Would Manny Ramirez and Ozzie Guillen be a match made in White Sox heaven?
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The will-they-or-won’t-they game continues with Manny Ramirez.
As of Tuesday, the Dodgers apparently had not waived their curious outfielder, though reports that the White Sox would claim him obviously had made their way to the Chicago dugout.
White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen said he’d heard the same rumors as everyone else, and wouldn’t have a problem handling a personality like Manny.
Said Guillen to the Chicago Tribune’s Mark Gonzales:
‘I can handle anyone. I don’t have to handle the players. The players handle themselves. I’ve had players who have come to the ball club with a reputation that they’re bad for the ball club and with me they were very good.’
White Sox general manager Ken Williams wouldn’t address the Manny question directly, but told Gonzales that the character of a player wasn’t a major issue when acquiring someone for the final month of the season.
‘The perfect fit is less important than production in the last month of the season, the last 30 games, and that’s not to say I don’t factor it in. I always factor it in and how it fits in the makeup of who we are and what we are. But you can only get on someone’s nerves so much in 30 days. So you come in, you produce, we win, everybody’s happy. The guy you didn’t like, he leaves anyway. Just being honest.’
Gonzales wrote that Guillen seemed less tolerant than Williams of putting up with the antics of Ramirez.
‘I want to see how [chairman] Jerry Reinsdorf is going to confront the hair,’ Guillen said of Ramirez’s long dreadlocks. ‘It ain’t going to be my [bleeping] department.’
Guillen said it had been too long since he’s seen Manny play to make a current evaluation of his skills.
‘You talk to me about Manny and I didn’t even see Manny in spring training and we played against [the Dodgers] every day. If you give me Manny when he was with Boston, I take a limo to pick him up. But I haven’t seen Manny in a long time.’
-- Steve Dilbeck