Everyone who has seen this movie before, raise your hand.

Wow. One hundred percent of you with your arms in the air. We couldn’t get 100 percent agreement that this is Friday.

I feel badly for Milton Bradley because I really don’t believe he can control himself. I am convinced he has serious issues with mental health. I’m not a trained professional in the psych field, nor have I played one on TV, but I think he is … oh, what is the technical term? … cuh-razy.

And the Cubs just signed him for three years and $30 million? Milton Bradley, the biggest time bomb in baseball? A major injury and a major blowup waiting to happen? And you committed $30 mill to him? Really?

And we think it’s because of a curse that the Cubs haven’t won a World Series since nineteen-oh-freakin’-eight?

So, what is Milton up to now? Where to begin …

Well, he’s hurt. There’s that. That happens. A lot. (At least 12 visits to the disabled list in his career, from what I can see.) He pulled a hammy the first week of the season and has one start since. In his nine-year career he has played more than 101 games in a season exactly twice. One of those occasions was 2008, when he had a career year in the baseball backwater where the Texas Rangers live, prompting the Cubs’ insane commitment, during the offseason, of $30-very-large to him.

He’s in trouble. And that happens a lot, too. In this case, an umpire said Milton bumped him after a called third-strike in Bradley’s Wrigley Field debut in which he pinch-hit with the bases loaded in a tie game and took six consecutive pitches — three of which were called strikes. He has been suspended two games. (Yes. One Wrigley at-bat, one suspension.)

He’s fighting with the media. Today’s story is Milton telling the Cubs’ in-house reporter that he isn’t going to allow the real media in Chicago make him “snap” — when he already has. It’s like someone who is sobbing saying “you’re not going to make me cry.” Milton, if you haven’t had anything resembling a real conversation with reporters not on the Cubs payroll in more than a week, your “snappage” is in the books. Now it’s about you dealing with it.

(One undercurrent seems to be this: Milton is unhappy that the Chicago Sun-Times did a story about him in which he said he was aware that Wrigley Field fans have been known to direct racial slurs at players, even home-team ballplayers.)

The tragedy of Milton Bradley?

He can be a really good baseball player. When he is healthy, he hits for average, he hits for power, he walks a lot, he’s a decent outfielder and he’s a switch-hitter whose left-right splits are marginal. He is a very useful player. Which probably is why former Dodgers general manager Paul DePodesta said, in 2004, when the Dodgers acquired Milton, that he would love to have “nine Milton Bradleys” — a quote that will follow DePo to his professional grave.

Of course, the Dodgers had gotten Bradley from Cleveland on the eve of the 2004 season for practically nothing (minor-leaguers Andrew Brown and Franklin Gutierrez) because  Milton was losing it; the Indians traded him days after he couldn’t be bothered to run out a pop fly in a spring training game.

Anyway, Bradley soon became a fan favorite, in Los Angeles. Until his celebrated blowup in the outfield, when he picked up a water bottle that had come out of the stands and threw it at a couple of guys who had nothing to do with the bottle-chucking. That got him benched for the final five games of 2004.

Then in 2005 came the celebrated dust-up with Jeff Kent. Kent, pricklier than a cactus, had the temerity to suggest to Bradley that he wasn’t playing hard, and Milton responded in a calm and adult way by suggesting Kent was a racist. And just when it appeared as if that ugly tit-for-tat (which I was in the clubhouse for) would tear up the team, Milton luckily needed knee surgery and was gone.

Ned Colletti traded Milton to Oakland before the 2006 season (and you can read that story here), for Andre Ethier, easily the best deal Ned has ever made. Of course, deciding to jettison Milton wasn’t hard for the new GM in town after reviewing MB’s history — which included three calls to his home pertaining to domestic violence complaints, outlined in this L.A. Times story.

(And the LAT piece mentions an episode I had forgotten — there are so many — and that is Milton doing three days in the pokey in Ohio after speeding away from a cop trying to give him a speeding ticket. Oh, and the classes on anger management that the Dodgers had him take. And how did that turn out?)

Anyway, Bradley was genuinely popular in Los Angeles, before he imploded. Fans liked him. If he could have kept a grip … he could have played a decade here. But he couldn’t, and he screwed it up, royally.

It helped when he was sent off to Oakland, and then to San Diego and to Texas, because those are baseball markets where no one much is watching you, and the pressure to win is marginal and the crowds are small, and your, uh, eccentricities, can go unnoticed.

Though Milton did have a doozy of an end to his Padres career, in 2007. Most accounts seem to suggest it wasn’t entirely his fault, the bizarre series of events that got him going after an ump at first base, and manager Bud Black coming out of the dugout to tackle Milton, and Milton suffering a torn-up knee because of it. That story is here.

Even in his career year, with the Rangers in 2008, Milton couldn’t make it through the season without a celebrated incident, bounding up four flights of stairs trying to get to the Kansas city Royals broadcast booth in the middle of a game — after he decided the TV guys were dissing him. You can see that one here — and please note the quote from Milton about how he is “strong, but not that strong …”

Anyway, how many incidents does a guy get in his career before a club has to be very, very careful about taking a chance on him? Whatever the threshold is, Milton certainly is on the high side of it.

I can hardly think of a worse baseball contractual situation than to be on the hook for $30 million to the least stable player in the game. But that is what the Cubs have done. Milton Bradley can’t control himself when his contract is up at the end of a season. When he is playing for his life.

What were the Cubs thinking when they put him in a position where he doesn’t really have to worry about behaving for the next three seasons — because he’s still going to get paid?

That’s why the Cubs are the Cubs, I guess.