With no respect to the Kansas City Royals, who remain a uniquely awful team, it’s become clear during the past few weeks that I have been wrong in thinking of them as the worst run organization in baseball. That’s not due to any of their recent moves – in fact, they’ve been even more surpassingly idiotic than usual lately, and when owner David Glass announced he was going to fire his general manager and then followed that up by not firing his general manager, he showed why he is held in contempt by all.

The problem in calling the Royals the worst-run organization in baseball is that they have an excuse. They play, after all, in the market least capable of sustaining a major league team in all of baseball, and with the best owner and the best front office in the game, it would still be difficult for them to become a perennial contender.

The Chicago Cubs, on the other hand, don’t have any excuses. They play in the best baseball city in the country, not to mention one of the best ballparks – beautiful Wrigley Field. They are owned by the Tribune Company, and as a matter of tradition draw their fans from all through the Midwest and even into the Rocky Mountain states and the Southwest. They have one of the biggest payrolls in the game, a productive farm system, a highly-regarded front office, and some of baseball’s brightest stars on their roster.

In one recent stretch of baseball, the Cubs scored 11 runs in 11 games – a feat unmatched since 1972. This month, they’ve gone 2-14. Yes, superstar Derrek Lee is on the disabled list with a broken hand, and yes, stud pitchers Mark Prior and Kerry Wood haven’t yet thrown a pitch this season, but none of that explains this kind of futility.

What does explain it is no mystery. Manager Dusty Baker prefers aggressive hitters to the point of actively deriding patient hitters and claiming that players who take walks just clog up the bases. In catering to this preference, GM Jim Hendry stocked the lineup full of players who have mediocre or outright poor on-base skills. Take Lee – the one hitter capable of running up a .400 on-base average – out of the mix, add the kind of bad luck that causes a bunch of players to slump at one time, and your team makes history.

On the other side of the ball, the pitching staff is missing Prior and Wood in large part because Baker has overworked them. That’s not entirely his fault – similar use hasn’t harmed ace Carlos Zambrano, and Wood in particular is probably just prone to injury – but Baker didn’t err on the side of caution, and it came back to bite him. Add in the team’s uninspired, fundamentally poor defense, and things just add up to a mess.

Baker, 271-252 in three-plus years on the North Side, is in the last year of his contract. In 2003 his team made the playoffs. In 2004 they choked the playoffs away down the stretch. Last year, they finished with a losing record despite having some of the best top-tier talent in baseball. This year, expected again to contend, they’re horrifying even by Cub standards.

What, then, has been the Cubs’ reaction? They haven’t fired him, yet, which is really a pretty bad decision, as no manager in baseball more deserves to lose his job. (In addition to running a lousy, uninspired team, Baker whines petulantly about how his problems are caused by things like not having a left-handed batting practice pitcher. No joke!) The organization has managed, though, to make an even worse decision – not only are the Cubs not firing Baker, but they’re holding out the idea that they may even offer him a contract extension this season.

Chicago columnists who are often spotted floating weather balloons for the team’s mysterious corporate management have even written about how it would be best to wait until the team hits on an opportune win streak to sign Baker to an extension.

Speculation, though, still has it that the Cubs are increasingly ready to fire him if circumstances make it the right thing to do. (Maybe if the $100 million team goes 2-14 again.)

All of this, it should go without saying, is insane. Baker’s not the man for this job, but if the Cubs think he is, they should just go ahead and extend his contract, whether or not the team is in the middle of one of the worst months in its entire history. And if they’ve at long last lost faith in him, they should simply fire him.

This sort of shilly-shallying, yes-but management is exactly why the Cubs are where they are. Given the team’s resources, it’s probably harder to botch things up this badly than it is to run out a good team. For that, those mysterious Tribune Company managers deserve all the scorn that gets heaped on David Glass, and a lot more besides.

tmarchman@nysun.com