It appears that Lou Piniella will be named manager of the Chicago Cubs as soon as today. In firing Dusty Baker and hiring Piniella, the Cubs have struck out in a bold new direction for exactly where they are.

Most lamentations for the Cubs start with the fact that they haven’t won a World Series since 1908 and haven’t won a pennant since 1945. That’s ancient history. The good guys are dead. The bad guys are dead. Rogers Hornsby’s mismanagement of Hack Wilson, the pointless experiment that was the College of Coaches, Leo Durocher’s conflicts with Ron Santo — these are all great stories but they have nothing to do with the Cubs today.

Chicago’s current problem isn’t personalities but personnel. Baker famously derided the entire concept of reaching base, saying, “Onbase percentage is great if you can score runs and do something with that on-base percentage. On-base percentage just to clog up the bases isn’t that great to me.”

This is a very strange thing for a manager to say whether he’s of the old bunt and run school or a latter-day Earl Weaver-type devotee of the three-run homer, because on-base percentage is just an expression of how often a player reaches base. When a player reaches base, it means simply he hasn’t made an out. When an out isn’t made, the team gets to keep hitting. The longer the team hits, the more likely it is to score runs. The more runs a team scores, the more likely it is to win. This isn’t about “Moneyball” or Sabermetrics. It’s about the very basis of how baseball works.

On-base percentage is both cause and effect of offense. The more runs a team scores, the more runners it will have on base. The more runners a team has on base, the more runs it will score. Baker saw reaching base as an isolated occurrence that had no connection to scoring, when in actuality reaching base is what enables scoring to happen.

Baker managed the Cubs for just four seasons, but the franchise has long been run as if getting on base were not an important consideration. The Cubs have institutionalized not reaching base. In the 30 seasons from 1977 and 2006 the Cubs have frequently been below average in on-base percentage. In 1984, the Cubs enjoyed a rare second-place finish in team OBP. Not coincidentally, it was one of the few seasons during that period that the Cubs reached the postseason.

In 2006, the nadir of the Baker run and the fifth time Chicago has lost over 90 games since 1996, the Cubs finished with just 395 walks as a team. This is actually a rarer achievement than hitting 240 home runs, the number of home runs hit by the 1961 Yankees and for many years after the team power gold standard. From 1996 to present, 11 teams have surpassed the 240 home run mark. From 1975 through 2005, just eight teams drew fewer than 400 walks in a non-strike season, the most recent being the infamous 2003 Detroit Tigers.

Thus the 2006 Cubs represented the perfection of Bakerism, the OBP-free offense. From the leadoff hitter, Juan Pierre, who drew 32 walks in 162 games, to the number eight hitter, Ron Cedeno, who took 17 walks (four intentional) in 151 games, the Cubs manfully refused to reach base.

When Piniella takes office, attention will be focused on the train wreck that was the Cubs’ pitching staff, with the mangled and perhaps irreparable careers of Kerry Wood and Mark Prior serving as emblems of lost potential, but rebuilding the pitching staff will be child’s play compared to changing the culture of impatience that has pervaded Wrigley Field for decades. It’s not clear if he is temperamentally or philosophically suited to the job. As a player, Piniella hit for good averages (.291 career) without being selective (368 career walks in over 1,700 games). As a manager, he did not seem overly troubled with playing unselective non-hitters like Gary Ward (who had one of the worst seasons by an outfielder in the history of the Yankees), Todd Benzinger, Billy Hatcher, Luis Sojo, and Mariano Duncan.

Still, a manager can only use the personnel that he is given. General manager Jim Hendry clearly bears much responsibility for the team’s inability to mount an offense. This November, Hendry will celebrate his 12th anniversary as a Cubs executive. Prior to becoming assistant general manager in 2000, he spent four years overseeing the Cubs’ minor league system during a period of time in which its most notable products were Wood and Corey Patterson, a typically impatient Cub. Hendry became the GM at mid-season in 2002 and took over a club that possessed several players that were willing to look at ball four, including Fred McGriff, Mark Bellhorn, and Bill Mueller. By 2003, these had been displaced by Eric Karros, Mark Grudzielanek, and Aramis Ramirez, all far less patient than their predecessors. This inaugurated a preference for impatience that has never abated. In 2002, shortstop Neifi Perez, with 18 walks in 154 games, batted first or second 94 times.

In the short term, though, there will be little Piniella can do to fix the offense short of stern lectures. A full season of Derek Lee will undoubtedly help, but the club’s second best hitter, Aramis Ramirez, has the option of negating his contract and becoming a free agent. There are few position players in the system and an equal paucity of franchise-changing players on the free agent market.

The great irony here is that Piniella is as misplaced with the Cubs as he was with a Tampa Bay club that is forever stuck in its first year after expansion. He’s not a builder, he’s a finisher. Even if Piniella has it in him to wise them up, it will be years before the results will show. The Cubs don’t need Piniella. They just need patience.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for www.yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.