It was mid-February in Tucson when Ozzie Guillen first met with his assembled White Sox players–a veritable global village–for a team speech.
Half of it was in Spanish, half in Spanglish and the interpreters sorted through it all for Japanese players Shingo Takatsu and Tadahito Iguchi.
“You couldn’t translate that stuff, I don’t think,” Paul Konerko said afterward. “I couldn’t understand sometimes what he was saying. But it’s comical and it’s funny. Ozzie definitely keeps everybody loose.”
And so began Ozzie’s Odyssey, a strange journey of ups and downs, blips and bleeps, controversy and unconventionality that has culminated in a World Series that begins at U.S. Cellular Field on Saturday night.
Let’s retrace our steps through the good times and the bad as we ready for the final trip:
The spring
Power hitters Magglio Ordonez and Carlos Lee were missing, the salary savings having been used to bring in speed and pitching, pitching, pitching.
“We have a chance to be a very good staff,” general manager Ken Williams said on Valentine’s Day. “If we stay away from injuries and focus on the prize, I think we’ll have one of the top staffs. Certainly one of the more balanced ones.”
Good prediction. The White Sox had only six pitchers start games. The only one on the DL all season was Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez. And the staff led the American League in earned-run average.
On that day in February, Williams also knew there would be some tough times ahead for a remade roster.
“If you have 25 men together through 162 games–actually 200 games if you count spring training–over seven months, if you think you’re going to have a controversy-free season you’re kidding yourself,” Williams said. “You can have little incidents arise, but you can overcome them if you focus on one goal.”
If only he knew.
The summer
The White Sox beat Cleveland on Opening Day and went 17-7 in April and 18-10 in May to build a five-game lead in the Central Division.
By the end of June their lead was 10 1/2 games and Elias Sports Bureau–baseball’s keeper of the records–was sent scurrying for statistics to back up just how good this team was.
What Elias found: All 26 major league teams since 1900 that had leads of 10 games or more at any point in June had gone on to finish in first place.
By Aug. 1, the lead had reached 15 games, mainly because the White Sox had not had a losing streak of more than three games. Even Guillen started talking about the playoffs.
“In spring training, we thought we had a chance to be pretty good and compete for the division,” A.J. Pierzynski said at the time. “But if you would have asked anybody if we’d be playing this well and have everyone on the team doing as well as they’ve done, everyone would have said you’re crazy.
“We’re just trying to compete and have a chance to go to the postseason.”
The swoon
By the end of August, a month in which the Sox had a seven-game losing streak, the lead had shrunk to seven games.
Elias researchers started digging again and this is what was discovered: No team had come close to blowing a 15-game lead after Aug. 1. The 1995 Angels led by 11 games on Aug. 1 and blew it, while the ’51 Dodgers had a nine-game lead on Aug. 1 and lost.
But this one, we were assured, was Chicago baseball-proof, despite the city’s two team histories.
On Sept. 15, though, the White Sox were embarrassed for a second straight day in Kansas City, and nerves were getting frayed.
“Guillen: We Stink,” screamed the headline the following day.
The fun times were disappearing for a team that couldn’t beat the worst team in baseball.
After a loss to Minnesota on Sept. 22, the Titanic-like lead had sunk to 1 1/2 games.
Panic set in in the city.
Even Guillen said, “I don’t want to talk about how I feel about my team because I might say something you guys or my team don’t want to hear.”
But he also said: “It’s not easy, but you have to stay on the same level. No matter what happens, you have to stay the same.”
And his team did, finishing the season with five straight victories heading into the AL Divison Series against Boston.
As they enter the World Series, the Sox have won 12 of 13 games.
“There’s no question we’re a better team, having gone through all the struggles,” Konerko said on the last day of the ALCS. “We just had like a second boost of energy.”
The personalities
Run by a general manager never afraid to make a trade and a manager never afraid to open his mouth, the White Sox were constructed of disparate personalities and from disjointed cultures.
Some were rejects, some retreads, some refugees and some came with so much residue they had to ask for repentance.
Strangely, their problems seemed to provide a team security blanket, a we’re-in-this-together bond that was fostered and fueled by Williams, never one to pass up an us-against-the-world mentality.
The chip on the shoulder became Everest-like.
Pierzynski was basically unwanted because of a “clubhouse cancer” label. He signed with the White Sox just to have a job.
“A.J. is a 20-something-year-old baby,” Guillen said halfway through the season. “He says stuff, and people sometimes don’t like it. I just laugh. The only thing about A.J. is he just wants to win.”
Cuban exiles Jose Contreras and El Duque Hernandez were basically run out of New York for their inconsistency and ineffectiveness.
If fans had had their way, Jon Garland and Joe Crede would have been run out of Chicago for past failures. Juan Uribe supposedly was not an everyday shortstop, Tadahito Iguchi wasn’t good enough to play in the United States, Scott Podsednik too soft to play on a contender, Carl Everett too weird to have around.
Jermaine Dye was unwanted because he was injury-prone and over the hill, Dustin Hermanson because he was old and caught between starting and relieving.
And then along came Bobby Jenks, who was not only a rookie but a reject as well–from the Angels, no less–because of past personal issues. But he proved to be a savior on the South Side.
In the middle of it all was the soft-spoken, non-controversial Konerko.
“You have guys coming here who were maybe not wanted or someone spoke badly of them where they came from,” Konerko said during the season. “When a player can have a chip on his shoulder . . . that’s a dangerous thing when a guy plays the game with a meaning behind it.”
The controversies
Williams’ spring prophecy played out during the season. The mixture of personalities and the perplexing passion of Guillen at times made it seem like the team would self-destruct in persecution. Only trouble was, the White Sox seemed to thrive on it.
There was never a short supply of stories around this team, much of it created–sometimes intentionally–by Guillen.
On the Sox’s lone trip to New York the manager was roasted for saying inappropriate things in the dugout. It was left to Williams to clean up the mess.
“I told Ozzie I never want to go on ESPN to clean up for him again,” Williams said after explaining his way out of the managerial mess.
Williams himself was involved in a midseason soap opera, pretty much publicly pursuing Cincinnati’s Ken Griffey Jr., even though the Reds insisted he wasn’t for sale. It was an effort that might have threatened what had become a close-knit team and one widely debated on talk radio.
“I talked to Kenny,” Guillen said, “and I said, `Listen, don’t fix something that’s not broken.’ It’s not fair for my team after they played so good for me.”
Griffey remained in Cincinnati and later wound up on the disabled list. So did Frank Thomas, leaving the role of DH almost exclusively to Everett. That prevented one brewing controversy, but Everett later complained when he was dropped from third to sixth in the batting order.
Guillen told the media–but not Everett–he had two choices. Everett could bat sixth or he could sit on the bench. Everett batted sixth.
Of all the mini-whirlwinds that made up this strange season, none created a bigger stir that the Damaso Marte affair. And it came at the worst time, during the incredible shrinking lead saga when the White Sox really needed no other distractions.
“A distraction for me, yeah,” Guillen said. “For the team? [No]. We can play without him. We did it before.”
Marte’s offense was reporting late one day and saying he wasn’t ready to pitch. Guillen has only two rules: Don’t be late and be on time for the national anthem.
Marte wasn’t with the team in Kansas City (during the “we stink” series) but did appear a day later in Minnesota, apologized to the team and was reinstated after a vote of team veterans.
The Sox also survived Guillen’s warning to Thomas when he was ready to rejoin the team: “It is good to have him here, because now he can see a winning attitude, because he was part of the bad attitude [of the past]. Frank was a big part of the bad attitude. Now he can see the guys, how we handle stuff, why we’re not whining every day. . .”
They also survived all the other problems, learning that, as Guillen says, “I talk to my players through the media.”
And he talked and talked and talked. There were rants about media treatment, the team’s reception by fans and a rambling dissertation on how he might retire if the White Sox win the World Series.
“We took a lot of beatings during the year and we just kept playing,” Guillen said after beating the Angels. “Good thing my players don’t listen to what I was saying to the media. We stuck together.”
