Chicago ? Pitcher Carlos Zambrano and catcher Michael Barrett teamed up for a perfect game Friday.

If someone had suggested a way to sum up the awful first third of the Cubs’ season, it couldn’t have been illustrated any better than by what occurred on a warm afternoon at Wrigley Field.

Zambrano, who has pitched like someone with the weight of an unsettled contract negotiation digging into his shoulder blades, lost it in the dugout. That in itself is not breaking news. If Zambrano were a hip-hop star, he would be called Cra-Z.

Barrett lost it, too, which is perhaps even more fitting. He has made so many mental errors the last few weeks, it’s hard to believe he’s a catcher, the purported coach on the field.

The two lost souls, amid a group of lost souls, scuffled in the dugout, two months of frustration spilling over into a flurry of slaps and punches.

Then they went at it again in the clubhouse, Barrett ending up with a split lip and a trip to the hospital for stitches.

And there you had it, in a nutshell: an underachieving Cub going at it with a mistake-prone Cub. Assault-and-batterymates. Perfect. Use any kind of math you want – new, old, fuzzy – but any way you add it up, it comes out to 22-30, the Cubs’ sad record.

And hovering over it all is the Cubs’ off-season spending spree, in which about $300 million was committed in hope of changing the franchise’s fortunes. So now it’s official: Money can’t buy you love.

Nor, apparently, can it do much in the way of balling up history and throwing it in a trash can. Unless something radical happens between now and October, the Cubs and the World Series will go another year without speaking to one another.

Fights among teammates normally don’t translate into future success. Sometimes they serve to resolve a problem. More often, they’re a reminder that something is fundamentally wrong.

Maybe the Cubs can hash this out and be better for it.

Or, more likely, not.

A fight doesn’t give a team a brain transplant. A team doesn’t play dumb baseball for two months and then turn things around because a few punches are thrown. A left hook doesn’t solve a dropped fly ball.

What a mess.

It happened in a five-run fifth inning against the Braves. Barrett allowed a passed ball and then compounded it with a throwing error to third base, allowing a run to score. When he and Zambrano met in the dugout, Zambrano was shown on television pointing to his head and yelling at Barrett. Translation: Use your brain, dummy.

Barrett responded by pointing to the scoreboard. Translation: You might have noticed we’re down 7-1, thanks to your pitching, knucklehead.

That led to the conflagration. And the too-predictable 8-5 loss.

The part of Cubs manager Lou Piniella that is the grizzled baseball lifer probably liked what happened Friday. The other part keeps wondering, loudly, what he has gotten himself into. A mess, Lou, you’ve gotten yourself into a mess.