The Twilight Zone

Well, that was exciting, the White Sox waiting until two out in the bottom of the ninth to score a run, but Korey Lee’s homerun allowed the South Siders to avoid being shut out for the eleventh time this season. Oh, they still lost, 3-1 to the Blue Jays, but it’s the little victories that count, right? The loss puts the Sox at 15-42, on a pace to out-lose the ’62 Mets. A nice cool evening last night drew 11,599 fans to see the game. According to baseball-reference.com, the Sox are 28th in attendance, averaging 15,009 a game. Only the Marlins (12,584) and A’s (6,297) are worse. With a little effort, who knows? Any rational owner would have fired a manager with the worst winning percentage in franchise history by now, but not Jerry Reinsdorf. He keeps Mickey Mouse around to say things like “There’s no magic remedy here. The remedy here is you know what? Let’s get ready to work again in Milwaukee. That’s it” and “It’s about work. It’s about preparing, working. These guys are not afraid to sweat, not afraid to get after it. We have to continue to get after it. As far as the statistics and the history of this team and what we are doing, I’m not really focused on that. I’m focused on where we are at and where we gotta go.” [both quotes from today’s story on team website] If you can make sense of that last one, you’re better at deciphering gibber than I am. In his column in today’s Tribune, Paul Sullivan wrote “Grifol makes it impossible to feel sorry for him with his serial bootlicking and insistence that things really aren’t as bad as they seem.” Pretty strong words, if only Reinsdorf bothered to read them. And there’s no way to know if he watched the postgame show last night. If by some miracle he did, oh boy. Frank Thomas said it’s time to starting “DFAing” players to send a message while Ozzie Guillen picked up on Mouse’s preparation-mantra, pretty much saying preparation without the requisite talent is mostly a waste of time, only Ozzie said it better. Reinsdorf isn’t in the habit of accepting bad news or responsibility for failure. The thing is, it’s getting harder to avoid. Maybe he’s found a way to slip into the Twilight Zone and make friends with the gremlin that drove William Shatner crazy.