Not everybody can be expected to count all the way to two

Intrepid readers could not tell me fast enough or often enough about the Cubs very terrible, no good, minor league fill-in announcer Alex Cohen talking about his namesake Alex Bregman's name and describing it thusly:

"One syllable. Easy to spell."

We all learned how to clap out syllables in second grade. Well, apparently not Alex Cohen. Not only is Alex two syllables, IT'S HIS OWN FUCKING NAME!

He's just so, so dumb. And not even in a fun way.

We have reached the point in spring training where everybody's bored of spring training. The players have stopped giving a shit, the fans have stopped paying attention and there's still nearly a month to go. The Cubs were so inspired yesterday that they scored nine runs in a game against the Reds and lost by eight.

The only fun was that they let fans pitch the bottom of the eighth, and they didn't give up a run.

Honestly, if you'd told me that they let some college kid play shortstop for half the game, and then signed him, I'd have believed you.

Wait, I think they did.

The Cubs signed a 25 year old shortstop from the University of North Carolina who went undrafted and unsigned after his sixth season playing college baseball. Well, he must be a real whiz, then. Look out Dansby!

The guy is Alex Madera. He played the first four years of his college career at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania. He was a two time MAC Freedom Player of the Year. Whatever that is. He was a grad transfer to UNC where he hit .332/.432/.403 as a...third time senior? I have no idea what to even call him.

In college, all six years of it, he walked more times (181) than he struck out (133). Impressive. He also hit seven homers in six years. That anemic slugging percentage at UNC is James Triantos-esque.

So why do teams sign 25 year old non-prospects? Is it because they found out he has a bat that he made out of a tree from his farm that was struck by lighting and he carved Wonderboy into it?

Not exactly. Mostly, you sign these guys because you don't have enough players at a position in your farm system to adequately cover yourselves. Nobody wants to go to a game in South Bend and watch every ball to short just roll to the left fielder because there's nobody there. That's where you put Alex Madera. Probably until this year's draft and then you have an influx of new, much younger, Alex Maderas and you give the old one a bus ticket. Or, at least a coupon for 10% off a bus ticket.

Back in 2003 the Beloit Snappers had their own Alex Madera. It was a guy named Chaz Terni. He was 24, which is too old to be a real prospect in the class-A Midwest League.

He was originally a Red Sox draft pick, selected in the 13th round of the 1997 draft out of Oakdale, Conn. And if you think it's impossible to find great players in that round, well, the Mariners drafted eventual Cub and White Sox superstar Ross Gload just five picks before Chaz.

The Brewers didn't need Chaz to start that season. They had a hotshot prospect shortstop to go with their hotshot first base prospect (Prince Fielder) and their hot shot center field prospect (Tony Gwynn Jr.) a highly thought of starter (Manny Parra) and closer (Tom Wilhelmsen.)

All of those guys would eventually play in the big leagues, with Prince turning out to be just as good as everybody thought he'd be.

The shortstop was Josh Murray, and they had taken him in the second round of the previous year's draft, after taking Prince in the first. (The Cubs had three picks in that first round--their own, plus compensation picks for losing Rondell White and Todd Van Poppel in free agency. They took Bobby Brownlie, Chadd Blasko and Matt Clanton. Nice job, Jim.)

Murray was only 17 when drafted, and played 48 games in the short-season Pioneer League. But at 18, the Brewers expected him to be ready to handle the Midwest League. If 24 is too old for that league, 18 is too young. That said, Prince was only 19 and he tore it up, but there aren't that many Prince Fielders.

After just 10 games, Josh was struggling. He was hitting just .188/278/.250 with 11 K's and just two walks. He was overmatched.

I was the official scorer for the Snappers that year, and I remember walking into the office about an hour before the 11th game of the season, and the door to the manager's office flew open. Don Money stuck his head out and yelled, "Does anybody have an airport bus schedule?" That was not a good sign. Josh was sitting in front of Don's desk, head in hands.

He was off to High Desert in the rookie league. High Desert is a great place to learn to fly fighter jets. Not a great place to learn how to hit curveballs.

Josh was back for 2004 to give Beloit another whirl, but he was somehow worse. He slashed just .160/.209/.250 in 55 games. He kicked around the Brewers organization until 2006, spent 2007 playing independent ball and was never heard from again.

Right?

Wrong!

Josh's brother was Aaron Murray, the Georgia quarterback, perhaps best remembered for leading a near upset of Alabama in the 2012 SEC Championship Game, only to throw a three yard pass, inbounds with less than 10 seconds to go down by four with no timeouts, and let the clock run out. Whoops.

Anyway, that's what Aaron's remembered for.

Josh is remembered for being on the 10th season of The Bachelor. He wasn't just on it, he was the titular bachelor and he proposed to one of the bachelorettes, but they broke up before they ever got married. He then went on Bachelor in Paradise and again he proposed to the "winner" Amanda Stanton, and they never got married either.

Man, if he couldn't find true love on a game show even after giving it two tries, what chance is there for the rest of us?

So what does this have to do with Alex Madera? Well, when Josh Murray washed out in 2003 the Brewers didn't have a shortstop to play at Beloit. They had a utility player named Keith Bohanon who could barely bend at the waist, so they played their third baseman Jeff Eure there for a few days, and then Chaz showed up.

He was just there to keep grounders from rolling to left, and he did that occasionally.

What I remember Chaz for was that during one of his many slumps, he hit a grounder to short that the guy fielded, then threw over the first baseman's head.

I ruled it an error, and after the game, as was custom, I made the trek to both clubhouses to ask both managers if they had any rulings they wanted to argue. Don didn't usually have any. Though during one stretch he told me he wanted me to give Prince an error on any bad throw to first, even if it wasn't his fault. "How the hell else are we ever going to get him to give a shit about playing defense?" I didn't do it. Don never asked me about it again.

On this occasion he told me he thought Chaz should have gotten a hit. I laughed, because I thought he was kidding. A halfway decent throw would have thrown Chaz out by 20 feet.

Don wasn't.

"He might have beaten that. Besides, he needs a hit."
"Well, then he should get one."
"You should change it. Or at least, the next time it's close, give him a hit."

I'm not exaggerating when I say that over the next three months, at least three times a week I'd go see Don and before he picked up the box score, he'd ask me. "You give Chaz his hit yet?"

No. No I didn't.

This is a very long way of me writing that somewhere in South Bend this summer, some poor underpaid official scorer is going to Dan Wasinger's office (he's the manager there, apparently) and Dan's going to be sitting there in his underwear chirping, "You give Alex his hit, yet?"

Meanwhile, for years now I've had this unshakable thought that the longer that Ian Happ hangs around the Cubs doing nothing exceptional, that eventually fans will start to think that he was on the 2016 World Series team. A big part of that is that when people do look back and think he must have been on that team (he debuted in the big leagues in April 2017), he does nothing to correct them.

He even showed up at the 10th anniversary dinner the Cubs had for that team the night before the Cubs Convention started this past January.

Well, Praz was quick to text me this, yesterday.

Oh, Kibbs, you poor, dumbass, whoever you are.

Think about how sad it must be to be involved in a Bruce Levine Twitter thread where Bruce's Tweet is more coherent than either of yours?

What Bruce tried to write is actually encouraging. At least so far the Cubs haven't had any talks with Happ about a contract extension. They shouldn't, of course, because he was never all that good, but he's clearly in decline. Last year he struggled to score from second on triples.

I'm still bracing myself for Jed finally just saying, "Fuck it. Happ will stay for cheap." But until that day, I have my hopes.

You see people posting on Bluesky all the time about "When it happens." I'm not 100 percent sure what they're hinting at. I just assume that like me, they are really excited for when the Cubs let Happ sign with Pissburgh.