The first thing you learn about the all-grown-up White Sox is don’t call them kids, even if they can play, which is still more slogan than truth, always was more excuse than incentive.
Manager Jerry Manuel is all for his team having an identity, but his players will take it from here, thank you.
“The marketing department will do what it has to do and we will do what we have to do,” said Manuel, suddenly the old pro of Chicago sports foremen.
It is about time when Manuel has been in grade longer than anyone in town but Bob Pulford, and he doesn’t count, that the White Sox get off this stale love-us-because-we-try, watch-us-because-we’re-fresh gimmick they’ve been relying on.
I mean, Chicago might be a coach and manager’s turnstile, but I don’t think we’re ready to start calling Manuel “Pappy.”
The White Sox have only three players barely on the serious side of 30, but wherever Magglio Ordonez and Bob Howry and Chris Singleton and Ray Durham and Mike Sirotka are, they certainly are beyond adolescence.
“They get annoyed being called kids,” Manuel said. “They don’t like it at all.”
Never mind the fact that it hasn’t worked. Attendance recedes and attention declines, and the Cleveland Indians win the division by the All-Star break. That has been life on the South Side. The White Sox could be derelicts and leftovers for all the difference any of this has made to the reason they are in business.
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More often it seems as if the White Sox exist only to envy the Cubs, a franchise blessed by perpetual sunshine and impossible parking. The Sox win 10 more games than the Cubs, finish second in their division to the Cubs’ sixth in theirs. The Sox play to shadows and echoes while the Cubs fill seats through Sammy Sosa’s last time up.
No sympathy there. The Sox once had Sosa and used him like . . . well, sort of as new Cubs manager Don Baylor is thinking of using Sosa, one base at a time. That would be typical Sox revenge, if Sosa is transgressed into the erratic underachiever he once was, while the White Sox remain afterthoughts.
Manuel illustrates the new maturity with Durham, who appointed himself captain of the White Sox, an unofficial leader since Manuel does not believe in team captains.
One of Durham’s teammates made him a “C,” as in hockey, to wear on his jersey.
“But it’s Velcro,” said Manuel. “I can snatch it off at any time.”
This has to be the year that the Sox stop being postscripts to the Cubs and footwipes to the Indians. That’s the earned identity of the White Sox, and it has nothing to do with marketing.
“We’re searching,” Manuel admitted. “We may be a club of young players, but we have to get rid of that identity. We need to establish a new one, one where we compete and contend. They are just not kids anymore.
“Our players have to establish themselves with some kind of history in the major leagues. There will be times when our inexperience will show, but if we are talented and dedicated enough, it will even out.
“This is the year we have to just go out and play and be considered by our results. We want to eliminate youth as an excuse. We want to say, if we get our butts kicked, they were a better team, not because we were not ready to compete.”
It is not Manuel’s job to package the Sox, only to manage them, so when he tries to condense the image he wants for the Sox, he comes up with “fearless and aggressive.” Come to Comiskey for a little F and A? The new image is obviously a work in progress.
The most obvious poster flop and sad example of youth as an alibi is shortstop Mike Caruso, a player in over his head too soon, his inadequacies tolerated to the point where he may be finished at 22. Caruso could be the first player who ever lost a major-league career because of harebrained marketing.
Caruso has been replaced by Jose Valentin, late of Milwaukee’s infield and eight years older than Caruso.
With Valentin, Frank Thomas and new pitching addition Cal Eldred making up the trio of Sox thirty-somethings, there is almost enough of a quorum to announce, these fogeys can play.
“Let’s just say that Valentin has made some plays that would have had me catching my breath last year,” Manuel said.
Adulthood. Give it a chance. Sounds like a slogan to me.