Jay Mariotti Continues to Cry and Sob About Ozzie Guillen

Holy balls, I am nervous. Does it show? Oh man, I think I just shat myself. Here's the issue- PNoles, having graduated from college a couple weeks ago, is now either dead from graduation-related alcohol poisoning or employed full time. That leaves the unenviable task of picking apart a Mariotti column to yours truly. *deep breath* OK, here goes. And as per site policy, I won't link to the article in order to make sure Jay doesn't receive any traffic boosts from us. Find it yourself if you need to.

To show off Chicago, you reject the Kennedy Expy. for Peterson Avenue and take Lake Shore Drive toward the skyline. You visit the museums and stores, do a comedy club, hang out in Bucktown, avoid Trump Tower, ride an elevator to the top of the Hancock, then pick any one of 100 good places for dinner. You hail a cab to a jukebox bar and drink longnecks in the light of the beer signs.

To show off Chicago, here's what you do. Take a slightly different route from the airport to downtown than most people would. Then you do a bunch of shit you can do in pretty much any big city- tall building, comedy club (???), something the locals like to call "retail shopping," and don't forget to eat food! Then, finally, you go drink alcohol. If it sounds intensely cultural, that's because it is. Jay Mariotti: an effeminate man who knows how to have a good time.

And you go nowhere near U.S. Cellular Field.

I mean, maybe... it is on the South Side, a long ways away from most stuff... but on the other hand, it's conveniently located right off the Dan Ryan. Why would you avoid it?

Not because you hate the White Sox, but because Ozzie Guillen works there.

Oh, I see. If you lived in Chicago and had out of town company, and really wanted to show them the city, you would avoid the less famous of the city's two baseball stadiums. Why? Because the manager of the team who plays there has personally insulted Jay Mariotti in the past. No other reason, just that. That guy is mean, so keep the visitors away. You never know who Guillen is going to slander next, after all.

Forget about those old Al Capone and Hog Butcher to the World references. What this city must expunge, as it attempts to win the 2016 Olympics and polish its image for the world, is the embarrassing cloud of stench accumulated by the Blizzard of Oz with his relentlessly profane attacks on human life around him.

I can just see the IOC right now, sitting in a secret room with curtains drawn a couple years from now, deciding not to give the Olympics to Chicago because Guillen has said some controversial stuff. Letting China host the games in spite of their spotty human rights record? No problem. Letting Chicago host the games when one of its 9 million residents has a short fuse and easy access to an unimportant segment of the media? No thanks!

If he is so deathly unhappy managing the Sox, as he has commented at least twice in a three-week period in which his team has risen to the division lead, then my only suggestion to him is to leave town for his sake and ours. And if he won't leave, then Ken Williams and Jerry Reinsdorf should fire him.

I'm no ChiSox fan. I'm also not a Guillen admirer. (Not a hater, either. Just a casual observer.) But I definitely understand the difference between being in 1st place in June and being good enough to be in 1st place at the end of September. The second is more important than the first, and Guillen doesn't feel like his team has the talent it needs to reach that objective. Can't blame him for that. Sure, he's batshit crazy and constantly popping off at the mouth. But Jerry Reinsdorf and Kenny Williams have known that for years now. If they truly believe in his managerial talent, then by now they should have installed filters on their ears that translate what the guy is trying to say during tirades like the one that prompted this stoolpile of an article. The guy thinks his lineup stinks. Viola. That's all they need to know. The rest is just filler for pudwhackers like Mariotti to get upset about. Is it right for Ozzie to say this in public in the manner he did? Probably not. But it shouldn't be a job-threatening mistake, particularly not from this guy.

I wrote it last year. I'm writing it today. And I will keep writing it until sanity prevails and the Sox return to some form of civilized leadership in their dugout.

Let the record show that for purely personal reasons (i.e., his feud with Guillen, and not because he thinks removing Guillen will necessarily make the Sox any better) Jay continues to espouse a this course of action. If and when Guillen finally is shown the door, brace yourself for his self-righteous response.

"I'm sick and tired to watch this thing for a year and a half," Guillen said in his latest rant, this one aimed at Williams. The feeling is mutual, Ozzie. We are sick and tired of you.

Pwn!

When you're in last place, you're miserable.

That team needs a manager who's content finishing 72-90.

When you're in first place, you're miserable.

When you're in first place in early June, and are wholly convinced that you won't be able to stay there much longer without more offense, you voice that opinion. What are you, fucking nuts? As before, Guillen should have probably have aired his concerns in private. But he's not, like, fucking nuts for having them.

When you go out for a beer, you say you're miserable because you're afraid the guy next to you will yap that he got drunk with Ozzie, as you said last month.

This is bad for reasons known only to Jay. I mean, what celebrity doesn't just love being in the public eye during ostensibly private moments?

You are trapped inside this creepy character you've created. Whatever charm that may have been attached to the Blizzard three years ago, when the Sox somehow won a World Series, has been replaced by a reality that glory isn't worth the price of dealing with a madman.

First "Blizzard" reference! Hooray! This article is now official. It's like a baseball game that made it through the 5th with a steady rain already falling. Doesn't matter what happens from here on out- we're already in the record books.

It's one thing for Guillen to make a mockery of a ballclub and the bosses who have enabled his clown act. It's quite another for Guillen to become a piece of crude, negative imagery when people think of our town.

Oh, the irony. Percentage of people nation wide who think of Chicago, then think of Guillen as one of its key institutions, then become offended: undoubtedly less than 1. Honestly, who the hell cares what he says or does? Percentage of people nation wide who think of Chicago, then think of Mariotti as one of its key institutions, then become offended: probably slightly more than 1. I mean, you figure a good part of the population is made up of sports fans... and most of them have access to ESPN... and some of those people watch "Around the Horn"... and every last one of those people can clearly see that Jay stinks... and most of them know he's from Chicago... and a reasonable portion of them are subsequently offended... I'm going to say that totals up to more than 1% of 300 million. Call me nuts.

Monday was one such moment, a day after he turned his tongue in the direction of management for the first time. As you may have noticed through the years, I am the Blizzard's only critic in the Chicago media, mostly because my soft colleagues either fear Guillen's wrath, enjoy how he rips me, work for one of the Reinsdorf-controlled broadcast outlets or are afraid of getting on the chairman's bad side.

Or, haven't provoked Guillen enough to be called out by him and see no reason to do so. As well as don't need to constantly criticize local figures in order to stir up controversy and maintain their audience.

I ignore what they write and say about Guillen, and I'd advise any reasonable person to do the same. Far more interesting to me is how the national media view him. Frankly, they're stunned he is still employed. ESPN's Mike Greenberg, the whip-smart radio host who used to work here in the '90s and understands the homerish nature of many local media, opened his SportsCenter segment on Guillen with an astute comment: Why do Guillen's inane rants largely go unchallenged? The answer, of course, is that 72-year-old Reinsdorf approves of them as high comedy, which is a poor and hypocritical reflection on an owner who promotes family nights at the ballpark and has been co-chairman of Major League Baseball's Equal Opportunity Committee. When Reinsdorf says he thinks Guillen is "the Hispanic Jackie Mason," most of his media sheep in town laugh right along. That's why the rants go unchallenged.

That, and the fact that most people don't take them overly seriously because they realize that you can separate what a person is saying from the way in which they're saying it. They're not going to shit themselves every time he rants about something, because they recognize that's just the kind of person he is. And as long as he's not insulting anyone besides Jay, I think we can all understand where he's coming from.

On "Pardon the Interruption," co-host Tony Kornheiser

The foremost authority on anything worth complaining about, to be sure. Whiny old coot. Retire (even more) already why don't ya.

seemed amazed that Guillen is still employed. "He may as well wear a shirt that says 'Fire Me' on the front and 'Fire Me' on the back," said Kornheiser, who has defended Guillen in the past. "He's in first place and he's screaming. How does he keep his job? Is his life so bad?"

Well, he wants to stay in first place. He thinks the team needs to make some changes in order for that to happen. So yeah, he life is kind of bad right now. He's like an ugly guy with a gorgeous girlfriend who's constantly being hit on by good looking dudes. (The girlfriend is being hit on, not the guy. Stupid English language. When are we going to genderize our nouns to avoid confusion in sentences like this one? Not soon enough, that's when.) I think the analogy works pretty well- sure, things are fine right now, but what about next week? Next month? Something's got to give, and what acquiring a better second baseman is to Ozzie is what knocking up that girl is to the ugly guy.

On "Around The Horn," I used to be the lone Guillen basher. Not anymore. Monday, Woody Paige

Always good to have him in your corner. Really lends a lot of legitimacy to your stance.

said he should have been fired two weeks ago.

Shortly after drinking a pitcher full of mercury.

J.A. Adande said the clock is ticking on his employment.

And noted as an aside that Robert Horry undoubtedly belongs in basketball's Hall of Fame.

This is what I do when I know I'm right and media folks in Chicago are wrong. I seek confirmation from people who don't live here, people who aren't swallowed up by spin jobs and smear campaigns. They make the most sense.

This is what I do when no one nearby will agree with me: go out and find two other guys who are nearly as dumb as I am and get them to agree with me. That pretty much proves everything, right?

"The manager has to respect the GM. He has to apologize to the GM," the retired major-leaguer Julio Franco said.

"You have to have a relationship between the manager and the general manager, and once that's lost, you've got issues," said Buck Showalter, one of Guillen's old targets.

This all well and good, and Guillen should probably privately apologize, but like I said before it's not like Williams shouldn't expect this out of Guillen. I'm not saying Guillen has license to say whatever he wants; I'm saying that he simply can't seem to help saying shit like this, so if you're going to employ him, you might as well get used to it. Let him heat up, let him cool down, and move on. Lost in all this crybabying, too, is the fact that this rant was really more about the players than about management. Guillen said he wanted Williams to make a better lineup, or even fire himself or the hitting coach... but he didn't explicitly blame Williams for the team's run scoring problem. He merely said the offense they have wasn't going to work long term. It's a gray area, to be sure, and it's fair for Williams to feel insulted, but it's not an outright insult to the GM.

Guillen is such a hypocrite. Not long ago, he was ripping local media and fans for criticizing the Sox and gushing over the first-place, problem-free Cubs. Now, he's criticizing the Sox, too. Coupled with recent remarks in which he seemed fed up with managing life -- "There are times lately where I say, 'Wow, why do we have to go through this situation?' I can live without these problems, I can live without the smell of the ballpark," he said -- there is only one conclusion.

Put the man out of his misery. Fire him.

There is only one comclusion that will put Jay out of his misery. Fire Ozzie Guillen so he doesn't feel threatened anymore. And for the love of God, keep the tourists away from US Cellular. You don't want them whispering about how negative the home team's manager is, do you?

OK, so how'd I do? Granted, I'm not a Chicago native (or a fucking ginger, that's him on the right) like PNoles, but I've spent my share of time in the Windy City. I think this will pass muster until whenever he decides to start recovering from graduation weekend or take some time off from his horrible entry-level job. Until then, keep in mind that the whole point of this blog is to get Jay Mariotti fired. Just because Bill Simmons is a clueless bint and the NBA playoffs are way too long doesn't mean we can forget about our namesake.