(please, save something for the MLB Network cameras)
The MLB Network’s attempts to make White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, GM Kenny Williams and owner Jerry Reinsdorf as notorious reality TV fixtures as The Situation, The Entertainer or Danny Bonaduce — aka “The Club” premiered last night. If you were too occupied watching something else, fret not, because the Chicago Sun-Times’ Rick Morrissey is pretty sure the show sucks. Without having watched it, of course. “If a reality show is a store window,” argues Morrissey, “the Sox are a striptease on an outdoor IMAX screen, downtown, during the busy lunch hour.”
If we wanted to know what was going on with Guillen and Williams from the start of spring training to the All-Star break, all we needed to do was consult the Sun-Times, look at Oney Guillen’s tweets or just ask Ozzie.
Even Williams, who prefers a football coach’s approach to the flow of information (that is, no flow) can’t help himself sometimes. The general manager will fire a laser Guillen’s way every once in a while.
If the series has footage of Guillen and Williams almost coming to blows, as a Sun-Times story had the two doing in early June, then MLB has a hit on its hands. But it’s hard to picture team chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, who usually laughs off the Ozzie-Ken dynamics, allowing anything on the air that might put the franchise in a poor light.
A better series might have revolved around Sox players, whom we in Chicago don’t get to know as well because of Guillen’s huge shadow. Then again, I challenge the producers of ”The Club” — or the spymasters of the CIA, for that matter — to get anything out of the reticent Carlos Quentin.