Look, Milton Bradley, despite his temper tantrums and penchant for lunacy (and injury history), was a good baseball player last season. I know this, because I looked at his stats. It doesn’t matter what size or shape a dude is, if he has an OBP of .436 and an OPS+ of 163 (well above the league average of 100), he’s pretty good at the plate. Having 22 homers and 73 RBIs in 126 games is pretty darn good, too. He is making the team with the most runs in the NL of a year ago better. Let me remind you, the object of baseball is to score more runs than your opponent.

But see, if you are Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Tribune, these things, a player’s actual production at the plate, take a back seat. Rick Morrissey is more convinced Bradley’s fire and passion is what’s going to turn this team around from choking in the first round of the playoffs.

When Ryan Dempster walks seven batters in a playoff game, as he did in the series opener against the Dodgers, that’s pressure getting the better of a team.

When each member of the infield commits an error in a playoff game, as the Cubs did in Game 2 of that series, that’s pressure getting the better of a team.

What became finally and conclusively apparent in the 2008 postseason was that the cute, happy, aw-shucks Cubs thing doesn’t work. It tends to freeze in the spotlight, with earnest smiles giving way to a sort of ghastly group rictus.

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Now comes Milton Bradley, who is so un-Cublike he probably wears White Sox boxers under his pants. He’s the Human Sneer. The Cubs aren’t bringing him to town to be a leader. They’re bringing him to provide another left-handed bat and light a fire. Light a fire, pull the pin of a grenade — it’s the same thing, isn’t it?

Do you see what Rick Morrissey is proposing here? He is essentially saying Ryan Dempster walked seven guys in the first game of the NLDS against the Dodgers because the team was, wait for it, full of nice guys. He is saying because Milton Bradley wasn’t patrolling the outfield on that fall night, his fire and passion couldn’t magically guide Dempster’s right arm to throw strikes. He is proposing that if Milton Bradley was on the Cubs, they somehow don’t commit all those errors.

Yes, you see, the Cubs’ attitude would have somehow been different because a halfway crazy guy was on the team, and all those strikeouts and errors would have vanished into thin air.

Rick Morrissey is proposing something incredibly silly.

Now, Morrissey does mention Bradley’s production briefly, using 15 words of this column to say he can hit for average and power and that that’s the “important thing.” But, he quickly goes back to Milton’s attitude and passion and fire for the entire rest of the column.

Apparently, Rick Morrissey thinks the game of baseball is like a high school production of Grease, where attitude and histrionics rule the day. But, that’s not what baseball is. Baseball is funny in a way in that, you have an incredibly lengthy sample size of a season with 162 games, and then the first round of the playoffs is five games. (Five!) If the opposing team is hot, one guy has an off day, bats go cold, a great season record can be erased in a blink of an eye. In the postseason, sometimes the better team during the season doesn’t win. The playoffs, in some respects, are nothing more than a crap shoot. Bradley can light the whole city on fire, and it won’t change a thing.

What’s that saying? Nice guys coupled with one “bad,” firey, passionate dude can in fact, finish last. That is, of course, if they don’t produce at the plate or in the field.