The Cubs' feeling that they needed to give him two years also says something about the failure of the Cubs' farm system to develop and keep healthy the large stockpile of talented pitchers they had in A-ball in 2002-03. If you're not producing your own players, you're going to sign mediocre veterans to multi-year multi-million dollar deals.

Maybe, but my impatience with Hendry runs a lot deeper than that. The fact of the matter is that they don't need to sign Rusch to a two-year deal whether the minor leagues are producing or not.

Here's the thing: Rusch was originally acquired by the Cubs when they signed him to a minor league deal in April of 2004. Basically, he had had a disastrous year with the Brewers the year before, and had washed out with the Rangers(!) during spring training. But Hendry saw something and brought him aboard.

And you know what? It was a good move, the kind of thing that validated Hendry's stellar reputation as a talent evaluator. It wasn't a one-shot deal, either; finding Ryan Dempster and Joe Borowski were similar validations, and Scott Williamson may yet work out pretty well, too.

The problem, then, comes with handing out multi-year deals to guys that you found for nothing, and could replace just as easily as you found them. I know the Cubs aren't the Royals or Athletics; they don't have to be as careful with these things as those teams do. But how can Hendry not learn a lesson from his successes? Why can he not see that a guy who came to the team on a minor league invite with a highly indistinguished track record is not in any way irreplaceable?

To make my point clear, even if they're not developing the players they should be, we have a guy as our GM who has a good record of finding guys just like Rusch, but without the committment and salary demands. So what does it say about Hendry that he values Rusch so highly anyway?

Simply, I think it says that he's a GM who either doesn't recognize his own strengths, or who ignores his strengths in order to take what he sees as the safest path.