Jackass

Let’s say you’re talking with someone about the WBC. And let’s say that this someone drops this into the conversation:

Alex [Rodriguez] was kissing Latino people’s [rears]. He knew he wasn’t going to play for the Dominicans. He’s not a Dominican. I hate hypocrites. He’s full of [ahem]…The Dominican team doesn’t need him. It’s the same with [Nomar] Garciaparra playing for Mexico. Garciaparra knows Cancun because he went to visit it.

How would you react? I don’t know about you, but I’d wonder why that guy was being such a jackass.

However, if you’re Mark Gonzales of the hopelessly biased Chicago Tribune, and the guy doing the talking is White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, your reaction is “This was merely the latest in a series of colorful pronouncements from Guillen.”

Thank you, Mark Gonzales, for showing me a new definition of “colorful:” a completely gratuitous slam.

To be fair, Guillen realized that he had come off looking like a jackass, because he quickly backtracked and apologized to A-Rod, “his family, his fans, the New York Yankee organization, [and] the White Sox organization.”

Guillen also added:

I learned a lesson. I never took a first shot at anybody in my life and now I feel like I took the first shot.

So I guess Buck Showalter must have taken the first shot when Ozzie referred to him as “the best manager in the history of baseball” and “Mr. Baseball.” And Wrigley Field must have taken the first shot when he said there were twenty thousand rats in the batting cages under the stands, and the day he complained that he had to park at the McDonald’s across the street.

If Ozzie would have just apologized and left it at that…well, he’d still be a jackass, but at least he wouldn’t be sticking his foot further down his throat. Trying to explain away his cracks, Guillen said, “I don’t call him a hypocrite in that way.” Uh…what other way could there be?

“I was just trying to say he doesn’t have to please people,” the further explanation went. So a hypocrite is someone who tries to please people? Now I’m really confused…

Fortunate, Gonzales went into full spin-control mode to defend his man, explaining in the hopelessly biased Tribune that “the word [hypocrite] isn’t perceived as harshly in Latin America as it is in the United States.”

Ah, cultural differences! It’s all so clear now. But Guillen said himself that Rodriguez isn’t a Dominican. Shouldn’t he have realized that A-Rod wouldn’t be receptive to such linguistic nuances?

Notably absent in the apologies was Garciaparra. Guillen did say that he was just joking about Nomar. “I think it was funny,” the manager said. If you’re into that kind of thing, I guess…

And before you get on my case, White Sox Fan, when I say Ozzie’s a jackass in love with the sound of his own voice, I don’t mean it in that way. Among white people in beautiful south-central Wisconsin, calling someone a jackass in love with the sound of his own voice isn’t perceived as harshly as it is in Chicago.