His father won a World Series, but could Ozney Guillen be the prototype for the modern MLB manager?

May 15, 2024

TROY, N.Y. — Ozney Guillen went to a prep school and two colleges in Miami, but his real education came in the White Sox clubhouse.

“I grew up with adults, that’s something people don’t understand,” Ozney says. “I grew up in a clubhouse.”

As a lanky teenager, Ozney listened and he learned. And when his father, Ozzie Guillen, and his right-hand man, Joey Cora, would talk about baseball, Ozney recognized the dichotomy between their approaches.

“Opposites,” Ozney says one day in his own manager’s office in an upstate New York ballpark. “Complete opposites. Joey’s the first guy to do analytics that I ever saw. The first guy. My dad would grab the numbers and throw them in the trash, literally these same little papers, he’d throw them in the trash.”

Joey Cora, a Vanderbilt graduate who favored defensive shifting, could have been at the forefront of the analytics revolution. Ozzie trusted his eyes, his brain and his gut, all of which worked for a time.

“Joey is so Joey,” Ozney says. “My dad is so my dad.”

Imagine if you could mix Ozzie’s gifts with people and his innate ability to see the whole field with Joey’s obsessiveness with preparation. In the modern game, where a manager has to be fluent in the role analytics plays in making decisions, someone like that would be an interesting hire.

“If you do that, it’s Alex Cora,” Ozney said of Joey’s little brother, the World Series-winning manager of the Red Sox

Or maybe it’s Ozney Guillen.

It’s 6 o’clock on a warm evening at Joseph L. Bruno Stadium, an hour before first pitch against the Lowell Spinners, and Ozney Guillen is in his manager’s office explaining baseball to his father.

Ozney is demonstrating the physics of throwing a baseball as he explains fastball hop. He’s telling his father, the first Latino manager to win a World Series and the first Chicago manager to do so since 1917, why batting average is, to use his father’s parlance, a horseshit stat and how the Astros use a “lucky ball” percentage to determine if someone is really a good hitter.

Ozzie sat there and listened attentively. Baseball arguments are how the Guillens communicate with each other, but Ozzie didn’t have a word to say.

“I learn more from him,” Ozzie says, “than he learns from me.”

Ozney Guillen talks to his father, Ozzie, who was in town to watch his son manage a Tri-City ValleyCats game. (Dan Flaherty / Tri-City ValleyCats)

Ozzie isn’t against the idea of analytics in baseball — or what he thinks analytics and sabermetrics mean — but like most baseball men of his age, he liked being considered the baseball expert because he was the guy who played and he was the guy in the thick of it.

And now his son, who didn’t have much of a playing career of his own, is coming up as a manager with the Houston Astros, arguably the most progressive organization in baseball.

Ozney Guillen, just 27, is in his first year as manager of the Tri-City ValleyCats, the Astros’ short-season Class-A team in the New York-Penn League. He finished his playing career in Venezuela this past winter with a bad shoulder, a bad finger, a possible blood clot in his leg and a firm realization that his playing days were over.

Baseball has given everything to the Guillen family — a life of fame and riches that Ozzie and his wife, Ibis, couldn’t have imagined when they met as teenagers in Venezuela — but it also calloused them along the way.

When Ozzie was the World Series-winning toast of Chicago in 2005, they were on top of the world. The boys were minor celebrities, and Ozzie was the face of Chicago baseball.

When Ozzie was out of baseball after leaving the Sox in a huff and spending one beleaguered season in Miami, when he was ostracized from the sport after 27 consecutive years in the majors, when Ozney was unable to get a sniff to try out for organized teams after passing on signing with the White Sox after high school, baseball was very cruel.

“Everything happened so fast,” Ozney’s older brother Ozzie Guillen Jr. says.

Ozzie had a major-league managing job just four years after he retired as a player. He broke Chicago’s bifurcated World Series curse in year two. Then he was out of baseball before he turned 50.

In the seventh year of his major-league hiatus, on a summer night sitting in the second row behind home plate, Ozzie Guillen tells me this is the first summer he and Ibis can just breathe.

“It’s the first time, family-wide, we’re not worried about any of our kids,” he says.

The star of the close-knit family is clearly Adela Guillen, Ozzie Jr.’s daughter. Ozzie’s Instagram page is essentially a fan page of the girl they refer to as “our baby.”

“My goal is to bring the baby here,” Ozney says. “I guarantee if the baby comes, every single person in my family will come. It’s not because of me, it’s because the baby is here and they want to take pictures of the baby at the stadium. It’s cool. I want to see the baby too.”

Ozzie Jr., who used to be the Spanish language broadcaster for the White Sox, has an MBA and works as a project manager for Cisco, while still dabbling in sports media with La Vida Baseball. Oney, whom you remember from his infamous tweets, works as a financial professional.

And Ozney. They used to worry about Ozney, the former baby of the family and the best baseball player of the three sons, who were so closely tied to their father during his run with the White Sox.

But Ozney is doing just fine. In fact, he’s thriving in the Hudson Valley of New York, far from Miami, far from the South Side of Chicago. Right where he belongs.

Ozney was a teenager when the White Sox won the World Series. He was home-schooled that year, so he was with the team from spring training until the parade.

“He was Drake LaRoche before Drake LaRoche,” Ozzie Jr. says with a cackle in his little brother’s office.

Ozney caught bullpens for José Contreras and Freddy Garcia, he ate late-night burgers with Frank Thomas, he laughed at the comedy stylings of Pablo Ozuna and Willie Harris.

“Willie would walk up and down the dugout — ‘If you want to win, put Willie in,’ — with a baseball bat,” Ozney says. “My dad would just stare at him and go, ‘Willie, you can’t hit, man.’”

To the players, Ozney was like an eternal rookie, and guys like Jon Garland and Mark Buehrle would haze him.

“When you’re a rookie, you have to surf the plane,” Ozney says. “I had to surf the plane every day.”

Surfing the plane, for those who haven’t done it, is when you go to the back of the plane as it takes off and try to stand up and, well, surf gravity’s waves.

Ozzie’s sons didn’t just hang around. They served as translators for the Spanish-speaking players. Sometimes it could be a dangerous profession.

“Here comes El Duque (Orlando Hernandez) looking for me, and A.J. (Pierzynski) is right behind him,” Ozney says. “I’m like 120 pounds at this point. Duque is like, ‘Come here, tell this motherfucker fuck him and if he wants to fight me, let me know right now.’ I’m like, ‘Uh, A.J. …’ and he’s like, ‘I understand that motherfucker.’ I’m literally between these two. A.J. said, ‘Should I hit you or should I hit the fucking translator?’”

White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen kisses his son Ozney after the White Sox defeated the Houston Astros 1-0 in Game 4 to win the 2005 World Series. (Jeff Roberson / AP Photo)

You want to know about the things Ozney carried? Well, his family name, of course. But he also lugged around Ken Griffey Jr.’s PlayStation on the road in the waning months of the 2008 season. He carried a tea set for Jim Thome, so he could have tea parties with his daughter in his hotel room. At 3 a.m. one morning in Texas, he carried boxes of McDonald’s for Contreras and El Duque on a bum foot, an injury suffered at a baseball tournament.

Ozney has hours of stories that aren’t fit for print, about the stuff deranged, bored major leaguers would dare him to do for money. He also saw stuff that teenagers shouldn’t see.

Many of his funniest stories have to do with Juan Uribe, like the time the Guillens passed him driving on the road and realized Uribe had installed TVs in the back of the front two seats of his two-seater BMW.

Ozney was hitting coach Greg Walker’s “test dummy for all the stuff he wanted to try out.” White Sox pitching coach Don Cooper thought Ozney should’ve been a pitcher.

“Coop said he had the best changeup for a 14-year-old he’s ever seen,” Ozzie Jr. says.

Ozney did more than goof around, carry things and translate. He watched how Paul Konerko and Thome prepared. He saw how Jermaine Dye led. He took mental notes of how Alexei Ramirez played shortstop and Joe Crede manned third base. He said hi to everyone, because his father told him that was important. He sat in Ozzie’s press conferences and took in how he used brutal honesty with his players and saw everything on the field at all times.

He watched as his father and Kenny Williams did baseball alchemy on a boring franchise and turned it into world champions in one offseason.

Ozney saw the highs and lows of fame for his father, who won a World Series at 41, but whose reputation got away from him as egos collided in the organization.

One memory of the duality of Ozzie stands out for his son. It was in Anaheim during the ALCS. The family was eating sushi when Ozzie locked eyes with a toddler who was bouncing a ball. Ozzie, who loved his players’ kids more than he liked his players, started interacting with the kid, bouncing the ball back and forth. The kid’s dad smiled, hugged his son and pointed to Ozzie.

“He says, ‘That’s the crazy guy from TV,’” Ozney says. “My dad’s heart broke. He looked at me and I could tell he was embarrassed. This was during the playoffs. We won the game, but after the game you could still tell it was bothering him.”

The crazy guy from TV?

Earlier this year, Ozney got kicked out of a ValleyCats game for the first time. He is not prone to anger, but something bothered him and he argued with an umpire and got tossed. No big deal, right?

But the team snapped a picture of it and put it on Ozney’s baseball card. A picture of him arguing.

Ozney didn’t find it funny. He was crestfallen. He understood why the team would choose that picture, but he doesn’t want to be known as a crazy guy either. (The organization apologized.)

“That’s the funny thing,” he says. “When people meet me, they say you’re very your dad but you’re on the opposite side. I do get mad. If you do love baseball, you’re going to get emotional about it. You’re going to get upset.”

Ozney rides an electric scooter to Joseph Bruno Stadium every day.

“They call me the Hispanic Joe Maddon,” he says.

Or maybe he’s just a lot like his dad, who used to take an expensive fold-up bike on the road and cruise around different cities.

Ozney is tall (6-foot-3) and handsome with big arms and dark features and long, well-coifed jet-black hair he plays with constantly during conversations. His beard is neatly trimmed like his old man’s.

Tri-City manager Ozney Guillen talks to his team before a game against the Lowell Spinners. (Dan Flaherty / Tri-City ValleyCats)

A child of both worlds, Ozney moves seamlessly between the Latin and U.S. players on his team, joking around, playing ping-pong and offering encouragement. He loves talking baseball, from philosophy to strategy.

But he’s not afraid to get tough either. While Ozzie frets that his son has to be the guy to cut players, Ozney doesn’t see the conflict.

“I’m so honest with my players that you have to see it coming,” he says. “I tell them all the time, ‘Guys, I’m going to be here all year, my job is not going to change. You can hate me, you can love me, you can have any opinion about me, but you will get better and you will try to move up. If you don’t work hard, it’s not going to happen.’”

The only time in two days that Ozney asks me to leave his side is to deliver a message in Spanish to a player about missing signs.

Outside Ozney Guillen’s office, there are inspirational quotes painted on the wall. There are ones from Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell, a possibly apocryphal one from Tommy Lasorda.

And then there’s one from Bill Veeck, the former owner of the White Sox, which says, “You are owed nothing.”

For a night game that begins at 7, Ozney’s day starts at noon when he joins his Spanish-speaking players at their mandatory English class at the stadium.

It usually ends around 1 a.m. when he finishes his reports, which are uploaded on the Astros’ Ground Control database and shared via Slack.

Ground Control? Slack? If Ozzie thought a guy was either horseshit or fucking good, he’d call up Kenny Williams and tell him himself.

But these are new days and this is a new Guillen in charge working for the Astros, who are light-years away from the Sox of Ozzie’s day.

When Ozzie first visited his son earlier this season, he couldn’t believe his schedule.

“I spent two days with him, I was tired just to watch,” Ozzie says. “All the little things they have to do. The stuff you see in the big leagues, they’re already doing in the rookie league. It’s amazing how it works. From 1 o’clock until the end of the game, work. Extra hitting, ground balls, pitcher throwing sides on the mound. So many different things, it’s amazing.”

Ozney Guillen (right) works out his infielders during a hitting drill before a Tri-City ValleyCats game. (Jon Greenberg / The Athletic)

Ozney doesn’t go to Spanish class to provide moral support as these young players navigate a new country, but to make sure they’re on time and not cheating by speaking Spanish to each other.

Then it’s on to his daily work. Managing for the Astros in the minors is a constant effort to update videos and communicate with his bosses.

The Astros crave cold, hard information and Ozney is an eager convert to their ways.

“We believe your eyes lie to you,” Guillen says.

On the wall outside his office are updated printouts that show his players’ VO2 max (maximal oxygen intake), their hamstring asymmetry and their 30-yard sprint times.

There is a charging station for the Catapult GPS sensors that measure the players’ energy expenditure and track how much ground they cover. There’s a plastic bin for the Blast motion capture swing sensors that go on the knob of their bats to track and analyze their swings. The players check their Slack accounts (yes, they have Slack too) and watch video on team-owned iPads. The ValleyCats have Trackman radar and Edgertronic cameras. The organization’s psychologist was in town to listen and talk.

It’s not all high technology and high-mindedness. They still have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the staple of every minor-league team, but there are also wraps and fruits and veggies and plenty of protein bars and energy snacks. On a wall by the lockers is a hydration schedule with pictures and Spanish translation.

Now that Ozney is a proponent of numbers over eyes, doesn’t that put him at odds with his father’s success as a manager? After all, Ozzie did OK for himself, winning nearly 700 games with the White Sox alone. The team has had only one winning season since he left after the 2011 season.

“It still works, it still works. Instincts are instincts,” Ozney said. “But when you can actually measure stuff, like would it not help to know when he was managing, who would you rather use to pinch-run, Pablo Ozuna or Willie Harris?

“You’d say Willie, but people thought Pablo was just as fast. Remember when Pablo stole home plate on a pickoff against Kansas City and people had this whole thing with Pablo? So now there you can test it, this guy is faster than this guy, so you know who to use first and who to use second or who not to use.

“I liked (analytics) before but now when that they can prove stuff to you it’s a little different. Especially since I come from both sides of baseball, so I can combine that. So then it’s cool.”

Ozney took an analytics course during the offseason with former GM Dan Evans and he dove headfirst into the Astros culture once he got hired.

Now, the kid who grew up with the White Sox is a proselytizer of the Astros Way.

A new pitcher arrives in Ozney’s office wearing a Mississippi State shirt and a Mississippi State cap.

“What school did you go to?” Ozney says.

“Mississippi State,” the player responds, not getting the joke.

Ozney smiles. He tells the player he has a rule, you can’t wear your college team gear at the stadium.

“Is that because you went to a bad school?” Ozzie Jr. says with a smile.

No, it’s one of Ozney’s rules, along with “throw strikes,” don’t wear Astros gear outside of the stadium and don’t get in trouble out on the town.

But no, Ozney didn’t go to Mississippi State or Miami or Texas.

In high school, he played in all-star games with Manny Machado, Carlos Correa, Javy Báez and all the greats in Florida.

Ozney committed to the University of South Florida in 2010, but after his draft fiasco he wanted to stay in Miami and went to a top junior college, Miami-Dade, before finishing up at NAIA St. Thomas University.

Ozney’s dreams of playing in the majors essentially ended on June 8, 2010, when the White Sox drafted him in the 22nd round.

It doesn’t sound bad now, but then it was viewed as gasoline tossed onto a tire fire.

Ozney was a very good high school player. He was named first-team all-Dade County by the Miami Herald his senior year and ranked No. 252 in the nation that year by Perfect Game.

Ozzie Guillen Jr. (left) poses with his younger brother Ozney in 2005, as they wear shirts encouraging fans to vote for White Sox outfielder Scott Podsednik to make the All-Star Game (Ron Vesely / MLB Photos via Getty Images)

Ozney said scouts in South Florida at the time were telling him he would go fairly high in the draft. Despite telling reporters he didn’t want any favors, Ozzie was the manager of the White Sox and the White Sox liked to draft family.

They drafted his older brother Oney out of North Park University. They drafted Kenny Williams’ sons (Kenny Jr. went in the sixth round in 2008), they drafted Ron Schueler’s daughter.

Ozney was excited. He was 18 and his entire life was ahead of him.

He spent the first night of the draft in Miami with his friend Machado, who went No. 2 overall. (The White Sox drafted a college pitcher named Chris Sale at No. 13.) Then the next day Ozney flew home to Chicago so he could celebrate with his family. As the draft progressed and Ozney wasn’t selected, the Guillens started to worry and then they got angry.

For Ozney, it was a pride thing. With the Guillens back then, it was always a pride thing.

By the time the Sox took him with the 668th pick, the Guillens had already shut their laptop and Ozney was walking the dog near their West Monroe Street apartment.

“Round by round passed, and I remember how sad my parents were,” Ozney says. “I remember how sad my mom was. It was bad. Everybody was like just dead. I was fine. I went to go walk my dog. I was like, this happened. I remember my high school coach called me and I explained the situation and what we thought was going on.”

To this day, Ozney still believes that other teams were dissuaded from selecting him higher so the Sox could take him. But do teams really tell other teams which players not to draft? And would other teams really listen? It doesn’t matter now, of course, but that day is still fresh in Ozney’s mind.

At that point, certain inescapable tensions existed in the White Sox organization.

The context of that season, and the one that followed, was a very public power struggle between Kenny Williams, other factions inside the organization and the Guillens. That was the tumultuous year when Oney Guillen quit as a scout for the team after a dust-up over his Twitter account. There was a media cycle about a family website. The team was turning into a soap opera and the draft was just another episode. (The team also literally had a reality show on MLB Network.)

On one hand, it seemed like some scouts did tell Ozney he was going to go higher than their teams valued him. On the other, communication between the White Sox and the family certainly could have been better, especially as the 22nd round neared.

“I look at both sides,” Ozzie Jr. says. “Again, I’m 35 now. The White Sox, if they were really honest about it, would say, ‘You know what? Why waste a seventh-round pick on Ozney? We know we can get him in the 22nd round.’ That’s how I would think as a general manager. I think other teams stayed away from him.

“For Ozney, there was the pride of he was a top-ranked Florida player. He wanted to go in a certain round. Looking back, I think one of the biggest mistakes Ozzie made, organization-wise was, even more than him leaving, he should’ve said, ‘You know what? Sign. Sign. Try it out.’ I think if he would’ve been put in the system, he would’ve surged and things would’ve been a little bit different.”

(The Sox have moved away from nepotism in the draft. They passed on Alek Thomas, the son of their longtime strength coach Allen Thomas and a highly regarded prep prospect, in the second round last season to take Steele Walker.)

That day at the park, Ozzie was unhappy as he talked to the beat writers.

“I think the 22nd round in high school doesn’t mean anything,” he told a handful of reporters. “I think the White Sox did what I told them; I don’t need any favors, or he doesn’t need any favors. But it’s kind of hard. His expectations, not mine, his expectations were a little higher. He thought he was a little better player than what other people think.”

Ozzie had a deal with Ozney about going to college if he wasn’t drafted high enough. As he half-joked, his son didn’t need their bonus. He had $50,000 in his pocket to send Ozney to Niketown.

In his last season as manager of the White Sox, Ozzie Guillen talks to then-assistant GM Rick Hahn and GM Kenny Williams. (David Banks / Getty Images)

And that was the beginning of the end of Ozzie’s managing career with the White Sox.

“I think if you can go back and pinpoint one point where the thing completely broke, it was that moment,” Ozzie Jr. says. “I think that was the point when he really started pushing back on a lot of things.”

Beyond that, it affected Ozney’s life. As Ozzie Jr. remembers now, “No one really asked Ozney if he wanted to sign or not.”

Happy as he is in his life now, Ozney still carries a chip on his shoulder because of that day.

“You know what was funny?” he says. “There was so much turmoil going on with all that shit with my dad, I hated baseball. I wanted to play, but I didn’t really want to play. I did good (at Miami-Dade junior college), but it wasn’t fun. That was the thing. After my sophomore year I told my parents I don’t want to play anymore.”

If he could do it over again, Ozney said he would’ve either signed or gone to college in Chicago. He didn’t get drafted after a successful first year at Miami-Dade and he didn’t get drafted after his second year. He didn’t get drafted after he went to St. Thomas. He never got drafted again.

“The scouts were telling me ‘they’ don’t want to draft you because of your dad,” Ozney says.

With no plans besides baseball, Ozney took the road less traveled and wound up in Normal, Ill., playing for the Cornbelters of the Frontier League for two seasons. Then it was Sioux Falls, S.D., to play for the Canaries of the American Association. After that, two years in the Atlantic League, the top independent league where former big-leaguers go to get signed again, playing for the Bridgeport Bluefish and the New Britain Bees. Ozney finished his career with the Ottawa Champions of the Canadian-American Association.

Ozney wasn’t putting up numbers to justify a minor-league signing, but he was proud he started and never got benched or released. And while Ozzie thought Ozney was miserable because he was in the lowest level of pro ball, that wasn’t the case. Not exactly.

“I wanted to get signed to be with an organization and then flip to be a coach,” Ozney says. “That was my goal. I knew I had talent, but it was too late. I was just hurt all the time. I played a little crazy and I just got hurt too much. My shoulder hurt for three years.”

He never developed power, like the scouts projected back in high school, and his career flatlined. Still, Ozney said he learned a lot by playing in these leagues.

Does he miss playing now?

“Hell, no,” he says.

But he wasn’t unhappy, and he doesn’t want his father to feel bad about how his playing career turned out.

“I feel like my dad feels guilty about all of this,” he says. “I told him, ‘Why? Look at my life.’ We’re happy. At the end of the day, it’s about you being happy. You can die tomorrow. Would it be cool to be a big-leaguer? Yeah, but I don’t know which route my life would’ve taken.”

Ozney Guillen prepares before a game in the New York-Penn League at Joseph Bruno Stadium in Troy. N.Y. (Dan Flaherty / Tri-City ValleyCats)

His last gasp as a player came in the Venezuelan winter league, where his father managed Tiburones de La Guaira. It’s the family team, the one Ozzie won a championship for as a player. He’s been managing there for the past three winters, but it’s not as if Ozney got a hero’s welcome when he started playing for him.

“Fans were being very brutal,” Ozzie says. “Disrespectful. They compared him with me, all kind of stuff.”

“I got booed from my first at-bat to my last at-bat,” Ozney says. “Every day. I remember there’s a video my girlfriend took the first time she came to visit (during the 2017-18 season). She was so excited and I was like, ‘Hey, it’s not what you’re going to expect. It’s a lot of people but they’re not going to be on my side.’ She was like, ‘But you’re the home team.’ First game she’s videotaping, my batting average says .314 with 80 at-bats, I think. With winter ball that’s like whoa, especially for a kid from indy ball. I had all big-leaguers in front of me and behind me. Booed completely. And she was in such shock. ‘I told you.’”

He didn’t play much for Tiburones last season because of his injuries, but he helped with scouting and sat in on front-office meetings. One day he just decided he was done.

His mother and brothers were in town for his last game, and he figured it was a nice way to go out. A week later, he told his father at their house.

“I was shocked, hurt, my feelings were hurt,” Ozzie says. “Because I know he couldn’t accomplish what he wanted to accomplish. My wife was sick in her stomach.”

“They knew it was coming,” Ozney says. “They were just scared of, ‘Damn, is he going to be OK?’”

Ozzie Jr. began working with Ozney on a plan to get into baseball as a coach or in a front-office role. Ozzie Jr. went to scout school and Oney had worked for the White Sox in a scouting role, but this was different. Ozzie Jr. gave his little brother a road map that included a crash course in office technology and how to present himself for interviews.

During this time, Ozney touched base with Phillies assistant GM Jorge Velandia, a Venezuelan who played parts of eight seasons in the majors and spent 2006 with the White Sox’s Triple-A team.

Years earlier, when Velandia was the GM of Tiburones, he told Ozney he saw something in him.

“I told him, listen man, you were a good prospect in high school, but I think you’re a better prospect now,” Velandia said in a phone conversation. “Because you’re trying to pursue a dream to be a major league baseball player, but you don’t have all the tools as a baseball player. The day you want to decide to call it quits, you become a good prospect in the game of baseball because of all the knowledge you have gained throughout your life, knowledge you gained on your own, not just from your father. What you have done on your own.”

As for Ozzie, he found out his name wasn’t as good around baseball as he might’ve thought.

“Sometimes you think you have friends in different organizations and you think just because you played 30 years in professional baseball and you’re a manager, sometimes you think someone will help you,” he says. “And that was very wrong.”

Ozzie says he didn’t get much help from his contacts. At SoxFest, he asked chairman Jerry Reinsdorf what he should do.

“Jerry told me to tell Ozney to open the door by himself,” Ozzie says.

And if that didn’t work, Reinsdorf told Ozzie he would help.

But Ozney wanted to do this on his own. He told his dad he didn’t need to help. So he sent out resumes and applied to major-league teams. A week after the process began, Ozzie checked in and found out his son hadn’t gotten any replies. Velandia was interested, but the Phillies didn’t have an opening.

But then one night in Venezuela, Ozney approached his father, who was stewing after a bad loss.

“He told me, ‘We made it,’” Ozzie says. “I couldn’t understand. ‘You made what?’ He said, ‘The Houston Astros called me.’ And I was in tears.”

So how did Ozney get hired as a minor-league manager for arguably the most progressive organization in baseball at 27 with no coaching experience?

As it turned out, the Guillen name did help.

Jason Bell managed the ValleyCats last season, winning the league title as the second-youngest manager in the minors. (The ValleyCats beat the Hudson Valley Renegades for the championship. The Renegades were, and still are, managed by the youngest manager in Blake Butera, who is seven months younger than Guillen.)

After the season, Bell was named the Astros’ fundamentals coordinator, a new position in the organization that essentially put him in charge of the fine details of the minor league system. He set up the schedule for spring training and now he’s responsible for roving around the Astros’ farm teams to make sure they’re adhering to the organization’s developmental guidelines.

With that in mind, he was responsible for interviewing his replacement in Troy.

“We had gotten a strong recommendation on Ozney from someone on our big league staff, bullpen catcher Javier Bracamonte, who is Venezuelan and knows the Guillen family really well,” Bell says. “I got on the phone with him and I really liked his energy and passion for the game. He’s bilingual, bicultural and he knows the game really well. We thought he’d be a perfect fit. He’s young and hungry.”

Ozney’s top two coaches are also his age and all are in their first year coaching pro ball. The Astros don’t necessarily look for young coaches, but they do look for coaches amenable to the Astros’ way of doing things.

“There are plenty of good older coaches who have adapted to the way the game has changed,” Bell says. “We like to do things differently, so it has to be a good fit for what we believe in.”

During his interviews, Ozney stressed how his experiences made him a good fit for the job, from his time around the White Sox to his positional versatility as a defensive player in college and the independent leagues. The Astros have their players try out multiple positions in their early days in the minors.

Before a game against the Lowell Spinners, Tri-City manager Ozney Guillen talks to the umpires and opposing manager Luke Montz. (Dan Flaherty / Tri-City ValleyCats)

“In the interview process he had told me, ‘I want to create my own identity. I don’t want to live purely in the shadow of my father’s achievements,’” Bell says. “It was really great for him to say that, because his father has done great things, but he wants to build his own legacy, his own career.”

But while he doesn’t want to ride on his father’s coattails, learning from him helped make Ozney a future coach.

“I feel like that’s why I got the job because I had all that feel,” he says. “Watching a game with my dad is probably the most interesting thing you can do because he knows everything that’s going on in the game and he’s having a full conversation with you. People think it’s a joke, but it’s impressive. He did it his whole career.”

When he interviewed with Houston, Ozney says he was straightforward about what he knew and what he didn’t know.

“I was honest,” he says. “This is what I know, this is what I want to do. This is what my goals are, this is what I want you to teach me. I told them I want you guys to teach me whatever you need to teach me and hopefully I can include my own experiences in baseball in it.”

And it worked.

Ozney gets asked about his dad a lot in interviews, and he’s fine with that. As for his players, they think it’s cool that he’s Ozzie’s son, and they definitely made fun of him for that picture of him kissing his dad on the lips after the World Series. But they dig his style.

“I didn’t realize he was Ozzie Guillen’s son until two days after I got here and someone told me,” infielder A.J. Lee says. “I was like no way.”

When pitcher Blair Henley, a seventh-round pick from the University of Texas, joined the team in Staten Island after the draft, he walked into the clubhouse and heard someone declaring that LeBron James is better than Michael Jordan.

He walked by thinking it was a fellow player. But he realized it was his manager. For Henley, it was a good first impression.

“He’s definitely a player’s manager,” he says. “He’s honestly hilarious. He’s easily the best manager I’ve ever played for.”

And he’s relatable.

Like a lot of his players, Ozney’s girlfriend FaceTimes him constantly. Except Natalia Fernandez is a dancer and a model from Miami who is on a European tour with Latin music star Ozuna. While Ozney was readying to play Lowell in Troy, N.Y., she was in Milan.

I spent two days around Ozney as he worked with his players. He has an ebullience about him as he goes through his day. A lightness that left Ozzie in his latter years with the Sox.

Ozney is just starting his career and he loves doing everything. Hitting fungoes, running fielding drills, the hours and hours of paperwork.

OK, maybe not the paperwork.

He talks passionately about his belief in defensive shifts, when to bring the infield in to spook a hitter, and playing an aggressive brand of baseball.

“I have the guys who get picked off the most in the league, but we’re (third) in steals,” Ozney says. “We have the most first to thirds.”

As an organization, the Astros preach power hitting and running hard. Some teams don’t start shifting until the players are more advanced. The Astros don’t see a reason to wait.

On one of the days I was there, the ValleyCats lost a doubleheader 14-3 and 6-4. The next afternoon, Guillen and his right-hand man Jacob Buffa, the team’s performance coach (a remodeled coaching position among the Astros minor league teams) and analytics guru (“He’s going to be a star,” Ozney says), hold a meeting with the position players.

Ozney Guillen and performance coach Jacob Buffa talk to the ValleyCats position players before a game. (Jon Greenberg / The Athletic)

Guillen leads the meeting with a light touch at first, joking that the biggest problem was the Lowell Spinners hitting every pitch off the wall.

But then he drills down, pointing out flaws in his team’s mental approach.

“We were not prepared to get punched in the mouth,” he says.

Ozney is trying to instill tougher attitudes among his players. He’s been through a lot, and he wants these kids to have the success that he did not.

“Find something to get you going,” he says. “If you’re a first-rounder, go find a tweet that says you suck. If you signed for $10,000, what about that guy who signed for a million?”

The players are quiet, but engaged.

“We love them,” first-round pick Korey Lee says of the meetings. “It gets us ready for the game. It gets us ready, and we know what we have to do.”

This job is about development, not wins and losses. But losing sucks, and Ozney isn’t trying to raise losers.

“I’ve been through experiences high and low, so I’m a good person to teach them,” he says.

A lot has changed since Ozney was a kid listening to his dad’s press conferences. He handles the media a little more carefully than his freewheeling father.

“I spoiled the media very well,” Ozzie says.

When it comes to the demands of the job beyond dealing with his players, Ozzie’s advice to his son is simple.

“Don’t be too honest,” he says. “Why? Because when you’re too honest, sometimes people don’t like honest people. When you’re too honest, that will create problems.”

Once the game starts, Ozney positions himself at the top step and takes in the action. Ozzie and Ozzie Jr. have tickets at will call, but they don’t pick them up and just take seats behind home plate near the scouts and the radar guns. Ozzie, who is unusually quiet around his son’s players, signs autographs and takes pictures, even lending his World Series ring to a little kid in the row in front of him. An older couple behind me ask if they’re supposed to know who he is. An inning or so later, the husband asks Ozzie for his autograph.

Ozzie nurses an IPA while he watches the game, shouting encouragement to the pitchers and whistling to his son when he wants to alert him to something going on.

Ozney Guillen talks to broadcaster Joe Mixie before a game against the Lowell Spinners. (Jon Greenberg / The Athletic)

The ValleyCats lose, but just barely. After the game, Ozney is honest, but not too honest, with the local press.

The night ends, like so many minor-league nights do, at an Applebee’s.

Ozney is doing his reports on his laptop while sharing funny stories with his father and brother. We stay past midnight. Ozzie has to get up to go golfing with Harold Baines in Cooperstown the next morning. Ozney has a bus ride to Burlington, Vt. The two will link up again in Brooklyn for his next series.

Ozzie Guillen, with his World Series ring and 747 victories, says he’s fine with never managing again. He loves his family, and he loves his main job doing pre- and post-game coverage for White Sox games on NBC Sports Chicago. He never wants to leave Chicago, where even Cubs fans still love him. He has mended his friendship with Williams and shared a cry with Reinsdorf.

He wants to do more with the White Sox, perhaps from an advisory standpoint. He’s only 55.

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life living off what I did,” he says.

And you know, in his heart, he would love a shot to manage again.

But that’s probably not going to happen. Not with the way baseball is going. Ozney, however, has a real shot.

But Ozney’s immediate career goals are a little more modest. It’s not manager or bust for him. Maybe he’d like to be a jack-of-all-trades coordinator, like Bell. The smarter organizations are creating hybrid coaching jobs at the big league level, like field coordinator, run prevention coordinator and hitting strategist. Ozney could see himself doing one of those jobs in a future that is now full of possibility.

But in the present, he’s content.

“I’m just happy where I’m at,” he said. “I’m in baseball, it’s cool, and my family is happy. That’s all I can ask for.”

(Top photo: Dan Flaherty / Tri-City ValleyCats)

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