Ozzie Guillen was such a breath of fresh air for baseball that he could have been named as a hurricane. The eye of the hurricane was the Chicago White Sox dugout and when Ozzie held court before each ballgame it was more entertaining than Judge Judy on the bench.
But now it turns out that even Guillen himself felt the need for a room freshener after eight years at the helm of the South Side squad. Guillen opted out of continued managing of the White Sox and the team hierarchy did not beg him to stay. Well, even “A Chorus Line” closed on Broadway.
Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf has always said he considers Guillen to be like a son. Once in a while that meant disciplinary measures were called for, but most of the time Reinsdorf loved him no matter what he said. And Ozzie did deliver a World Series championship in 2005, the first one for the team since 1917. A transcendent victory like that buys a lot of goodwill.
Even during his days as a player with the White Sox, when he was the latest in a long line of hot Venezuelan shortstops to populate the position, Guillen was a talking machine more than a hitting machine. He even said his dream was to host the Ozzie talk show. Although Guillen’s audience was small, more or less the same cluster of beat reporters for 162 games a season, a collection of Guillen’s talks, “Ozzie Unplugged,” or something like that, could be a best-seller.
The public didn’t hear the half of it. One of the funniest men in baseball, Guillen frequently went off the record to utter his best stuff because he knew he could get in trouble for saying the politically incorrect thing. Sometimes he went overboard on the record and did get his mouth washed out with soap. But the unpredictable nature of trips to the Land of Oz was a delight. That’s why television networks signed him up for those stints on air during the playoffs. It was a calculated risk that Guillen would amuse with candor rather than offend with a too-blunt comment and he never did embarrass anyone in front of a national audience.
The man could field questions the way he handled grounders. Once I posed a simple query to Guillen about his best memory playing in the old Comiskey Park—and he didn’t stop talking for 20 minutes. It was like the reincarnation of Muhammad Ali.
My favorite Guillen story occurred a few years ago. After a particularly distressing loss when he felt his team’s nickname could have been changed to “E-6,” the disgruntled Guillen hustled to the clubhouse to address the Sox. He passed through the family waiting area where one of the player’s youngsters was fussing. On the fly, Guillen scooped the little boy up with one arm and carried him into the team’s quarters, whereupon he declared, “You guys played so badly you made him cry.”
Things went sour almost from the start this year in Chicago and general manager Kenny Williams may yet take the fall for this. The starting pitching didn’t perform. The White Sox never found a closer to replace Bobby Jenks. Adam Dunn looked like a sure-thing home-run-hitting free agent hire, but then turned in the worst hitting season of any regularly used player since Grover Cleveland was in the White House, never mind Grover Cleveland Alexander was on the mound.
None of that was Guillen’s fault, which is why he will be managing elsewhere next season. The Florida Marlins need his spark and Guillen was that team’s third-base coach (and got his first Series ring there) when it won the 2003 championship. Also, a new ballpark is scheduled to open for the 2012 season and the Marlins must sell tickets. Who better to be the front man for the franchise when it begins a new era than Guillen?