Silva release just another Cubs diversion

After a century of futility, even a positive Cubs move is aggravating.

Carlos Silva's departure punctuates what a remarkable business model this sports franchise has concocted.

The Cubs are sort of like the auto dealership that charges a customer thousands of dollars over list for a new car and then throws in a coupon for a half-price oil change.

Silva's release is the Cubs' version of a half-price oil change, so let's take a wider view than simply applauding them for dumping him.

You know, a view that first reminds that the Cubs haven't won a World Series for 103 years but are champions of diversion.

Silva has been a terrible major-league pitcher for years and wildly overpaid. Unprofessional while with the Cubs, he initiated a dugout dust-up during spring training and then scorched pitching coach Mark Riggins on the way out.

But here's what is being lost in all this: Silva was a bad guy but not the worst issue.

As an isolated case, the Silva controversy would be OK; in the context of Cubs history it's just more of the same nonsense.

The White Sox engage in feuds with departed players like Bobby Jenks and Magglio Ordonez, but there's a difference.

The Sox have won something, specifically the World Series as recently as 2005. So, suggestion to the Cubs: Win something.

As is, Silva is a sand pebble in the Cubs' desert of dysfunction, a teardrop in their tsunami of terrible, a blink in a century of sad.

With and without Silva, the Cubs haven't been able to win a World Series since 1908 or even qualify for one since 1945.

Silva was merely an itch to the rash that infects everything and everybody the Cubs have come in contact with for more than a century.

The way Silva departed conveniently obscured to a large extent how he arrived.

Remember, a year ago the Cubs had to choose between the lesser of two evils and Silva was a preferable booby prize to Milton Bradley, whom they inexplicably signed for big money a year earlier.

The Cubs no longer could tolerate Bradley's boobism and wasteland of a contract. They traded him to Seattle for Silva's boobism and wasteland of a contract.

Now the Cubs couldn't tolerate Silva's boobism any longer, couldn't trade him for even another boob and finally released him.

So it's odd that the Cubs are applauded for eating the $11.5 million that Silva had coming to him and cleaning up a mess they created.

Listen, neither Silva nor Bradley was the reason the Cubs haven't won anything significant in most of our lifetimes.

Bad management has been. That and, of course, the hexes and jinxes and curses and other sideshows that comfortably reside in Wrigley Field's crannies.

Anyway, all that matters is that Silva, like Bradley and other previous diversions, made big news over the weekend and eclipsed that the Cubs remain the Cubs until proven otherwise.

In the meantime, the Cubs still haven't won a World Series since 1908 or played in one since 1945.

Hardly any of the drought was Carlos Silva's fault, but reports of the past few days sure made it seem that it was.

How Cubbie all this is, don't you think?

OK now, folks, go back to enjoying your half-price oil change and trying not to get too aggravated with the Cubs this season.

mimrem@dailyherald.com