Bradley is actually a very intelligent guy, so I’m sure he “understands” the power structure and is enraged by it, but he encounters problems because he’s enraged by EVERYTHING. He doesn’t pick his battles, so after a while it sounds like he’s always crying wolf, and people become annoyed by him and ignore/ostracize him.

If David Ortiz said “I want to give the best for my team, and considering my health…” like you suggest, most would buy it.

Bradley doesn’t have that kind of equity built up with the public, however, so picking his battles would really help him immensely.

I don’t think he’s a bad person, I don’t even think what he said was that awful, but he should have sat this one out.

http://media.www.dailygamecock.com/media/storage/paper247/news/2004/04/14/Sports/Nba-Ruling.Thwarts.TripleDouble.Attempt-659325.shtml

(scroll down)

Bradley’s comments from time to time are going to rub people the wrong way, but it’s not his job to sugarcoat things. I think the media and fans have seemingly placed that task upon the players, but I like that Bradley seems to be more intelligent about value than many of the other players. He isn’t going to be well liked because he doesn’t give the nice interview the media wants, but all the Cubs need are about 180 games from him and they got $30 million worth of production. If they can somehow find a way to get 360 or 400 games from him, that’s an outstanding contract.

Now he said essentially the same thing, but the emphasis was placed on himself and not the team. Especially considering the fact that baseball is as individual a sport you can get while still belonging to a team, this just smacks of heirarchical hypocrisy.

The nature of competition, especially economic competition, is subjugation, but its first implementation! Even fan graphs is in the business of doing this, we all are either rabid fantasy baseball players who want to get the value of the next breakout player without having to draft him until the later rounds, or baseball fans who want to be able to tell thier buddies who the next joeschmo will come out of nowhere to win the Cy Young. As bad and as intense as we get about that sometimes, Do you ever think what owners must do? What owner wouldn’t want to pay Milton Bradley 2 million dollars instead of 8 million? If you haven’t bought into the system, as Bradley seems not to, or sadly, or maybe fortunately it seems like he’s never been taught how to exist within it, can you see how a cognitive dissonance and a paranoia about being taken advantage of would occur?

Again, I’m not sure I’m happy that Bradley hasn’t bought in or if I feel sad that he doesn’t know that all he has to do to get those contracts he wants is to satisfy the power structure already in place. Most people just know, when confronted with A, just say B and everything will be okay. This is why players like Milton Bradley and Manny, and to a small extent Ian Kennedy are my favorite players. They don’t sacrifice themselves for the system, whether they know it or not, they are contributing to the fabric, the story of humanity much more than any of the drones who will make more money than them.