The Cubs offense has been lousy this season. The team misses Aramis Ramirez badly, but even with him the offense would not be the powerhouse we were hoping. To some extent, there’s not much that can be done to fix it. Ramirez will come back, and hopefully that will help. Milton Bradley will start hitting - or he won’t - but given his career statistics, you have to assume he will. Derrek Lee and Geovany Soto have both started hitting some, but given the early-season holes they put themselves in offensively, their season lines still don’t look very good. There is, though, one thing that can be done: Aaron Miles needs to go.

Miles had, before yesterday, a season line of .206/.250/.265 in 110 plate appearances. That’s good for the 10th most plate appearances on the team, and 16th on the team in OPS, ahead of only some pitchers, Joey Gathright and Ryan Freel. The Cubs’ team line is .250/.330/.408. Everyone who’s batted for the Cubs who isn’t Aaron Miles? .253/.334/.416.

That probably doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but consider this: the Cubs are 11th in the NL in batting average, 10th in OBP and 9th in SLG and OPS. My hypothetical Cubs-minus-Miles team is 10th in BA, 8th in OBP, 5th in SLG, and 6th in OPS. In other words, the Cubs’ offense would still be mediocre, but it would be on the good side of mediocre instead of the bad side - which I could live with given the slow starts of especially Bradley and Soto and the fact that Ramirez has barely played at all.

Miles isn’t expected to scuffle quite this badly the rest of the year: his ZiPs projection for the rest of the season is for a .268/.313/.335 line the rest of the way. The problem is that ZiPs thinks Bobby Scales will hit .262/.333/.397 the rest of the way. Scales can play second better than Miles and he can back up third more credibly than Miles, too. Andres Blanco is projected at 255/.287/.309, which is worse than Miles, but Blanco is a better shortstop than Miles by a pretty wide margin. And Jake Fox is projected for a .247/.295/.435 rest of season, making him a significantly better option as a bat off the bench. None of these lines is great, but all of the players in question are bigger assets than Miles is.

Miles is obviously not going to get the 400 PAs the Cubs were talking about giving him at the beginning of the season, but they need to end this experiment and let players with a better chance to contribute try to fill his role on the club - they really can’t do any worse than Miles has so far. He’s signed through next year, so he’s almost certainly not going to be cut, but he doesn’t do anything that others couldn’t, and he needs to go.