I wonder exactly what White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen did when he heard of Jay Mariotti’s resignation. Take off his hat and wash his hair? File his nails? Trim his facial hair? (Clearly, I imagine Ozzie as a grooming celebrator.)

In any event,  Ozzie — never short on words — shared his thoughts about Mariotti’s dismissal to Chris De Luca of the Chicago Sun-Times:

”When people wish the worst on people, you have to be careful because the baseball gods are going to get you,” Guillen said. ”He was not asking just for my job, he was asking for thousands and thousands of people’s jobs over the years. I’m not going to say I will get the last laugh because I will get fired from this job. But the day I get fired is the day I lose interest in this game.

”Am I enjoying this? Yes, because he tried to make my life miserable. He did everything in his power to make my life go the wrong way, but he didn’t make me miserable because I don’t believe him. Maybe if somebody else wrote that stuff about me, then I would put attention on it. And that’s what he wanted. He wanted attention. He has to thank me because I gave him a lot of [stuff] to work with. I know I helped him the last four years to make his money, and, obviously, he did not help me at all to make my money.”

For Ozzie, this is actually pretty mild-mannered and tame. Hooray for civility! But Mariotti’s former coworker at the Sun-Times did not go as easily on the guy.

And now Mariotti says the printed page is a dinosaur. He has embraced the Internet as his new forum.

We’re talking about a columnist who detested bloggers — mainly because he was easy fodder for their biting humor. He acted as if he stood on a level above bloggers. Most of the better bloggers have the kind of wit he couldn’t touch.

Are bloggers bad? Absolutely not.

But those of us who work at newspapers have one edge over the blogging world. We have access to the players, coaches, managers and front-office executives. We can talk to key figures on and off the record to get insight unavailable to others. It’s a privilege most of us don’t take lightly. To not use it to our advantage is a waste — of our energy and the readers’ time.

As a blogger who’s laid into Mariotti plenty of times, I agree with De Luca in premise here. But there are plenty of scribes on the Internet who aren’t bloggers — Jeff Passan at Yahoo!, Pat Forde at ESPN, Gregg Doyel at CBS Sportsline, to name a few — who I think Mariotti is trying to identify himself with when he’s talking about writing on the Internet. Mariotti is not trying to become a blogger. (At least I hope not.)

According to De Luca, he hasn’t seen Mariotti in either the Cubs or White Sox clubhouse in eight years. (He does, however, go to the press box. I’ve seen him in the box at Wrigley. Granted, I have a small sample size to draw upon, so take that for what it’s worth.)

This sort of non-access rapport with the athletes sounds a hell of a lot like what a blogger traditionally does.  Maybe Jay has been one of us all along — call him a glorified blogger. DEAR GOD NO.