Major League Baseball

A muted Ozzie does Marlins no good

Published Apr. 11, 2012 1:00 a.m. ET

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You don’t have to know Ozzie Guillen well to understand there is nothing inauthentic about him. He is exactly who he purports to be, which has always been part of his appeal, maybe even part of his ability as a baseball manager.

He is one of the few truly unfiltered personalities left in sports, and the Miami Marlins understood this last year when they started negotiating with Guillen on a $4 million per year contract, and he promptly let loose an epic, profanity-laced rant about wanting to buy a 62-foot boat and that the championship he won with the Chicago White Sox meant nothing next to the payday Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria was about to give him.

“Money is everything besides health,” said Guillen, which somehow wasn’t even close to the craziest or tackiest moment of his career but certainly ranked among the Ozzie-ist.

But the last act of Honest Ozzie — and what should be his last act as Marlins manager — came yesterday, in an apology that was both sincere and necessary following ill-advised comments about Cuban dictator Fidel Castro that were tantamount to treason for the Cuban-American community in South Florida, a large portion of which suffered atrocities at the hands of Castro’s regime.

“I hurt a lot of people’s feelings,” Guillen said about a Time magazine interview in which he said he “love[d]” Castro and respected his ability to stay in power. “I did the wrong thing. It was a very stupid comment. When you are [in] sports, you should not be involved in politics. I was very stupid with the comment. This is the biggest mistake so far in my life.”

Whether it’s a mistake that will cost him his job with the Marlins remains to be seen. Guillen was suspended five games by the team, but it might not be enough given the damage he has done. As the face of a franchise whose new ballpark rises above the streets of Little Havana, this is a bell that can’t be unrung.

And if Guillen returns to manage the Marlins again, it will surely be in a safer, sanitized, more guarded version that most of us won’t recognize. This will change Guillen, making him forever self-aware in a way that he never had to be in Chicago.

But if that’s what the Marlins are left with after all this — just the manager, not the loose-cannon personality — is there really a point to keeping him around?

The Marlins didn’t lure Guillen out of Chicago with a massive contract because of his value as a tactician. They wanted him because he’s a star, because he says unpredictable, brutally honest and controversial things that make him relevant even when his team is not. They wanted him because there wasn’t anyone else who could bring people to the ballpark without ever throwing a pitch or digging in at the plate.

But if Guillen is no longer any of those things — if he’s just there to make pitching changes and double switches — then he’s no longer worth the public relations price the Marlins are going to pay for keeping him.

Which isn’t to say Guillen isn’t a good manager. He clearly is. He fights for his players, and he generally gets a lot out of them. In that respect, though, Guillen is no different than any number of baseball lifers Miami could have hired. His managerial skills are only part of the package. If the Marlins encourage anything less than the full Ozzie experience, they’re not getting their money’s worth.

But what happened yesterday makes it impossible for Ozzie to be Ozzie in Miami again. For years, the man has thrived on confrontation and controversy and saying whatever is on his mind. Guillen has gone into interviews with far more malicious intent than this one and gotten away with it, even after public apologies.

This is different, though, because what Guillen told Time wasn’t intended to be mean-spirited; it was just off-the-cuff and uneducated. Listening to Guillen at his press conference, it became clear pretty quickly that he had no knowledge about the history of Cuba and no real sense of the struggle its former citizens faced as they came to America.

That might not matter in a lot of places, but it matters profoundly in Miami. And Guillen understands there’s no apology that can absolve him of this.

Part of Guillen’s appeal to Loria was the calculation that a famous Hispanic manager would connect the new-look Marlins to the city of Miami in a way that hadn’t happened since the franchise came into existence in 1993.

That strategy has been torpedoed now, and the only way Guillen can get through it is to shut his mouth and manage the team.

But that’s not the combative, no-holds-barred Guillen that Loria hired, the one that was supposed to make the Marlins interesting and relevant for the first time in years. The problem isn’t that Guillen made a fool of himself talking about something he wasn’t qualified to discuss; it’s that he touched the wrong issue in the wrong city.

That would change any man, even Guillen. But the more cautious, milquetoast version that we’ll get from now on does the Marlins no good. Problem is, he said the one thing that makes the alternative worse.

There is no reason to doubt Guillen’s sincerity when he stood in front of the world and apologized. But as long as he’s in Miami, it might be the last time he’s allowed to be himself.

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