It’s been a pretty quiet off season in Chicago. In fact, if you go by posts on White Sox Watch, it’s been completely dead. (Hopefully for your sake you don’t go solely on WSW… just partially.)

For the last month, all there has been to do in Soxland is wait around for Yoenis Cespedes to establish residency in the Dominican Republic so he can become a free agency (which happened yesterday) and wait around for an AL East team to make a competitive trade offer for Gavin Floyd (which will probably happen next week).

There is only one thing that interrupts the quiet: the idle chatter by, and about, Ozzie Guillen. That would be former-Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, who now works 1,200 miles away yet still manages to find his way into our lives all too frequently.

After the Don Cooper thing, the Jake Peavy thing, the “quitting” thing, tons of Twitter stuff and the Chairman’s attempt to smooth everything over publicly, yesterday Barry Rozner took to print media to give his slant on the whole Ozzie bonanza. All we learn from any of the jabbering is that people like to talk about things. Especially after the fact. Ozzie talks and the city of Chicago can’t wait to drop and shatter their collective monocle incredulously.

That is the part that gets me worked up- that we have to carry so much schadenfreude and pay so much attention. Ozzie speaks, and the internet lights up with negative reactions. It almost feels like the Marlins are becoming the new Cubs– meatball Sox fans will root hard against them and take pleasure in their misfortune as much as they’ll enjoy their own team’s success.

Why is anybody still paying attention to any of this anymore? I don’t even mean that as a slight to Ozzie, I am just sick of the knee jerk reaction in Chicago and undue importance to Twitter feeds. Ozzie is free to say whatever he wants. When hasn’t he done just that? Nobody in Chicago should bat an eye about it.

Giving attention to the ridiculous antics of an attention-seeker… isn’t that a little like actually reading a column by Jay Mariotti (something any self-respecting person never, ever should do)? Or like decrying the ridiculousness of Tom Greene’s persona, and then watching his show  just so you can be outraged by it? I don’t understand why people keep taking the bait. You’re only fueling the frenzy that Guillen/Mariotti/Greene/Joe Cowley are hoping for.

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But there is another issue here that bugs me. Beyond the immaturity of all this, none of this needed to happen. You have to remember: based on his personnel decisions and performance on and off the field, Ozzie Guillen would have been fired by any other team in MLB long before September 2011. This gets overlooked so often.

In most towns, if you don’t win, you’re out. Somehow, Ozzie, (as well as Kenny Williams and Greg Walker– but this isn’t about them), was above any job evaluation for the last four plus years.

Ozzie deserved to be fired in the first place. He is hardly the first manager in major league history that wore out  his effectiveness and had to be dismissed. Firing a manager isn’t rare. Allowing a manager to pass the threshold of firing and passively snowballing the tension is. The only reason it became such a big deal in Chicago is because the Sox ownership chose not to fire him when the time was right, instead letting the situation fester to uncomfortable degree. The GM wanted him fired. I bet many players wanted him fired. His performance deserved it, and I bet you deep down he knew it. And yet he remained.

Basically, Ozzie became George Costanza with the Yankees. He couldn’t get himself fired, no matter how hard he tried. Costanza wore Babe Ruth’s uniform, streaked naked through the field and defiled the World Series trophy, but couldn’t get fired. Ozzie undermined his players’ confidence, misused his roster, spent every waking moment on Twitter and ignored his bosses. Neither guy could get fired!

(The same could be said for Williams and Walker, who probably would have been fired in most other organizations for their recent performance. Both offered to resign, at least the Sox accepted one of their resignations.)

If Ozzie was fired midseason 2011 (or ever earlier), as his performance merited, none of this stuff would have been an issue at all. He wouldn’t needed to play out the string. Or constantly defend his terrible strategies. Or wage war with his GM, pitching coach, and star pitcher. He would have still barked, no doubt. This is Ozzie! The guys is going to have a parting shot if you fire him, just as he did in 1998. But it wouldn’t have festered in the same way, especially with the “quitting” nonsense.  And we all could have begun the “moving on” process much sooner.

As for me- I was on the Fire Ozzie bandwagon from day one. I couldn’t stand what he became as a White Sox manager. But I wish him no ill will now. In fact, I wish him and the Marlins well.  To paraphrase AJ Pierzynski, who voiced his opinion on Chicago Tribune Live yesterday, I hope the Marlins make it to the World Series, and the Sox kick their butts. Besides, someday, when his Marlins gig ends, Ozzie will be back with the Sox in some capacity. Just like every other ex-Sox or Bulls icon who leaves on bad terms only to come back as an ambassador of some sort, a list Ozzie is already on! The fact that Jerry Reinsdorf would go to such great lengths not to fire Guillen and then to publicly defend him and let everyone save face is proof he’s already thinking about it.

Bottom line: sure Ozzie was wrong, but so are tons of other managers that get fired. The only difference is Ozzie is/was louder about it, and was allowed to stay on board well past his “Sell by” date. As for his incessant tweeting, why the heck are you even paying attention to it, Chicago? Get over it.