Interesting Evaluation of Ozzie Guillen

Ozzie Guillen is sometimes described as a modern day Billy Martin, but that comparison really doesn't hold water. Guillen's fights are with snarky columnists and opposing managers; Martin's were with the bottle and his own players. Guillen is candid and quotable, but unlike Martin, there's no evidence that he is unstable. He enjoys a certain co-dependency with the Chicago press corps, which is at once indebted to the column inches that he fills, and disdainful of his political incorrectness. How much of this is Ozzie being Ozzie!, the self-caricature, is hard to say. Perhaps Guillen deliberately makes himself a lightning rod for attention to shield his clubhouse from it, or perhaps his candor is read by his players as honesty. However he goes about it, his tenure has been characterized by players who play relaxed, professional baseball toward the upper end of their ability, and that's really the bottom line.

Tactically, Guillen shows little of the tendency toward low-percentage baseball that he exhibited as a player. His frequency of sacrifice attempts, pitchouts, and intentional walks are all very close to the norm; he gives his runners the green light a little bit more than average, and pinch hits a little bit less. More notable is his handling of the pitching staff, where he and Don Cooper have developed a centrist philosophy of working the starter past the century mark, but almost never beyond the truly dangerous 120-pitch threshold. The bullpen has been equally well-managed, as Guillen's tendency to ride the hot hand usually works out well.

This comes from the 2007 Baseball Prospectus, and really gives me some perspective that a lot of the issues with Ozzie may be trivial. My support of Guillen has definitely wavered recently, but having the best baseball evaluators in the business extolling him really surprised me.