White Sox Aren’t Exactly Proponents of ‘Ozzie Ball’
From SABR member Christina Kahrl at ESPN.com on April 27:
Maybe it’s a matter of the kind of player Ozzie Guillen was. With a career line of .264/.287/.338, and just 28 career homers in more than 7,000 plate appearances, he was anything but a bopper. Or maybe it’s because of his characteristic volubility in praise of little ball and stealing bases. After all, this is the manager who heaped elaborate praise on the unlikeliest of trios almost five years ago: Jason Bartlett, Jason Tyner, and Nick Punto of the Twins, the original-edition “little piranhas.”
As a result, you might think of Ozzie as a skipper inclined to live up to the “Ozzieball” rep, scrapping after one run and giving much consideration to “the little things.” If you did, you’d be wrong, because this is a classic case of do as I do, not as I say. For all the talk, Ozzie’s ballclubs have almost always been anything but the subtle nibblers he might publicly profess admiration for.
Instead, Ozzie’s squads have lived up to an older label associated with Chicago’s South Side: the Hitmen. That name for the 1977 team described a club that hit a then team-record 192 home runs. Playing in a different park now — and a veritable slugger’s paradise at that — Ozzie’s squads topped that total in four of his first five seasons as a skipper from 2004-2008.
Read the full article here: http://espn.go.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/9718/the-guillen-number-white-sox-rely-on-hrs
Originally published: April 27, 2011. Last Updated: April 27, 2011.