Heeeere's Ozzie!

Guillen loved doing them, although they had to be done on his terms. "The first one, I read it, I don't like it," he says. "I gotta kiss some ladies, sleep with another. I talk to my wife about it, she doesn't like it at all. But I already signed a contract. What I do is, instead of being on top of a lady, I pretend to be asleep. And instead of being a beer vendor, I'm a soda vendor. See, all the kids in Venezuela look up to me. But I still kiss the ladies."

Still to air is his starring turn in La Raya de Cal (translation: Foul Line), a three-hour miniseries about a kid who gives up his girlfriend to date the team owner's daughter just so he can play professional baseball. "I would never do that," Guillen says, reminding you that art doesn't necessarily imitate life. The better (according to Ozzie) of his two impending TV productions casts him as the good son, the one who takes the rap for his brother's drug abuse. Says Guillen, "I cry for him, they take me to jail—it's all there."

The ease of his acting experience is breathtaking to him. "If you kiss the lady," Guillen says, "and the director doesn't like it, he just says, 'Cut,' and you do it again. I would like to strike out once and say, 'Cut,' and do it again."

He is plainly intrigued by show business, which is different only by degree from what he does now on the diamond. He could reach people beyond the infield, he wouldn't have to wear a funny hat, and nobody would line baseballs at him. He could just be talking about something.

Still, nobody who knows Guillen believes he would really leave his spot in the infield for a talk-show desk. One day in spring training, following an afternoon workout, Ventura was examining Ozzie's posse, which included seven-year-old Ozzie Jr. and six-year-old son Oney (two-month-old Ozney was waiting with his mother in the car). "Look at those kids," Ventura said. "He's got them dressed in their little White Sox uniforms and their little spikes. They're in here all the time after games, and they're exactly like him, talking all the time. But just look at them." They were pounding oversized gloves and getting underfoot and jabbering away. "They love the fact that their dad's a ballplayer. The thing is, their dad loves the fact that he's a ballplayer too."