Cubs, Sox making news for all the wrong reasons

A good strategy is to wake up in the morning already trying to shake the dumbfoundedness from your head.

Then all you have to do is determine whether you're shaking over the Cubs or the White Sox.

Every day it's one or the other. The real problem comes when it isn't the Sox or the Cubs but both, and Saturday was one of those days.

My goodness, that was even before they both closers gagged up ninth-inning losses.

The Cubs' was to the Pirates on a grand slam by Derrek Lee, of all people. The Sox' was to the Tigers in a game that likely ended their last hope of making the playoffs.

Talk about a city's baseball season in a capsule.

A report came early in the day that Sox' general manager Kenny Williams and hitting coach Greg Walker recently engaged in a shouting match, during which Williams ordered Walker to clean out his locker.

If that isn't worth a shake-shake, tsk-tsk, what could be?

Well, a few hours later word arrived that Cubs' chairman Tom Ricketts extended for four years the contract of vice president of player personnel Oneri Fleita.

Shake-shake, tsk-tsk.

The twin events were enough for me to relapse back to Dumbfounded Anonymous.

“Hi, my name is Mike and I'm dumbfounded.”

“Hi, Mike! Cubs or White Sox this time?”

“Both.”

“Yikes!”

Seriously, folks, Chicago baseball keeps becoming more of a joke and less of a laughing matter.

For starters, the White Sox are a mess.

The Williams-Walker nonsense wouldn't be a big deal if the news didn't come at the end of a week in which Sox' manager Ozzie Guillen's took his inherently controversial nature to the extreme.

Overall the Sox could be the most dysfunctional team ever to be in a pennant race, if indeed they still were in a pennant race.

The real problem here is that no blood has been drawn yet. All the participants involved in the Sox' bickering should climb into a steel cage with the last man standing emerging as King of Comiskey, just as oversized men and little boys would settle differences.

As for the Cubs, Tom Ricketts seems intent on discouraging all confidence that he's capable of hiring the right man to fill the Cubs' vacant position of general manager.

Two local precedents indicate that whoever winds up being the new GM should be responsible for building his own organization, including directors of scouting and player development.

In 1981 new Cubs' general manager Dallas Green brought in Gordon Goldsberry as director of minor leagues and scouting; later in the decade new Sox' GM Larry Himes brought in Al Goldis as director of scouting and player development.

Blessed with a single heartbeat the Cubs qualified for the postseason twice in the '80s — the first times since 1945 — and the Sox became one of the winningest teams of the '90s.

Oneri Fleita is a solid baseball man. The new general manager might want to retain him. But that should be his choice, not the club chairman's.

Unless Ricketts already knows who the next GM will be and has cleared Fleita with him, anyone else who accepts the job on these terms probably is wrong for it.

Neither the White Sox nor the Cubs inspired much faith in the future on Saturday, on or off the field.

No wonder my whole body was shaking before sundown.

mimrem@dailyherald.com