After Carlos Silva endeared himself to his teammates by starting a slap fight in the dugout yesterday, the Cubs had a team meeting this morning led by our most beloved cue ball, Mike Quade.

Nobody’s quite sure what Quade told the guys, but I’m sure it started with him throwing the bats into the shower and ended with Pat Listach saying, “It’s a miracle.”

Is it a bad sign when two weeks into spring training, players are fighting, the team can’t field a batted ball and it’s more fun to watch TV replays of Cardinals pitchers limping off the field than watching the Cubs play on it?

What do you think?

Quade airing out the team the first week of Spring Training games is fine. Chances are he wasn’t even all that mad yet. But not to be outdone, after that meeting, the Cubs players–led by Marlon Byrd and Carlos Pena–had their own team meeting. For his part, Byrd stayed positive. He told the troops not to get their heads down, that it’s early and these games don’t mean anything.

Pena took a different tact. He wept openly, lamented that because he hit .196 last year he was “stuck on this shitty team with you losers” and tried to kill himself by jabbing a broken bat handle into his chest. Tyler Colvin told him he was doing it wrong, and had Wellington Castillo throw one at him. Then Ryan Dempster handed Starlin Castro a can of peanuts and when Starlin opened it, a big foam snake popped out of it. The guys had a nice, hearty laugh over all of it, and then went out and lost to the A’s.

Then Castro took a poop through the sunroof of Dempster’s car.

Oh, what lovable scamps these Cubs are!

It’s way too early to draw conclusions. So what if the Cubs have made 14 errors in five games? Really, what does any of it mean?

[Other than that the team is still a dysfunctional crapfest and maybe the most fundamentally unsound team in the Cubs long, unmatched history of ineptitude.]

It’s not like the team has holes all over the field or anything. They certainly don’t have defensive suckholes in left, short and second. It’s not like they have a 245 pound centerfielder, or nobody to bat leadoff or third. They certainly don’t have a list the length of your arm of mediocre (or worse) candidates to be the fourth and fifth starters.

I swear that if the Bulls don’t get through the second round of the playoffs and the NFL lockout rolls into the fall, I think I might have to find a new hobby. Like maybe philately or starting to read books without pictures.

Can’t the Cubs wait until at least May to fill me with disgust?