I’m so old I remember when Chicago Cubs general manager Jim Hendry was a baseball man.  That was a time before he became second in command of one of major league baseball’s top three or four franchises.

Professionally, Hendry’s come a long way from the days as head coach of the Creighton Bluejays.  And no one can blame him for leaving the Creighton program to accept a job in the Bigs.

Creighton plays its home games in a crappy little ballyard not far from campus, and as a private Jesuit university, the college isn’t known for its generosity when it comes to paying its coaches.   Coupled with the fact that Nebraska weather isn’t the most conducive for building a baseball program it was little wonder Hendry parlayed his success, leading the Bluejays to the College World Series to special assistant to Florida Marlins’ GM Dave Dombrowski.

That was 1991 when Hendry was still a baseball man. Now as a business man for a baseball team, Hendry signs players to multi-million dollar contracts and fires the hitting coach when they fail to perform.

That’s how far Hendry’s come.  Or gone.

On Sunday, Hendry fired hitting coach Gerald Perry.  When a club is hitting .246 collectively and is 14th out of 16 National League teams in run production, something - or in this case - someone has to go.

Exit Perry.  Enter new hitting coach Von Joshua.

“Obviously, we’ve been struggling for a long time,” Hendry said of the move. “I’m not one to dump all the blame on coaches. I’ve never made a coaching change to my knowledge in the middle of the year. I think sometimes you need a different voice.”

So that’s it.  All Chicago Cub hitters need is a different voice telling them the same things.

If that’s all it takes, I throw my vote to WGN baseball broadcaster Len (Judas to the Truth) Kasper as the new hitting coach.  At least Kasper offers a novel approach to the Cubs hitting woes - albeit wreaking of desperation.

During the eighth inning of Sunday’s game between the Cubs and Minnesota, Kasper joked (at least I hope so) that maybe Alfonso Soriano could loft a fly ball that somehow would miraculously land on the back of one of the birds circling Wrigley Field.  The bird would then fly to the bleachers where it would dispose of the ball in the crowd.

At least that’s what I hope Kasper was referring to when putting bird and dropping in the same sentence.  Then again, he could have put Perry’s firing as plainly and bluntly as Soriano.

“When the team’s doing wrong, somebody has to pay,” Soriano said. “Last year, nobody said anything, we had the best year offensively, and [Perry] is the best hitting coach. This year, we have a little problem, and now he’s the worst. That’s the game.”