Ozzie Guillen: WTF

Ozzie Guillen noticed the White Sox were having some troubles with probability math regarding runners in scoring position.

He then sensibly decided that it was because Orlando Cabrera only plays the game professionally to the best of his near perfectly league average ability and then tries to beat the traffic:

Guillen hopes Cabrera, teammates bond more

Surprisingly, one day after Cabrera's failing grade on the "Doesn't Play Well With Others" section of his report card, the White Sox had not emerged on a white lightning 40 game winning streak, instead, going out and losing a baseball game to a team with a 33-22 record on the road.

Ozzie knows something that you don't:

The teams that bond with each other go 162-0. And he knew well enough that post chatter, his team had a .000 winning percentage. In an incredibly predictable postgame tirade, he promised some shakeups, and assumedly some mathematically shaky (not even shaky, actually, down right idiotic) baseball moves.

In other words, Ozzie Guillen is continuing to manage in the Major Leagues. (The vagueness of his threats indicates to me that he hasn't the slightest clue what he's going to do, but will instead feel the lineup from his gut in the next few days.

I hope that what supernatural insight he is gleaning will not be misinterpreted and actually be the mall food court Chinese he had telling him to down some pink bismuth. Treating multi-million dollar payrolls with the same level of forethought that one usually reserves for insomnia television viewing choices would terrify me if I were a Sox fan, and outrage me if I were their owner. Just saying.)

Guillen and his thoughts on As Seen On TV! Payroll Management

If Guillen knew more of computers than their ability to be used as blunt objects, he would know that his very expensive, aging team is actually vastly overperforming (well, technically a lot of that is the Indians and Tigers underperforming, but whatever). PECOTA isn't perfect, but it's good, and it had the White Sox at 78-84.

Jose Contreras has a 2.89 ERA despite allowing on average around 10 baserunners/9, and is only striking out about 5.5. And in case you are not familiar with the gentleman, he's very old. And had a nasty slide in production last year. Currently he's at about 95th percentile projections, and while that's not impossible (5 percent is a real number, after all), it's very unlikely (95 percent is also a real number, and a much larger one).

Offensively, Carlos Quentin is blowing up projections, but the more troubling numbers are there: Paul Konerko's current state is pretty close to where he should be. Jermaine Dye probably won't stay where he is. There is plenty of cause to show that Nick Swisher is vastly below expectations and should get better, but this is a lineup full of low OBP question marks that Ozzie will eventually bat #2 because he likes the cut of their jib.

Jose Contreras will regress to the mean this year.

I'm waiting for the real fun. When the Detroit pitching regresses back to even reasonable levels and the Indians' hitting fulfills even a fraction of it's healthy lineup. When John Danks goes through some struggles that bring him back to Earth a bit. When Jermaine Dye gets hurt or Quentin isn't on a pace to hit 42 HR anymore. When the White Sox become mired deep into 3rd place, and Ozzie starts demanding that Orlando Cabrera now sleep over at Joe Crede's house during losing streaks and threatens to set fire to reporters. Then the end of the season, when Ozzie Guillen is himself sleeping at Joe Crede's house and forcing all his players to wear the dirty socks of their last victory, and actually begins openly weeping and ranting in a fictional language.

Better send Thome to the Adam Dunn school of sacrifice bunting soon. This is going to be an interesting summer.