Here are a few choice quotes from these two, all from but one ESPN.com article:
We win the World Series and Kenny makes three key moves to winning, and the guy in Cleveland [Shapiro] wins the Baseball America Executive of the Year. That's a bunch of s---.
- Ozzie
Ninety-nine percent of the people weren't behind us. Hey man, this game is a bunch of front-runners. If you're good, they kiss your butt. If not, you're horse s---.
- Ozzie, on last year's team
We made a big mistake when we won in 2005. We never took credit. Me and Kenny, we just did our jobs and never went out of our way to rub it in people's faces that we were the champions. If we win it again, I'll be a cocky, arrogant, SOB. I'll be wearing my World Series rings hitting fungoes in the field.
- Ozzie
OK, I lied. Those are just Ozzie's quotes. It's not that I don't think Kenny Williams is entertaining in a perpetually aggrieved, peevish, chip-on-his-shoulder, semi-justified manner, but honestly, nothing he says will ever be as entertaining as his feisty manager's average bromide.
Even so, there's something to be said for a general manager of a major league team who is so willing to constantly and unwaveringly complain to the press about everything from his reputation, to Baseball Prospectus's White Sox predictions, to his own internal distress over his admitted errors. In fact, it may be that Williams' most entertaining feature is his monumental certainty of his place in the world: he admits it when he screws up, boasts about his successes, and boldly endorses his commonly crackpot schemes even in the face of almost universal criticism. I don't think there's another major professional team in the United States with one official so publicly anti-P.C., let alone two, and it is something I think it's about time we commended the Sox for.
2. This team is like Frankenstein's Monster in that it seems like it consists entirely of parts belonging to other, more sensibly constructed teams. Nick Swisher, who is one of their only OBP sources, signed his very sensible deal through 2012 when he was with the A's. Jim Thome, the other OBP source, signed his deal when he was supposed to be the long-term first baseman for the Phillies. Many other players - like Dye, Vazquez, Pierzynski, and Cabrera, - were drafted and graduated by other teams and are now at the tail end of the peak portion of their careers. Then there's the one good young player drafted by the Sox, Fields, who feels so out of place amongst this collection of oldish imports that he's almost like the body part Doc. Frankenstein couldn't locate in the cemetery and had to cut off a living person. I don't know if all this necessarily adds up to a meaningful point, but I just can't shake this comparison for some reason.
3. The White Sox are probably going to miss the playoffs this year. Then what? This team isn't built for the long haul - most of its best players are just going to get worse or become free agents. Its young players are, at best, league average. But it does have long-term guys like Fields and Swisher and Buehrle who can contribute down the line, making it difficult to envision a future in which the team becomes the worst in baseball and must engineer a complete retooling (see: Astros, Houston). Even the farm system, while heavily depleted, has a couple of guys along the lines of Aaron Poreda who could be quite good in a few years, unlike some other teams I could mention (see: Astros, Houston). The Sox are going to be in a very weird, uncomfortable place come Winter '09, with no clear path for how to proceed.
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