Why can’t Ozzie find the high road?

Monday, to their credit, White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen and general manager Kenny Williams lived up to their 2011 pledge to limit the club’s extracurricular drama.

The Sox opened their exhibition schedule and played all nine innings without Guillen or Williams spitting at each other or spatting with others.

Their team did lose a Cactus League game but no more of their dignity. Stay tuned: spring training is young.

The quiet on the Southwestern front came in the wake of Guillen’s feud with Bobby Jenks, which reinforced three enduring suspicions:

First, man doesn’t mature until it’s absolutely necessary; second, sports are refuges from adulthood; third, men-children will be men-children.

After a few days of Jenks and Guillen exchanging insults, a Sox grown-up finally emerged.

Unfortunately Terry Francona manages the Red Sox rather than the White Sox. Jenks is his problem now, and he urged him to end the nonsense and begin the baseball.

Adults are in such short supply in sports that when disputes arise — Guillen-Jenks, labor-management, whomever-whatever — it’s difficult to determine which side is closer to maturity.

Last year Guillen and Williams sniped at each other. Now that they have declared a truce, early indications are that one will complain about something else and the other will bicker with someone else.

You know, kids’ stuff.

Williams recently ripped baseball’s “asinine” economic system in reference to Albert Pujols’ potential free agency. Last week Guillen allowed Jenks to draw him into an adolescent hissing match.

Williams and Guillen share a combative, competitive, compulsive nature, and nature can be an irresistible force banging up against immovable objects.

So there we were the last few days with Guillen and Jenks, his not so dearly departed closer, lobbing insults from Florida to Arizona and back.

In a perfect world Jenks would have been discreet in his comments about the White Sox. Instead he chose to criticize Guillen and Williams.

In a perfect world Guillen’s response would have been diplomatic. Instead he fired back in typically defiant Ozzinator fashion.

This certainly isn’t a perfect world. Sports are as imperfect a world as any this side of politics and kindergarten.

Make no mistake about it: Guillen was at fault for escalating the Jenks dispute because the manager should be the grown-up while letting the player play the fool.

Older kids — in suits and in uniforms — bear the responsibility to impose sanity onto the madness.

If Sox management is serious about calming the waters this season they have to focus the fighting on the field rather than spilling it into the media.

As the clubhouse elder, Guillen needs to dummy up even if it elevates his blood pressure. In this latest dust-up, he ill-advisedly plunged to Jenks’ schoolboy level and engaged in teenage gibberish.

Guillen threatened to physically harm Jenks and to reveal the pitcher’s personal problems, hopefully to the Daily Herald rather than TMZ.

Please, Ozzie grow up.

A simple “no comment” would have sufficed. Don’t adults always preach to everyone but newspaper columnists that if you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all?

Oh, wait, forgot, this is baseball and adulthood rarely applies.

At least on these Sox it hasn’t the past couple of years.

mimrem@dailyherald.com