It looks like the White Sox have finaly hit the big time. For the first time ever I opened mt Sunday paper this morning over my coffee and eggs and there in front of me was a full page spread with a big picture of Konerko as he hit his homer over the Green Monster. The article follows;
The Sunday Times October 09, 2005
Baseball: Clean sox
DAVE HANNIGAN IN AMERICA
Their players threw the 1919 World Series. Now the Chicago White Sox are close to banishing the resultant 86-year ‘curse’
A matter of hours before the Chicago White Sox won their first playoff game in 46 years last Tuesday, their manager, Ozzie Guillen, was asked whether he thought the club’s failure to win a World Series since 1917 might be the result of a curse.
The infamous “Black Sox” threw the series just two seasons after that last triumph and many feel the team has been punished by the gods from that day to this, but Guillen isn’t buying the conspiracy theories.
“S*** teams,” he says, by way of explaining nearly nine decades of failure. “Just put down ‘s***’ in your notebook.”
That kind of candour has earned Guillen the title of the most entertaining manager in baseball. The manner in which he flawlessly guided his team to a three-game sweep of the Boston Red Sox in the American League division series on Friday night is why he is also most people’s favourite for manager of the year. Reigning champions Red Sox weren’t just defeated, they were summarily dismissed by a club that has spent much of the past century cultivating a reputation for losing on a grand scale.
“I feel great that we beat those guys,” said Guillen after the 5-3 clincher at Fenway Park. “Coming to Boston is not an easy thing to do.”
Whatever happens in the American League championship series that begins on Tuesday — in effect the World Series semi-finals — against either the New York Yankees or Los Angeles Angels, Guillen has brought the White Sox out of the doldrums in his inimitable style. In a sport where most of his peers come off as stoic, cerebral types painfully focused on not offending anybody, the 41-year-old is such a hyperactive, foul-mouthed loose cannon that he has been dubbed “The Blizzard of Oz”.
He criticises his own players in public, lambasts the fans if attendances are down, admits the team stinks when it does, and occasionally entertains journalists by reading them his personal e-mails.
“Look, here’s one from earlier in the year,” Guillen said last month, at a point when the Sox had lost form and looked as though they might squander a 15-game lead over their nearest rivals. “It says, ‘Ozzie, great job. You are kicking ass. Make sure you get in their faces and stay there. You’re just what the doctor ordered for this moribund group!’ Okay, so that was one from May. Now here’s one I got last night. ‘Guillen, what are you doing? You’re ruining the team, you crazy f***! Calm down, or check yourself into a mental institution! This is baseball, not the WWE!’ They’re both from the same person, too — our general manager, Kenny Williams.”
Williams is the guy who stuck his neck out and hired Guillen ahead of far more experienced candidates before the 2004 season. “I told my wife that I was going to hire him and she said, ‘Really?’ ” Williams said last week. “I told her, ‘I know there are going to be times he says things that will upset me and times he’ll say things that will make me laugh like hell. More often than not, it will be times that make me laugh like hell ’. And I’ll tell you this: those guys in the clubhouse, when everyone was doubting them and dragging them down, telling them they couldn’t do this or that, Ozzie was the voice of the positive energy.”
Almost immediately upon returning to the club where he spent 13 seasons of his playing career, Guillen questioned the attitudes of long-serving star players, queried the injury status of others, and generally ruffled feathers. The unorthodox approach has paid dividends. In just his second season as a manager, he has brought the White Sox to within four games of returning to the World Series. Better yet, he has done it by making the team play better than the sum of its individual parts.
“We don’t have Manny Ramirez or David Ortiz (Boston’s superstar hitters),” said the White Sox’s Paul Konerko, whose two-run homer set up the win in game three on Friday night. “We don’t have anybody who is as good as those guys. We have some depth and we have a bunch of guys who are going to fight you every night. It has got to be that way for us because we don’t have what some of the teams in the playoffs have, where they have a couple of guys who are just dominant, dominant forces. When we’ve played our best and won our games this year, everybody chipped in.”
Exactly what the players make of their loquacious boss could be gauged this past week by the sight of many of them wearing T-shirts in his honour. His relative youth, open style of management (one of his sons sits in the dug-out during matches) and oversized character has created a relaxed and noisy atmosphere around the locker room. Whether it be Japanese import Tadahito Iguchi, settling in perfectly in his first season in America at the age of 30, or Cuban defector Jose Contreras, previously with the Yankees, all appear to find common ground with the Venezuelan firebrand.
“Since the first day I walked into the clubhouse, everyone believed in me and had confidence in me,” says Contreras, who has been the star pitcher of the side all season. “The manager speaks Spanish and he’s my friend. He gives me a lot of confidence.”
Against the Red Sox it was Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, another Cuban defector and former Yankee, who made the difference in the third tie. “He has probably got the most heart of any pitcher I’ve ever been around,” says Konerko of Hernandez. “We’re not done yet, either. I don’t think we’re satisfied. I think we match up well in this next series with anybody.”
In a city where the White Sox have always been regarded as the unfashionable alternative to the equally cursed but more aristocratic Cubs, Guillen’s biggest task between now and Tuesday will be bringing his players back to earth. They may not look like the strongest team left in the playoffs, but not too many people fancied them to bury the Red Sox in the minimum number of games either.
Earlier in the season Guillen said he might quit if the White Sox won the World Series. Everybody assumed it was just Ozzie being Ozzie. He may yet prove them wrong.
This was such a buzz for me, I normaly have to spend 1/2 an hour most mornings copying/pasting from the internet into a Word document to read while at work.
And to think I only got The Times because my son bought the wrong paper!
