The Sox are not going to make the playoffs this season. (Unless you’re gripping to their seven percent chance at the moment.)

It’s been so rough as of late, there’s little reason to watch this team finish out the season. But, take heed, Sox fans. Here’s a few reasons you should watch the team in the month of September:

1) Gordon Beckham.

Though his batting average has plummeted nearly 30 points the last two weeks (he’s currently batting .271), Beckham is still the odds-on favorite to win the AL Rookie of the Year Award. Only a few times in White Sox history has a player received such an honor. Might as well watch his last month of the year, huh?

2) Cubs vs. White Sox.

Yup, don’t forget: their makeup game is schedule for Thursday at Wrigley Field. And considering neither team is going to the playoffs, this is the closest fans are going to get to a postseason feel this late in the season. Revel in it, people. The Sox currently lead the series 3-2 this year, pending Thursday’s bout. If anything, Cubs and Sox fans should just be concerned with a race to the best regular season record. The Cubs (65-63) currently have the edge on the Sox (64-67).

3) Jake Peavy.

We’ll know more on his status after his series of tests today. If it’s not a season-ending injury, there’s still five weeks left in the season. If the elbow tightness sets him back even another 1-2 weeks, there still might be time for Peavy to start at least one game for the White Sox this season. It’s something he by all intents and purposes wants to do, and it’s something Ozzie Guillen and Kenny Williams want as well, even if the Sox are even farther out of contention by then.

4) Ozzie Guillen.

He’s going to say something fun. He’s going to say something outrageous. He’s going to do something to make you smile. OK fine, you don’t have to watch a game to see any of this stuff; it will be parsed out and written/shown for you elsewhere, or will occur before or after a game.

And yes, when you’re clutching to a manager for a reason to watch a team, you know the season is officially kaput.

If he picks up the Rookie of the Year award (and at this point that seems almost inevitable), Gordon Beckham will become the sixth White Sox player to earn the nod, joining the likes of Ozzie Guillen, Ron Kittle and . . . um, who, exactly? In the spirit of history, Mouthpiece presents a look at South Side freshmen past — and a possible glimpse into Bacon Spice’s future.

Ozzie Guillen, SS, 1985
In 150 games, Guillen posted a solid .273 average to bolster an abysmal .291 OPS. His lone home run and 33 RBI weren’t much to write home about either, but everyone knew Guillen’s glove was what won it for him. Guillen would go on to play 16 seasons between the South Side, Atlanta, Baltimore and Tampa Bay before eventually becoming one of the premier managers in the sport. But you knew that.

Ron Kittle, OF/DH, 1983
Thirty-five home runs in 145 games meant only one thing: DON’T MESS WITH THE KITTLE. Unfortunately, injuries hampered Kittle’s abilities, and his numbers dropped off considerably and in a hurry. Kittle had stints with the Yankees, Indians and Orioles before coming home in 1991, playing his final game on August 13, 1991. Kittle went 1-for-5 that day; his final major league hit was a two-run homer off of Tigers reliever Mike Henneman, a shot now immortalized on Henneman’s Baseball-Reference page. Henneman’s whereabouts are unknown; Kittle wrote a book, found out Barry Bonds is a huge racist and checks in on his blog every now and then.

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Ladies and gentlemen, Ozzie Guillen:

“If I see somebody hitting my players and I know it’s on purpose, two guys are going down,” Guillen said. “I don’t care if I get suspended.”

[ ... ]

“If you can’t pitch in or don’t know how, don’t do it,” he said. “It’s getting to the point where they hit us seven times, 20 times in one week, and I hit one, I’m a headhunter.”

As I wrote when Bobby Jenks made similar comments earlier this season, there’s something to be said for the honestly here. Usually, any talk of beaning opposing players is covered up with an “oh, the ball just got away from me” or “no, I didn’t tell my pitcher to throw at him” or something far less blunt than Guillen’s or Jenks’ comments. (Though, Guillen probably could have been more diplomatic about it.)

But there’s a problem with this type of honesty: it leads to MLB investigating your comments. Happened to Jenks. He received a small fine. It’s happening to Guillen now too. So there’s a simple rule here: leave it in the clubhouse. Tell your pitching staff, tell your players, tell the rest of your coaching staff, but don’t tell the media. Because once MLB and dumb bloggers like me get a hold of it, it only escalates. Guillen has nothing to gain from these comments, (except maybe putting other teams on notice?) and everything to lose, like umpires being on the extra lookout for any errant pitch by the Sox’ pitching staff. Ejections or warnings might be given out in situations where they aren’t worthy, but are now with Guillen’s strong words. (And there’s certainly an argument to be made that even though the Sox sit as the fifth-most plunked team in the league this year, many of the recent beanings have had no malice behind them.) He’s handcuffed his team.

I love Guillen’s refusal to play the PR game and instead spout off however he feels. It’s refreshing in this cliched quote era. But he’s better off keeping quiet in a scenario like this.

With the Sox currently in the playoff hunt, they need every advantage, not disadvantage, on their side.

As pointed out earlier in these pages, MLB players do not express any strong desire to play for the men managing the teams of our fair city. Ozzie Guillen, as expected, doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks of him, which seems about what you’d expect out of the man who once promised to run naked down Michigan Avenue should his team win the World Series. Across town, Lou Piniella tells the Sun-Times he takes the snub “as a compliment,” which also seems right considering Lou’s old-school demeanor and generally well-liked off-field persona.

With Ozzie, you generally expect outsiders to show reluctance towards working for him. Consider the language, the abrasiveness, the borderline racism and the public hostility towards his players and it’s easy to empathize with a player’s Guillen aversion. But with Lou, the question has to be re-framed. He may not go to war with you, may not run off his mouth about what a lousy job the general manager is doing, but perhaps with Lou it’s less a question of what he will do than one of what he won’t do. Consider:

1986, New York: Piniella leads Don Mattingly, Rickey Henderson, Dave Winfield to second place.
1990, Cincinnati: Handed the keys to a recently-disgraced Pete Rose’s team, Piniella guides the Reds to World Series victory over the heavily-favored Oakland A’s. The champs finish the following season in fifth place.
1995, Seattle: Following a glorious late-season drive and a dramatic one-game playoff against the Angels, Piniella’s Mariners, anchored by Tino Martinez, Joey Cora, Ken Griffey, Jr., Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner and Randy Johnson, lose the ALCS to the eventual World Series loser Cleveland Indians.
1997, Seattle: The Mariners, taking their existing team and inserting a hot-hitting shortstop named Alex Rodriguez, take the AL West only to lose in the ALDS to the Baltimore Orioles.
2000, Seattle: Earning a wild-card berth thanks to Martinez, Rodriguez, John Olerud, and a pair of young pitchers in Freddy Garcia and Gil Meche, the M’s sweep the White Sox before losing to the Yankees in the ALCS.
2001, Seattle: The greatest regular-season performance of all time, 116-46, is rendered useless after Piniella’s team is again taken down in the ALCS by the Yankees.
2003-2005, Tampa Bay: Definitely not his fault, but those were some ugly years all the same.
2007, Chicago: Eighty-five wins are somehow enough to take the NL Central. Eighty-five wins also show just enough Cubbie swagger to earn a first-round sweep at the hands the Diamondbacks.
2008, Chicago: It’s gonna happen! And you know what? It did.

So maybe the problem with playing for Lou has absolutely nothing to do with Lou at all, but plenty to do with the end result of playing for Lou. Letdown. Disappointment. Heartbreak. Sorrow. All the great baseball in the world that, in the end, was played for no reason at all.

Or, you know, maybe no one really has an opinion on the Manny Actas and A.J. Hinches of the world.

Dewayne Wise? Dewayne Wise can handle whatever you’re throwing at him.

(Wise, by the way, should know the venom directed at him has less to do with his .150 average and more with the fact the White Sox haven’t been able to find a permanent center fielder since 2005. That said, a .150 average never silenced any player’s critics.)

Josh Fields? Josh Fields just wants answers and a chance.

(Fields, you may recall, was once heralded the future of baseball and while no one expected him to play Gold Glove-caliber defense or threaten to outslug the likes of Jim Thome, a league-leading eight errors and tremendous dropoff in offensive production never helped anyone’s cause, regardless of organizational confusion around Ballplayer 2.0.)

Ozzie Guillen? Ozzie Guillen does not give a flying **** what comes out of that ***** **** **** of yours.

(To his credit, Guillen has kept the team almost treading water without much of a team to manage, although under his watch the Sox themselves have ranged from untouchable to this year’s inexplicable second-place-and-two-under. With little more than that One Awesome Year [2008 doesn't count] under his belt, it seems Guillen has become Chicago baseball’s answer to Mike Ditka, forever invincible in the eyes of his followers, the masses still basking in the victorious glow of what happened Once Upon A Time. We’re talkin’ minimum eight-peat here, Bob.)

Three men, three different reasons to be mad at fans and media, and yet throughout the land only two of them will be lambasted for it. This, friends, is the power that comes with bringing something good to a sports city so inexplicably starved for reasons to celebrate. Must be a Chicago thing:

The Hawks and Bulls got crushed by old, broken-down Red Wings and Celtics teams? Let’s just cherish the fact they were even allowed into the playoffs.

The Bears got a mighty quarterback who might not have anyone to pass to? Dude, I’m gonna buy a jersey.

The Cubs might be the worst franchise in the history of sports? That’s OK. This one time, I totally drank some beers at Wrigley Field and went to this bar that had, like, Cubs stuff in it.

The Sox have finally turned on us? Man, 2005 was awesome.

In a last minute pitching switch prior to Monday’s game against the Oakland Athletics, Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen decided to put Gavin Floyd (3-5) on the mound instead of the scheduled starter, Bartolo Colon (3-4).

Guillen said he simply wanted to give the right-hander an extra day of rest, but not to worry, there was no injury or any other ailment stopping Colon from taking the hill.

Colon will kick things off on Tuesday in game two against the A’s.

With the Pittsburgh Pirates series already won, Chicago White Sox RF Jermaine Dye will be taking the bench in Sunday’s final game of Interleague Play.

Though Dye was active during batting practice on Sunday morning, bench coach Joey Cora and manage Ozzie Guillen — who is still out of town tending to his ill father-in-law — both agreed that “today was a good day to give [Dye] a break.”

The 35-year-old veteran is expected to rejoin the lineup in Los Angeles for Monday’s matchup against the Angels. Dye is currently swinging a .266 average and cracked his 11th home run this season in Saturday’s game against the Pirates.

Missing from his usual place in the far right corner of the White Sox dugout, manager Ozzie Guillen is absent from Saturday’s second game against the Pittsburgh Pirates due to a family emergency concerning the declining health of his father-in-law.

General Manager Ken Williams announced that Guillen would miss both Saturday and Sunday’s matchup against Pittsburgh, but is expected to rejoin the team on Monday when the Sox travel to Los Angeles to face the Angels.

Bench coach Joey Cora discussed Guillen’s situation only briefly on Saturday with the press, saying simply that Guillen and his wife are dealing with a diar situation and the team’s prayers are with their entire family.

There’s a lot of talk in Sox news these days. Well, not so much talking as a whole lot of saying. Saying, for example, that the offense will correct itself. Saying Jose Contreras is awesome on some simultaneously lower yet higher level. Saying the coaches are all just super.

So what?

If Greg Walker says the last-or-almost-in-the-American-League-in-just-about-everything White Sox can hit, does that make it so? No, of course not; but it does mean he believes they can.

If Ozzie Guillen says his guys’ jobs are safe, does that mean they’re all fireproof? Come on, no one loves their co-workers that much.

If Brian Anderson says Jose Contreras is pitching as well as he’s ever seen Jose Contreras pitch, does that mean another 17-0 run is in order? Ha!

So what are they saying out there in Soxland? Not much, if you think about it. But what’s interesting is not that the words and the actions are so entirely unrelated, but that the words are massive news and totally necessary in and of themselves because the action is entirely nonexistent. Anderson says. Walker says. Guillen says. And that speaks volumes more about the state of the team than any numbers, forecasts or kicker quotes ever could.

There’s an old saying that a good story is one that shows rather than tells. If Sox bats really can bring the thunder, no one should have to insist they can. If anyone’s jobs are safe, they’ll just go about their business of not losing it. If a guy really is that great, no one has to remind you of it. As a favorite singer of mine once said, “I can either tell you how I’m going to kick your a–, or I can just hand you your arms.”

Someday soon, we all hope, these Sox will indeed do the same. The arms, I mean; sabre-rattling hasn’t really been getting the job done the way anyone would have liked it to.