Crisis Of Management

Last year the White Sox were family, and they won it all. This year the Sox are off to another scorching start (49--26), but for most of the season they've been looking up at the Tigers, the arrivistes of the AL Central, and maybe Ozzie Guillen was feeling his family wasn't quite as tight as it should be. Perhaps that is why he decided to play some beanball, a game within the game governed by a set of unwritten rules supposedly unknowable to those of us who never played in the bigs. It's a game managers play to turn 25 ballplayers into a family, to restore meaning to hoary phrases like "I got your back" and "We police ourselves."

So in a June 14 game against the Rangers, Guillen sought a little payback. His catcher, A.J. Pierzynski, got bopped twice, and the manager wanted one of Texas's big sticks to feel some pain. But things went wrong, and it's not hard to imagine where Ozzie's head might be now:

If that kid pitcher we called up had hit the Rangers' guy the way I wanted him to, I wouldn't have had to ream him out in front of everybody, and then that ass---- from the paper [ Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times] wouldn't have ripped me, and I wouldn't have called him a "f------- fag," at least not in front of a bunch of reporters, and then that man [commissioner Bud Selig] wouldn't be making me go to goddam sensitivity training, whatever the hell that is.

The White Sox can play beanball the "right way," as they showed a week after rookie Sean Tracey failed to hit Texas's Hank Blalock and incurred Guillen's wrath. On June 20, reliever David Riske hit the Cardinals' Chris Duncan--in the back--after two Chicago batters were hit. (Riske was suspended for three games and Guillen for one. Riske appealed his suspension, as one of the unwritten rules of beanball is to acknowledge nothing, while Guillen, who hasn't admitted ordering Tracey to hit Blalock, served his last Thursday.) But maybe Guillen doesn't really know the code of beanball, with all due respect to his 6,686 at bats in the majors, not to mention the code of decent public discourse, with all due respect to the macho Venezuelan heritage he cites. A fundamental of managing is to put your players in situations where they can succeed. If the wrong player for a job fails, the responsibility falls to the manager, the designated adult on every team.

Against the Rangers, Guillen called in Tracey, 25, a hard-throwing righty appearing in his third major league game, to face Blalock in the seventh inning. Both teams had received warnings from the umpires that the next hit batsman would lead to ejections. Nevertheless, Guillen's instructions were simple: Hit this guy. If only it were that easy. As with many young pitchers, sometimes Tracey's guess about where his ball is headed is as good as the hitter's. In 2004 he led the Carolina League in wild pitches and hit 23 batters, nearly all of them unintentional. In his first year as a minor leaguer Tracey hit a batter in the helmet and watched the hitter stagger to the backstop when he thought he was trotting to first base. It made Tracey feel sick.

By normal accounting Tracey's pitch sequence to Blalock was textbook: high and tight brushback; low and away; back inside; swinging strike; weak ground ball out. Not good enough for Ozzie, who flew out of the dugout, yanked Tracey, then berated him in the dugout (and on TV) while the pitcher, obviously shaken, pulled his jersey over his head. Two days later Tracey was sent back to the Knights. The White Sox say the demotion was already in the works. And Freud said there are no coincidences.

Last week, four days after throwing his first shutout as a pro in his return to Charlotte, Tracey spent two hours in a Charlotte Applebee's dissecting the ramifications of the Blalock ground ball. He's a bright kid, a few classes short of a psychology degree at UC Irvine. He said he believes in the beanball code, as long as the injurious pitch is merited and below the shoulder, and insisted that he did try to hit Blalock. "I didn't get my job done, and I made my manager look like an ass," said Tracey, who hasn't spoken with Guillen since his dugout upbraiding. He's lean and strong and was drinking water. "He needed to make an example out of me to make the team feel more like a family, and I'm fine with that. I've learned from it." Tracey's watch was still on Chicago time. He plans to pitch his way back to the big club, and maybe he will.

It's possible that he was saying what needed to be said to redeem himself before his employers and teammates. But young Tracey has one thing wrong: It's not the player's job to make the manager look good, but the other way around. Ozzie Guillen made a bad pitching move and took it out on the wrong guy and in the wrong way, and that's no way to build a family. Who says? It's right there, in the manager's unwritten handbook. Ozzie should read it.

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