I should have spent some time on the Milton Bradley story yesterday, but I didn’t.  All I can say is perhaps it was not the right time for me to really write about him.  After all I have long been a defender of Bradley, saying of his past mis-steps that he has grown and matured over the years.  The incident on Friday sort of said to me that I was wrong.  So, I needed to wait a bit and think about this one.

On Friday, Lou Piniella had reached his limit with Bradley’s dramatics in the dugout.  It was one too many batting helmets destroyed, one too many hits to the water cooler.  As Lou said, someone was going to get hurt, perhaps Bradley himself, as happened two years ago when an umpire used an ethnic slur towards Bradley and he injured his knee while having to be restrained.  Lou sent him home mid-game.  According to this Chris DeLuca piece, Bradley arrived at his building before the game ended, and his doorman asked if the Cubs had won.  Bradley had to admit that the game wasn’t over yet- and had to sit with that feeling.

During yesterday’s FOX game the Bradley incident was brought up again and again, and so it began to stir in my brain.  I still have to think that Bradley is moving in the right direction.  After spending the last month working in close proximity with my siblings to do what is best for my mom, I have freshly revisited a lot of old bad patterns that create hostility and frustration. After one reared its head, it is much harder to put your best face on and return to the task at hand with a poisitve collaborative spirit.    Sometimes in the last month I have been Bradley.  Sometimes I have been Lou.  And sometimes I have been someone else standing there looking on, trying to figure out how it got this way.  I’m glad for my family as a whole that this hasn’t been done with television cameras watching.

When I read the DeLuca piece this morning, I realized Bradley is exactly what I thought.  He is a young man who came from a environment that did not provide him with the tools to express his feelings in a positive light.  He learned to swallow some until the only thing that could happen was for them to spill out in often a dangerous way.  He probably thought hitting the water cooler on Friday was the most positive thing he could do, sort of like the moment last week when I just turned and walked away from my sister and didnt speak to her for 24 hours was the most positive thing I could do.

I am still trying to learn to be a better person; I am trying to learn to become the person I want to be.  I think we all are, everyday, including Milton Bradley.  Its easy to say he is a bad seed.  And believe me I do believe that there are bad seeds.  But Bradley is simply trying to become a better person, and that comes with a lot of mistakes.  Read the De Luca piece and you see that Bradley is standing up and admitting his errors.   The mistakes he made in the past, hopefully, are leading him to the person he wants to be.  He can’t go back and redo them.  All he can do is try not make them again.

Overall, my family grew towards each other in the past few weeks.  Even in our not-so- shining moments, we came back and tried to make the new relationships work, and tried to leave the old ones in the past. Hopefully, Milton is on his way to doing the same thing.  And hopefully, we as fans of the game, can let him try.