At the beginning of the 2004 season, Chicago Cubs fans had reason to be optimistic. Their team, which had found itself just a few outs away from the World Series the previous October, looked like it was about to begin a five year run of dominance, and was the popular pick to win the World Series.

Mark Prior, Kerry Wood, and Carlos Zambrano, the three young aces whose arms had carried the team to the verge of winning the pennant, were returning, and prodigal son Greg Maddux had been signed in the winter. General manager Jim Hendry’s shrewd trade of nothing for slugging third baseman Aramis Ramirez in the summer of 2003 had netted the team a great young power hitter, and his off-season trades for first baseman Derrek Lee and catcher Michael Barrett added a couple of young hitters with real breakout potential to a largely veteran lineup built around Sammy Sosa and Moises Alou.

Center fielder Corey Patterson was set to return following a breakout campaign that had been interrupted by a fluke injury. Finally, in signing LaTroy Hawkins to add depth to a bullpen that featured another terrifying flamethrower in Kyle Farnsworth, Hendry had added what many felt was the last piece to a 95-win club.

But Prior and Wood spent much the season injured, likely because of how heavily manager Dusty Baker had used them in 2003, and Hawkins, when given a shot as the closer, basically blew a chance at a playoff berth by choking away several games down the stretch when just one more win would have secured the wild card. A summer trade for shortstop Nomar Garciaparra didn’t really work out, as the gimpy former star could only play about half the time. Still, the team won 89 games, posting winning seasons in back to back years for the first time since the 1960s.

Last season was an injury plagued disaster, as the team finished below .500 despite an MVP-caliber season from Lee, but the pieces remain in place for this to be a World Series winner with a bit of health and luck.

Given all this, a report in the Chicago Tribune that Hendry will be given a contract extension today shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Results matter, and no matter how big the space between expectations and achievements during the past couple of years, Hendry has, on balance, brought results.

Nevertheless, the question of whether Hendry deserves the extension is a perfect example of the difficulties in evaluating baseball executives. Looking at the amount of quality talent he’s brought in and how much he’s given up for it, Hendry would appear to be one of the better executives in the game, with a real knack for importing players who are on the verge of becoming stars in exchange for over hyped younger players. After Hawkins melted down last year, Hendry swapped him for the Giants’ Jerome Williams, who had a 6.48 ERA at the time; Williams promptly returned to form as one of the better young starters around.

But Hendry has also followed in Cubs tradition by running down players like Sosa and Patterson, whom he has to trade because they don’t get along with Baker, and then getting nothing for them, while allowing what was the best farm system just a couple of years ago to grow fallow, largely because Baker refuses to play its products. And this brings us to the essential question: How much can a GM be blamed for happenings over which he has no control?

Make no mistake, Dusty Baker has the power in the Cubs organization. When Hendry brings in expensive, mediocre veterans, or gets rid of cheap, useful young players, it’s because he’s putting together a team for a manager with whom he can’t win a messy, public fight. A lot of that’s down to the corporate culture of the team: Owned by the profoundly conservative Tribune Company, the Cubs are never going to side against the celebrity whom they made the second-highest paid manager in baseball, and who brought the team its greatest success in decades in his first year in Chicago. If Baker doesn’t want to play rookies, and if he insists on players who do the little things over players who can hit for average and power, these are just confines within which Hendry has to work.

One argument goes that if Hendry can’t figure out a plan to politic his way into having more power over the sort of team he’s building, that’s at least as bad a flaw as not being able to manage the roster or identify and acquire talent – in other words, his talents in the latter area are worthless if he can’t put them to full use.

The opposing argument is that an executive has to play to his manager’s strengths. Whether or not Hendry thinks Baker should be able to properly work in young players like outfielder Matt Murton and shortstop Ronny Cedeno, if he knows Baker can’t or won’t do that, he has an obligation to provide Baker with the veteran bench players he wants (like John Mabry and Neifi Perez) and is going to play once those young players start slumping.

The problem with the latter argument is that it makes it alright to forgive anything. If you know Baker can’t break in young players, the right call isn’t to provide him with a young shortstop and a reserve-caliber one like Perez, knowing the latter will end up playing. The right call is to get a good veteran shortstop. Pawning all your bad moves off on the manager is a perfectly good thing to do if you’re a GM looking to keep your job, but there’s no real reason to buy into it if you’re anyone else. Hendry hasn’t done anything to deserve losing his job, but he also hasn’t done as much as it seems to deserve keeping it.

That someone whose strengths are so neatly counterbalanced by his weaknesses is (sort of) in charge on the North Side says a lot about why this will most likely be just another .500 season in a long, long string of them.

tmarchman@nysun.com