Following up on Ozzie Guillen

In my last post I neglected to address something, and it seems others have been quick to mention it. Originally, the point was not about whether people agreed or disagreed with Ozzie's comments about Fidel Castro, but rather his right to say them in the United States of America. I'll stand on that forevermore.

Of course, his dissenters, whether in Little Havana or elsewhere, are also free to speak their minds. Like Ozzie, they have every right to express their opinions. They can rant and rave, write newspaper columns, spew sound bytes on TV or talk radio, and even peacefully protest, via boycotts, marches, and other means. Rights go both ways, and well they should.

The problem arises when certain people want to punish an individual for speaking his/her own opinion, because they disagree with it. In the business world, it would be akin to a boss disciplining an employee because they liked apples, and he/she preferred oranges. One might logically ask -- what, pray tell, does that have to do with workplace efficiency?

That appears to be the case with Ozzie Guillen, though he's flip-flopping like a politician facing re-election on his Castro stance. First he loves and respects him. Facing a "constituent" uprising over those remarks, he decided he misspoke and has since apologized -- repeatedly.

Let's not kid ourselves. Like Detroit Tigers' manager Jim Leyland once said, Ozzie is dumb like a fox. Ozzie knew damn good and well what he was saying originally, but sometimes being a fox will bring the hounds into play, and that usually doesn't work out well for the fox by the end of the day.

In what appears to be somewhat of a compromise, Guillen got suspended for 5 games, likely with no pay. Perhaps that's enough meat to placate the hounds, and they can get on to mercilessly chasing other prey on another day.

Thing is -- unlike Ozzie -- the hounds are never penalized for writing or speaking a point of view that others disagree with. They're exempt. It might be interesting to see what would happen if a columnist had $100 deducted from his/her salary for every negative opinion that came in over what they wrote. As they are so fond of saying -- that would take things to a whole new level. Indeed, perhaps they would get a different perspective of what they put others through with their words.

Ozzie recently signed a 4-year deal with the Florida Marlins, worth about $10 million dollars. At roughly $2.5 million a year, suspending him for 5 games gets into his wallet to the tune of about $77,000 dollars.

To Ozzie, that's chump change, and he'll be back in about a week. Story over. Put 77 pounds of meat in the middle of a field, and hungry hounds will get after it. They won't care where that meat came from, or what it used to be. They'll dig in anyway, because it's their nature.

There's a difference.