Trade Guillen

You've heard it all before. Jose Guillen is passionate about the game. All he cares about is winning. He wants to see his teammates play the game the right way. He plays hurt. He's a straight shooter who will tell you what he thinks, regardless of whether you like it or not.

All of that sounds nice, until you actually see Guillen play the game or until you see his actions or until you actually listen to what he has to say.

He has failed to run hard on numerous occasions this season--all of which we are supposed to believe he was hurt. He's made comments about the fans, saying he doesn't care about them and, at one point, saying "eff the fans." Nice. Then he knocked over a chair in front of Bob McClure in the clubhouse and they had words. A few days ago he doesn't make much of an effort to catch a pop up that dropped in and the fans booed him. But afterward, Ironman claimed to be playing through an injury that barely allowed him to walk. Okay...if you can't walk, how to you expect to play right field?

Unfortunately, Trey Hillman and Dayton Moore have joined in on the choruses of praise for Guillen any time somebody put a microphone in front of them. But for the first time, Moore's patience with Guillen appears to be wearing thin. Here are a couple of the comments he made that appear in the Star today:

“José Guillen likes attention. Every executive I’ve ever talked with has said the same thing. José Guillen like attention, he likes to talk, he likes to say things that will get him noticed. This is just the reality of things. We knew that when we signed the guy. He’s not the only player who you have to manage, not by a long shot. … The bottom line is that between the lines, José Guillen has been a productive player for our baseball team, and between the lines he will continue to be a productive player for our baseball team.”

And then we have this:

“Having some tension in the clubhouse, having some tension around our coaching staff, around our players, I don’t view that as a bad thing. I really don’t. Sometimes it’s good to step on people’s toes. Tension is part of success. I saw it in Atlanta. We had lots of tension, believe me.

“Of course, there can be too much. And hopefully the Kansas City Royals can get to the point where we can walk away from a player who causes too many problems.”

How about walking away from it now? Let's trade Guillen to a team that is so desperate for a bat that it is willing to overlook everything else about him.