White Sox general manager Ken Williams, manager Ozzie Guillen and captain Paul Konerko sat behind closed doors for two hours Monday, talking about ways to improve baseball’s most disappointing and underachieving team.
And what did they decide?
Trade away aging stars for young prospects? Trade stars for stars?
“We spent two hours talking and came out empty,” Guillen said. “It’s a lot of ifs — if we do this, if we do that, if we do that. I said, ‘Listen, we’re not going to do anything. Right now, we’ll try to stay positive.’
“
The key apparently was Konerko’s endorsement of his teammates and the continuing belief the Sox will still play up to their capabilities. Or supposed capabilities.
Said Williams:
“One of the things that I talked to Paul Konerko about — and I brought him into our meeting because I wanted a player’s perspective on this thing — was, ‘Do you guys still believe you can win? If you believe you can win, I’m more inclined to stick with it, to ride this thing out, and if we have to go down with the ship, we’ll go down together.’
“He expressed to me that this team can still win. But we’ve got to start to come together in a lot of facets in a very short period of time.”
Konerko did not talk about the meeting specifically but did talk about trade rumors.
“Those decisions are made by [front-office] guys,” he said. “It’s very easy to get off [track] and think about the big picture; are they going to sign this guy or trade this guy, or what we need to do to with this team. I play every day and if I talk about that or think about that, I’m not going to play well.”
Only 96 games remain this season and the Sox began the homestand against the Marlins on Monday 10 1/2 games out of first place in the Central Division and only 2 1/2 games ahead of last-place Kansas City.
Time, and patience, are running out. But Guillen, Williams and Konerko would like to wait until the lineup’s first two hitters, Scott Podsednik and Darin Erstad, return from injuries.
“Having two more guys in the lineup, we’ll have a better chance,” Guillen said. “If we continue to play like [we have], obviously we’re not going to go anywhere. I’m not going to say we have a chance if we continue playing like that. Obviously, it’s not the way we want to go.
“It’s just, how much longer can we believe in these guys? How much longer can we hope, have faith in them? It will be up to the players to see how much longer we’re going to sit there and see if we’re going to make the move.”
Williams admits other general managers have been circling like vultures, hoping to pick away the Sox pieces, and Williams isn’t quite sure what to tell them.
“I tell them I’m preparing for that slap in the face [of failure], and at the same time I’m also preparing to add to our current mix — maybe inject some life,” he said. “I’m looking for possibilities, first, to make us better right now and, second, to look for deals that might result as a byproduct of us doing worse than where we are.
“I hope it doesn’t come to us having to be a seller, because that means we’ve underachieved.”
Because the offensive slump and bullpen blowout has lasted so long, there’s the possibility that maybe you get exactly what you see with these Sox.
In fact, Williams was only half-kidding when he shared what he got out of Monday’s meeting:
“That we don’t know as much about baseball as we thought we did, and to a large degree that was kind of the thing. It is somewhat perplexing that a team we felt is [this] talented has yet to put it all together with any kind of consistency.”
———–
dvandyck@tribune.com
