Sports

Done with Guillen

Loading

A floundering baseball franchise completely rebrands itself.

New players, new stadium, new uniforms, new name, new manager.

And yet, only three games into the season they suspend their new manager and are on the verge of firing him.

What happened?

Ozzie Guillen, that’s what.

The Ex-White Sox manager has been running his mouth and offending people for years.

There are few groups he hasn’t offended and he has rarely issued a genuine apology.

So when the newly rebranded Miami Marlins, after moving into their new stadium in Little Havana, hired Guillen, they knew what they were getting into.

He has previously dealt with controversy with the White Sox by effectively daring his boss to fire him.

But the Marlins did not expect that Guillen would do what he did. During only the second series of the season, he said in an interview for TIME that he ‘loved’ Fidel Castro, offending the massive Cuban-American population in Miami.

The Cuban presence in Miami exists primarily because the dictatorship of Castro had driven them out of their homeland with countless acts of oppression and cruelty.

Guillen had done the worst thing possible for the Marlins: he had deeply offended the very group they were trying so hard to appeal to.

However, the disgraceful thing Guillen did was not what he said but how he responded.

The Marlins suspended Guillen for five games and flew him back to Miami for an ‘apology’ press conference.

At that press conference Guillen did indeed apologize.

He also claimed his words had been misinterpreted and that he had been unable to find the right word in English to say.

He is unable to see how deeply he offended a huge part of his fan base and how the appropriate response would be to take complete responsibility for his actions.

This debacle proves that Ozzie should be fired.

He still hasn’t learned anything and his presence will be a boondoggle for a team that needs Cuban-Americans to come to the ballpark to fill the stands.

Comments are closed.