EXTRA: Who had the worst week?

It wasn’t a good week for Chicago’s former baseball icons.

Most of the attention went to Ozzie Guillen, the former All Star shortstop-turned-World Series-winning manager who lost his job as manager of the Miami Marlins.

TEAM OWNER JEFFREY Loria is of the mindset that Ozzie was the problem with his last-place ballclub – even though it appears that the Marlins ballplayers by-and-large enjoyed having Ozzie around.

Which means this may well be an example of the chaotic nature of the Marlins’ baseball organization.

But Guillen wasn’t the only ballplayer to get himself in the news. And at least he kept himself sober!

Guillen’s former White Sox teammate, Carlton Fisk, got himself national attention (that’s what he gets for being a Hall of Fame ballplayer) when he was found barely conscious sitting in a truck parked in the middle of a cornfield near suburban New Lenox.

FISK USED TO live there (and also in nearby Lockport), but now is among the many who have retired to Florida. But nobody knows exactly what he was doing there at that time – although police say they found open liquor in his vehicle.

So now Fisk has to face a DUI-type charge. He is scheduled to appear in court again late in November. He may well lose his driver’s license for a time. He has added a line to his eventual obituary – although I suspect it won’t erase the images of him trying to wave “fair” his home run from the 1975 World Series (the only one he ever got to play in during a two-decade-long career).

Yet that comes across as better than that of Mark Grace, the one-time Chicago Cubs first baseman whom some fans think ought to be a Hall of Famer (others disagree, and not so respectfully).

He lost his job as a broadcaster with the Arizona Diamondbacks after a DUI arrest of his own earlier this year. Team officials say it wasn’t his first such incident, and he had been warned.

YET HE NOW has bigger concerns than trying to find a new job. It seems that authorities in Arizona came up with a criminal indictment related to his arrest.

His case will be more than a standard DUI incident. This will have the potential to mar his life for awhile, and will be more than just a single line in his eventual life’s story.

Which means that Guillen may well be the most fortunate of the batch. For he had a four-year contract to manage the Marlins (of which he only worked one year). He still gets paid!

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