Ozzie Guillen responds to
Brandon McCarthy's criticism of him and the White Sox staff for not being positive enough. I went ahead and cut out the first 12 minutes of the audio since Mike North's voice makes the Baby Jesus cry:
One thing is for sure --
Kenny Williams is a whole lot better at brushing off North's attempts to bait sound bites. Ozzie? Not so much. The two big ones we'll be hearing beyond tonight:
- "I don’t want to talk about Mac because he made a couple of comments — I really hate him."
- "You played with us 162 games and all of a sudden you leave and say you
don’t have a friend in the clubhouse? Only Brian Anderson? Well, he
picked the wrong guy to be friends with."
Guillen had the right idea for about 14 words.
This may be a minor point, but if I were writing the story, I probably would've interpreted the comment as saying "...because he made a couple of comments, I really hate 'em." The
Sun-Times and
whitesox.com both say "him," but if two things hold me up. One, I'm not hearing a long enough pause to warrant the em dash -- he runs through it like a comma. Two, doesn't his accent make a short "i" turn into a long "e"? "Dees keed" when he says "this kid," for example.
The only other possibility aside from the straight "I really hate him" quote is that Ozzie was going for the sitcom gag where a womanizer is invited to a strip club, or the fat guy is offered dessert, and they say, "Well, I really shouldn't, 'cause I'm trying to OK." Laugh track ensues.
Other than that, I hope this all goes away soon, because both sides don't look good. Ozzie's making too much of a guy in his early 20s going out at night when he works nights -- especially when Exhibit A for overthinking failures is currently trying to nurse his groin back to health. On the other side,
Anderson re-affirms in Scott Merkin's article something that has become increasingly evident: McCarthy is kind of a ninny.
Let's pray this is the last time we have to talk about this.