Ken Williams stands on a baseball pedestal now, a spot the White Sox general manager will occupy for generations, and occasionally wonders where he might have been if not for one memorable night on his back porch.
That was where Williams found Ozzie Guillen, alone and in tears, waiting for him on the evening of March 22, 1989. The Sox had just dealt Guillen’s teammate and friend Williams, then 24, to the Detroit Tigers for pitcher Eric King, and the shortstop came over to break the bad news to his buddy.
It was not so much what Guillen said that struck a deep chord within Williams. It was how he said it.
“[Guillen] was crying,” Williams said. “It took him a while to convince me I really was traded because I didn’t think I would be hearing that from Ozzie Guillen. I thought I should be hearing that from [former Sox GM] Larry Himes. But that was that.”
Guillen’s passion, which Williams admired during three seasons as the Sox shortstop’s teammate from 1986-88, made a lasting impression on a guy with a touchy hot button himself. Almost 15 years later, when Williams got the opportunity to hire his first manager in the winter of 2003, memories such as that one coaxed the Sox GM into following his heart more than his head.
So Williams bypassed other veteran candidates, some with World Series experience such as Cito Gaston, to hire a novice whom he knew cared deeply about every person or cause he encountered. When Guillen told Williams to “go to hell” during the job interview, it only confirmed this was the zealot he wanted running his team.
“You’re talking about a guy who can go from tough as nails to displaying a sensitivity that you don’t see from many men in his position,” Williams said. “He’s a unique man.”
It would take a little more than a year, but Williams committed himself to building a team in Guillen’s unique likeness.
A spirited revolution
One of the congratulatory calls Williams received in the last week came from Minnesota Twins general manager Terry Ryan. The Twins had won the previous three American League Central titles before this season with players who were local heroes and national curiosities. Star-studded they weren’t.
“I told Terry Ryan, `Congratulations my [butt], you forced me to do this. I was tired of second place. We had to try to play your game,'” Williams recalled.
So Williams started ridding his team of big bats and finding players whose style and personality meshed with Guillen’s better than, say, Carlos Lee’s or Magglio Ordonez’s did. Lee averaged 27 home runs a year from 2000-04, but his defining play for Guillen came July 26, 2004, when he failed to slide hard into second base after the Twins’ Torii Hunter had run over catcher Jamie Burke.
That sleepy response woke up the Sox and reminded Williams he had a manager who was in charge of players to whom he could not relate. The wheels that started to turn in Williams’ head were put into motion as soon as the off-season began.
Lee was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers for speedy Scott Podsednik. Popular players Magglio Ordonez and Jose Valentin were allowed to leave town. Catcher A.J. Pierzynski, a human mace can to opponents, was signed.
The whole began to seem greater than the sum of its parts, a philosophical shift Williams made with Guillen’s spirit in mind.
“While it was very difficult to let go of some of that star power in favor of the team in its entirety, it had to be done,” Williams said. “And it had to be done because we were getting our [butts] kicked. There’s no revolutionary thought behind it.”
But now there’s a World Series trophy as proof the revolution changed a franchise forever.
A team on, off field
With all the new parts, Williams worried about how smoothly the machinery of the team would work. He looked for signs at spring training in Tucson, Ariz., and liked what he saw. Not only did the players like each other’s company, they enjoyed his.
“Usually the players run from the coaching staff or GM, and these guys were like, `Pull up a chair,'” Williams said.
During an early-season trip to Minnesota, Williams passed by a downtown bar on a chilly night. A group of players were inside after a day game. Reliever Dustin Hermanson and center fielder Aaron Rowand waved him in, labor and management mingling in ways MBA textbooks discourage.
“They literally embarrassed me out on the street, so I had to go in so they would shut up,” Williams said.
There was another night, Williams recalled, when players rented a hotel suite in Cleveland and called Guillen’s hotel room at 1 a.m. to invite him to join the party, which he did. Williams has played countless card games with the players and picked up many a bar tab.
“Probably as a GM you can get in danger of getting too close to this type of group,” Williams said. “Chemistry will come very naturally if you win games. So we are fortunate we won games early in the season.”
The Sox also are lucky Williams ignored advice he got his first week on the job in 2000 from a former baseball general manager. Williams was just 36, a little young, perhaps, but hardly overwhelmed.
The older executive told Williams if he wanted to keep the job for the long term he needed to avoid trading fan favorites because those were the kind of deals that got GMs fired. The keyword was caution.
“I forgot that advice the minute I walked through the door,” Williams said. “You either are going to go for it or you’re not. And if you’re not, you should hand the reins over to someone else. You have to risk looking like an idiot. That doesn’t mean you are an idiot.”
These days, they are looking for synonyms for genius to describe the architect of the 2005 World Series champions.
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dhaugh@tribune.com
