I'm Just Now Starting To Understand the Depth of Jay Mariotti's Ability to "Windsock"

By windsocking, I mean the phenomenon Chris W described in the comments section of the last Mariotti post I did. When popular opinion seems to be going one way, Jay must take the opposite stance. Bears fans think their team has a shot this year? Fuck you, Bears fans. The Bears will be lucky to win five games. Cubs fans feeling down in the dumps about a losing streak? Fuck you, Cubs fans. The Cubs are the greatest and classiest organization in baseball. White Sox fans think Ozzie Guillen is for the most part taking their team in the right direction? Fuck you, White Sox fans. Your team hasn't even won a game since July 2, 2006. And so on and so on.

But here's the caveat- with the exception of the Ozzie thing, on which is mind is pretty much made up, all of these stances are 100% susceptible to being reversed in the event that popular opinion begins to reflect what Jay has been thinking. The example from that post was their acquisition of Rich Harden. As Chris said- basically, before the Cubs got Harden, that was what they needed to do in order to make a run and you were a crazy person if you thought they had a shot in the postseason without him. Once the Cubs went out and got Harden, however, Jay was the first to point out that he had some possible lingering injury problems and there was no point in counting on him to contribute in October. And so on and so forth.

So why did I write this lengthy introduction? Because I'm an egotistical blowhard, for one thing. But I'm also getting to the point of this post. If you click the "Jay Mariotti" on our sidebar, here are some of the things you'll find on the first page that Jay has said about the White Sox. (And this is just in the last six months or so.)

-...the Sox, firmly the distant No. 2 baseball team again in the nation's third-largest market...
-Hate to be cynical about Ken Williams' belated offseason attempt to redeem himself, but acquiring Nick Swisher only assures the Sox of one thing: They're a little better than the Kansas City Royals.
-Consider it one more reason, along with the extension given to Ozzie Guillen, that the Sox are locked in as Chicago's second-class ballclub for years to come. ("It" being the fact that they gave a new contract to broadcaster Hawk Harrelson. Apparently, to Jay, nothing screams "organizational measuring stick" like the guy behind the TV microphone. That explains why the Yankees have been so good for so long.)
-The Sox are easy to loathe.
-The Sox can crow all they want about their World Series title, how they beat the Cubs to the holy grail. At least the Cubs still own their dignity as a Chicago institution...
-The team with no class almost spun a no-hitter. (Gavin Floyd, back in early May)
-This weekend at the Palmer House Hilton, snarling fans will continue a Soxfest tradition. They'll demand straight answers from general manager Ken Williams, who would have more fun sleeping naked at Wrigley Field in a snowstorm. They will ask why he left the rotation filled with craters, why he whiffed badly on Torii Hunter and Miguel Cabrera and why he keeps talking about a championship when finishing .500 seems like a -- cue the silly Hawkeroo -- ``stretch, stretch, stretch.''

This sample represents less than 1% of all the bad things Jay has ever said about the White Sox. So then, knowing how he loves this "windsocking" thing, I guess his article from Friday's Sun-Times (as a policy, we don't link him anymore, you'll have to find it yourself if you need the original for some reason) shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

Unfairly Snubbed, Sox Deserve Much Better

Especially from that nasty ol' Chicago media. Why can't they just support the hometown team?

Dadgum, Hawkeroo. Would you believe the records are nearly identical now? In fact, when weighing the difficulty quotient of playing in the superior league, the White Sox actually are having a better season than the charmed, beloved, gush-and-goo Cubbies.

Whom Jay has been gushing and goo-ing over for a good two months now.

Where this uprising came from, I don't know,

I have a theory about one such possible source.

and where it's going, I can't say.

I have a theory about which way you want it to go.

But "Sox In The City" is a boffo hit.

Please don't use pop culture references like that. Or obscure adjectives like that. Or awkwardly shoehorn the name of a team into a dissimilar entity such as a TV show like that.

Not that anyone is noticing.

That has to be an attempt at baiting. It has to be.

Grasping for respect as always, clutching the inferiority complex that never ends in a town that never changes, the Sox are dealing with a relentless trail of dissing that, admittedly, doesn't seem fair.

Damn you, Sox haters. If only Jay Mariotti could figure out who you were, he'd give you a piece of his mind.

They have one of baseball's elite pitching staffs,

I seem to remember hearing something about a rotation filled with craters.

yet none of their pitchers was named to the American League All-Star team.

This is the fault of popular opinion about the team, and has nothing to do with Terry Francona or the player vote.

They launched a crazy/mad campaign pushing the very deserving Jermaine Dye for the final All-Star roster slot, yet he finished second Thursday to Tampa Bay darling Evan Longoria, whose statistics fall shy of Dye's.

1. That's barely true.
2. Dye finished second in a five man race, and he beat out a Yankee. If you have a brain, you should be able to tell that that is reflective of an enormous amount of support.

The Sox will send merely two players to Yankee Stadium, upstart Carlos Quentin and warrior Joe Crede,

The Rays and Angels are only sending three each. The Phillies and Mets are only sending two.

while the Cubs had a whopping seven players named to the National League club, including two (Kosuke Fukudome and injur ed Alfonso Soriano) who belong only as hot dog vendors.

The Cubs have a larger national fan base. Again, not too hard to figure out if you have a brain.

And worst of all? Attendance on the South Side, a traditional Sox bugaboo that should be a non-issue after a World Series championship, is becoming a story again. Despite their success, the Sox rank 18th among the 30 big-league teams with a 28,915 average, down 4,225 bodies a game from last year and a revealing 7,596 fans from 2006.

Attendance numbers in today's game are largely driven by pre-season ticket sales. Therefore there's a strong one year lag effect on those numbers. (That's why the defending NL champion Rockies can be one of the worst teams in the league and still be on pace to draw more fans than they have in six years.) The 2005 Sox won 99 games and the Series but only drew 2.3 million fans, largely because the 2004 Sox stunk. The 2006 Sox were good, but didn't make the playoffs and weren't in first anytime after May. Yet they nearly drew 3 million, mostly because of the 2005 title and subsequent preseason purchases. The 2007 Sox still drew 2.7 million, because the 2006 Sox won 90 games. The 2008 Sox, even if they win the division, probably won't even crack 2.5 million, because the 2007 Sox stunk. But if they do indeed make the postseason, I would wager that the 2009 Sox (regardless of how their season goes) end up back in the 2.8/2.9 area.

This is a long way of saying that I wish Jay Mariotti had never gotten into journalism, and instead grown up to be a garbageman.

The company line blames gas prices,

Probably not true, but whatever.

but last I looked, the Sox primarily draw within 25 miles of U.S. Cellular Field and don't remotely compare to the Cubs as a regional attraction. When it's easier to find a parking space in the Loop than a Cubs ticket -- attendance already is nearing 2 million on the North Side, compared to 1.3 million at The Cell --

2007 White Sox, 4th place. 2007 Cubs, division champs.

I safely can conclude the obvious once again.

The smugness is just oozing off the computer screen, isn't it? That's what makes this so much fun. Sentences (or clauses, or whatever the hell you want to call it) like that are the reason I still enjoy writing for this blog 15 months after it started. No matter how obvious it is that they are wrong about something, leave it to jackassed sports journalists to "safely" conclude the opposite. It's beautiful.

Even in a year when both teams could win division titles, the Cubs own this town like, well, Batman owns Chicago in "The Dark Knight."

Gotham City is a fictional location that's mostly parallel to New York. And what is that "well" doing in there?

The Sox? No matter how much Ozzie Guillen yaps, Ken Williams preens and players make headlines by clashing in the dugout,

What kind of lowlife journalists are writing those headlines? Say something positive about those guys for once! Jay Mariotti is begging you.

they're still the other club in town, the afterthought, the alternative. Sometimes, it's very hard to like the people who run the Sox, but this summer, I don't mind acknowledging that I feel sorry for the entire operation. They deserve better, such as bigger home audiences.

At least he's consistent in identifying them as the Cubs' collective bitch. Still, here's an idea, Jay- how about they deserve better from you?

So why are fewer people showing up? The economy has some impact, sure, but perhaps there's also a burnout effect involving Guillen, Williams and their circus-like way of doing business.

We'll see just how burnt out people are in 2009 if the Sox finish 2008 like they've started it.

A day rarely passes without a Sox controversy, whether it's the federal investigation of a Dominican Republic scouting scandal or the argument Wednesday night between the level-headed Dye and volatile Orlando Cabrera. Personally, as long as the Sox are winning amid the disarray, I believe the fans should be pleased and flocking to ticket windows.

Jeez, this is creepy. Did someone from the Sox organization kidnap Jay's family and tell him they wouldn't be released until he said something nice about the team?

But they could be worn out by it all, waiting to spend ballpark money in August and September when the real drama plays out -- and not the ongoing Ozfest.

Possibly a worse/more shoehorned pop culture reference than "Sox and the City."

Later (this was my favorite part of the article)...

In campaigning for Dye, the Sox were creative to the point of lunacy.

Oh yeah? "Lunacy," you say? Well please, go ahead and tell me about all the madcap antics they pulled to try and get their guy into the All-Star game. Skywriting? Offering to pay off the other candidates to drop out of the race? Bizarre and confusing viral marketing? I can't wait to hear about the outrageous lengths they went to.

They had Guillen, players and coaches wear "Vote for J.D." t-shirts and stickers.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop right there. Let me catch my breath.





OK, I'm good. What else?

They posted messages on video boards across town.

That is completely bonkers. My computer's about to overheat just from copying and pasting the text into Blogger.

They flooded in-boxes of fans, making them eligible to win an autographed Dye jersey.

Never heard of anything like this before. Groundbreaking.

They even asked folks to support ex-Sox outfielder Aaron Rowand, who plays for San Francisco and was among five finalists for the last NL berth.

OK, and .... ?

This, too, defeats the purpose of trying to win an All-Star Game -- what if Rowand beat the AL with a home run?

So confusing. What is the point here? We followed this path to get here: Claim that the Sox did some crazy things to try to get Dye elected --> A list of those things, none of which was unorthodox at all --> Pointing out that the team also campaigned for one of their ex-players in the other league, which actually is kind of crazy but has nothing to do with Dye --> Complaining that that player might hit a game winning HR.

I think I'm just going to have to file this paragraph under "dumb" and leave it be. I can't parse it any more thoroughly than that.

The scheme officially went bonkers when the Sox hired a plane to display a banner: "Vote for JD: WhiteSox.com."

A-ha! My fault. They did do something a little wild. Not anywhere as cool as actual skywriting, but still a little out there.

This was done not in Chicago, but at Kaufmann Stadium in Kansas City. Huh?

Huh? I will give you one guess as to where the Sox were playing last Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Don't overthink it. Hey, if you wanted to get a message like that to its target audience, which plan do you think would work better?

A) Fly the banner over the out-of-town stadium in which the team is playing, enabling fans (who, since they're watching the game and therefore probably interested in getting Dye voted in) to see it on TV and subsequently go online and fill out some ballots.

or

B) Regardless of the fact that no games are taking place there until after the voting closes, damn the torpedoes and fly the banner over USCellular Field anyways. Hope that the grounds crew subsequently goes home and fills out thousands of ballots each.

It's a tough call.

In the end, like everything else, the Sox came up short on the marketing end.

If only they could get a little support from the media every once in a while.

"It's an honor to see as many votes as we all got, that's unbelievable," said Dye, who finished not far behind Longoria, the recipient of nine million votes. "Just great support from everyone, the fans and my teammates. I'm happy to get so much talk about it the last four days. I'm just happy to be mentioned."

Such is the Sox existence, of course. Snubbed and dissed, they're just thrilled when anyone notices.

Way to be a gracious loser, Jermaine. You pussy. Here are some facts I'd like to conclude the post with.

1) Things Jermaine Dye could have said about finishing second to Longoria, other than what's printed above: zero
2) "Zany"/"looney" things the Sox did to campaign for Dye: 0.5
3) Odds that Sox attendance will rise dramatically in 2009: extremely high
4) Size of White Sox fanbase, relative to the average MLB team: high
5) Things mentioned in this article that the Sox should legitimately be worried about: zero
6) Last time the Sox were any good: 7/2/06
7) Media member most responsible for disrespecting the Sox: guy who wrote this article, which is entirely about how the Sox don't get enough respect

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.