SUSPEND, YES! BASEBALL DISMISS, NO!

Guillen ban fits crime

Ozzie Guillen, who issued the kind of real apology you hardly ever get in sports, gets five games for saying that he loves Fidel Castro. And already there is the debate about whether it’s enough to satisfy Cuban-americans in South Florida, the anti-castro capital of this world.

But it is enough. The Marlins did the right thing by suspending Guillen and then Guillen said all the right things, began to back his words up with actions. And that should be enough. You can’t talk about what an enemy of freedom Castro has been in Cuba and then give Guillen some kind of baseball death penalty for exercising freedom of speech, no matter how incredibly tone-deaf and wrong-headed his speech about Castro was in Time magazine.

“I feel like I betrayed the Latin community,” Guillen said. “I am here to say I am sorry with my heart in my hands and I want to say I am sorry to all those people who are hurt directly or indirectly.

“I’m sorry for what I said and for putting people in position they don’t need to be in. And for all the Cuban families, I’m sorry. I hope that when I get out of here, they will understand who Ozzie Guillen is. How I feel for them. And how I feel about the Fidel Castro dictatorship. I’m here to face you, person to person. It’s going to be a very difficult time for me.”

Then Guillen said this about the interview with Sean Gregory in Time: “I was thinking in Spanish and said the wrong thing in English.”

The money quote for Guillen in his interview with Gregory came when the Marlins manager said that he not only loved Castro, but respects him for staying in power for as long as he has. In the Cuban-american community in Miami, it was the equivalent of saying in New York he thought terrorists sure are tough.

So the Marlins had him fly home from Philadelphia, and Guillen issued his apology in Spanish, then met with women who had been abused in the Castro regime. He certainly did not say that he was sorry if he’d offended everybody, because Ozzie Guillen knew he had offended everybody, and that does not just mean Cuban-americans.

Would the Marlins have been within their rights to fire Guillen? They would have been well within their rights. And it wouldn’t have been a free speech issue with them. It would have been about business. If they really thought that Guillen had done irreparable harm to their business and their brand, even after the guy had managed only a handful of official games, then they wouldn’t have suspended him, they would have told him to get lost.

But you don’t fire Guillen for what he said. You don’t ruin people for this kind of mistake, even though Guillen is another sports figure who has been convinced — and convinced himself — that we are hanging on every single word, in two languages, on Latin politics and everything else. Every time something like this happens, in baseball especially, you go back to the late Al Campanis, the Dodgers’ general manager who went on “Nightline” once and said that blacks lacked the “necessities” to be managers in baseball. It was a hideously inappropriate comment for Campanis to make, even after a career in baseball and with the Dodgers during which he had done more for minorities than any executive since Branch Rickey.

Campanis was fired by the Dodgers almost immediately and never had a big job in baseball again. I am not justifying what he said that night, or suggesting that I know whether he had carried beliefs like this in his heart and mind. But what I do know is that those few minutes wiped out Al Campanis’ long and honorable baseball life.

This isn’t the first time Guillen, who comes from Venezuela, has let us know what he thinks about Latin politics. He speaks frequently about antiimmigrant issues, even as he is all over the map when he talks about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, yelling “Viva Chavez” after Guillen’s White Sox won the 2005 World Series, then turning around and criticizing him later, and talking about how much Mrs. Guillen sure hates Chavez.

This is also the same Ozzie Guillen who has fined his own players and famously — for not showing respect during this country’s national anthem. Ozzie Guillen is no fool, even though he can sound like one sometimes, and sounded like one when Gregory interviewed him for Time.

Already there is a C uba n-a mer ican group in Miami that has demanded that Guillen be fired. You know they won’t be going away. Soon there will be boycotts and demonstrations outside the Marlins’ fancy new ballpark. That is why there is no way of knowing if Guillen is actually safe with the Marlins, no matter what they are saying, at least in the short run.

Again: If they do fire him, it won’t be about Castro or the violent anti-castro element. It will be about business.

We still need to get out of the business in sports of firing people, or calling for them to be fired, for what they say and what they think. Guillen doesn’t get by simply because he offered an emotional apology yesterday. But he showed real remorse and, again, how many times do you actually see that from people who step in it this way in sports?

“I will learn from this,” Guillen said Tuesday morning, and clearly he already has.

“This is the biggest mistake of my G life,” Ozzie Guillen said. uillen losing his job over this would be as big a mistake. That would be the real bad business here. This suspension ought to be enough, even for the Cuban-americans in South Florida. You hate Castro and everything he has done and everything he stands for. You don’t hate a baseball manager.