because he had library books to return and figured she could take them to work with her.

I have no axe to grind with Bradley. I’m certainly not hoping he fails – in fact, his success here would obviously be a great story.

Well, isn’t that big of you, you’re not going to be rooting against a player on a team you cover.  How big of you.  It’s not like you’ve ever done that before (Kosuke Fukudome), have you, pinky?

But he’s dead wrong if he’s trying to imply that he was somehow misquoted, taken out of context or misled regarding my intentions when I interviewed him in Milwaukee before the final game of that series for the story that appeared three days later. And he knows it — unless he really didn’t read it and he’s relying on second-hand opinions.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.  You didn’t take his quotes out of context, but I guarantee you that he had no idea what kind of context you were going to put them into.

His quotes were about his run-ins with fans in general, you’re the one who injected race into the whole thing.  At least that’s how it reads.  If he did directly discuss the racial aspect of it, you did an awful job of writing the article then, because it doesn’t come off that way.  The way it comes off is that a hack writer just threw a new guy with a history of volatility under the bus to try to prove a point that he couldn’t make on his own.  Gee, why would Milton be upset with the media?

Note: By the way, go to the Sun-Times’ site and try to find the April 15 story.  It’ll take you forever.  I finally gave up and just went to the column I wrote to mock it, and followed the link there.

I don’t know how much everything going on around him the past two weeks might be factoring into the way he responded to reporters today, at one point comparing Chicago to Los Angeles, where he had a tempestuous relationship with media while playing for the Dodgers.

Certainly, he couldn’t have been the happiest guy in the clubhouse after that 10-minute meeting this morning with Lou Piniella, with the manager telling him the injured groin has to be healthy enough to give 100-percent effort or he won’t play, that he’ll bat sixth instead of fourth when he returns to the lineup and also encouraging Bradley to talk to the media if only to make things easier on himself.

He already was mired in a 1-for-23 slump to start his Cubs career, and after striking out for the third time Wednesday night was booed lustily by the Wrigley crowd for the first time.

Did you ever think that maybe one of the reasons he wasn’t talking to the media was because he felt like some of the media, maybe one in particular, seemed to have an agenda he was hell bent on using him, wittingly or otherwise, to prove?  And maybe because Milton was playing poorly, and knew from his past that he was more likely to say something he’d regret when he was upset at his play that he decided not to allow the media, and one of them in particular, to catch him when he knew he’d say something that would be used to create a headline?

If any of that is behind the media boycott or the icy conversation this afternoon, I don’t plan to be a willing scapegoat just because he’s got a lot of issues swirling around him and a story that ticked off his new organization makes me an easy target.

That’s not what makes you an easy target.  Your penchant for missing real stories while you try to invent them out of thin air dos that for you.  And you don’t plan to be a willing scapegoat?  For Christ’s sake, you are upset with the idea that a guy you were trying to set up to be a scapegoat might try to make one out of you?  Holy shit, we’re going to need a scorecard to keep track of your delusions.

But if he really believes there was something unfair or inaccurate about the story – which he was asked today but couldn’t or wouldn’t answer – then let’s hear it. If there’s something else about it he doesn’t like or takes issue with, here I am. I also asked him what he thought about it the day it ran, and he shrugged off the question, saying then, too, that he doesn’t read the paper, as he headed out of the room.

By all means, Milton, the man’s right.  Let’s restart the whole pointless exercise of Cubs’ fans racism again.  It wasn’t absurd enough the first time, why don’t you provide Gordo with another chance to get up on a soapbox and bore us all to tears some more with his talent for generalizing.

Today, he ended the conversation before anything was close to being clarified, much less resolved.

Because Milton owes it to Gordon to clear up whatever it is that Gordon’s unclear on.  By god, we’d be here all day, just the personal hygiene stuff alone will take hours.  It’s lather then rinse, Gord.

It seems to me the coverage of him overall by the local media during his silent homestand has been more than fair and probably even more patient and tolerant and one or two East Coast markets I can think of – especially considering the way he has blown off reporters every game of the homestand, got ejected and suspended over his first at-bat as a Cub at Wrigley Field and then looked like he was giving half-effort running out that grounder and chasing that foul fly on Wednesday night (albeit, the groin being a potential factor).

He’s barely played during this homestand.  How were you going to write reams about him anyway?  Besides, you completely missed the point on the ejection story, you didn’t even know there was going to be a report filed about it, or that he’d made contact.  We found that out from Sullivan.  I don’t know what a comparison of how he’d have been treated in a market he has never played in, is supposed to prove here.  But I’m sure he’s really appreciative that in his first couple of days in a new town, the village idiot tried to throw him headlong into a debate about racism, of which he was supposed to be the barometer.

Under the circumstances, if he thinks the Chicago media are against him (and I can speak for at least one member), then that’s on him.

This is your writing in a nutshell.  Reread that sentence what does it say?  If he thinks the Chicago media are after him, you can speak for one member, and yet you don’t say if you are or not.  I’m sure it wasn’t you being intentionally clever, just you being unable to express yourself through the written word.  Ahh, but how is that important in your line of work?

Let’s sum it up.  You thought that your racism story was going to be huge news, and even more, you thought it was going to make you and Milton buddies.  It was going to be you and Milton against the world, against mean-spirited Cubs’ fans, against those other nasty media, and together you’d blaze a trail across the National League.  Only one problem, Milton, like the rest of us, just thinks you are a douche.