The 35th Street Review

Got an angel on one shoulder, got a league leader in strikeouts on the other.

Hey, did you know Ozzie Guillen and Kenny Williams want to improve next year’s White Sox by addition of speed in tremendous amounts?

‘We need speed, but they have to have talent,” Guillen said over the weekend. ”I know I would like to see some more speed. But when you talk about speed, you can’t talk about nine rabbits. You can’t.”

And this is nice to hear, just as it was last year, and the year before, and the year before, and, well, pretty much every year since this duo was first united atop the mountain at 333 W. 35th. Can they build such a team? Probably. But will they? And if you answered yes, what made you say that?

Here’s a quick exercise in team history: think of every Sox player on every Sox team since 2004 and ask yourself how many of those players were truly of this speedy, talented rabbit mold? One? Two? Do Jerry Owens and Willie Harris even count as players?

Conversely, think of the players the Sox have now and have employed in those same years: could they really get any slower?

Are regular shellackings really the answer? One White Sox general manager says “yes.”

Live arms, dead hope, empty promises and a whole field of unanswerable questions. Play ball!

Ah, January, in which temperatures hit -20 in Chicago and the paper of record reminds us all of our favorite team’s epic fall from grace:

Only two seasons after they won the World Series for the first time since 1917, the White Sox incurred the largest dropoff in victories in the major leagues last season.

Thanks, Murray. The laughable front-office/PR/GM stock response quotes are too numerous to individually highlight, and it’s shocking that the Times of all places would have a piece that so closely resembles the “news” from whitesox.com, but this has to be the best:

“If we can get guys at their career numbers and with the addition of Swisher, Cabrera and Quentin, we feel good about our offense, and we feel our bullpen will rebound,” Williams said. “We feel we’ll have as good a chance as anyone in our division. We don’t think there’s a clear-cut winner.”

Of course there’s no clear-cut winner, but that’s like watching your house burn and saying “Thank God we didn’t get hit by a tornado.” The more damning reality of the situation is that there are are at least three teams in a better position, but apparently Nick Swisher, Carlos Quentin and their respective .251 and .230 career batting averages are going to more than make up the difference. You say “po-tay-toe,” I say “fourth place.”

[New York Times]