Take It Easy, Kenny Williams

Kenny Williams expects certain things. When his expectations aren't met, says rediculous things like this:

Williams had a one-word reply when asked if he was bothered that the team wasn't as mentally tough as he'd like. ''Yes,'' he said.

But wait, there's more, and it gets worse:

''I know who's quit and who has not, who's willing to sacrifice,'' Williams said. ''It's hard to win. Winning and success, whether it be baseball or any other facet of life, if you're not willing to sacrifice, you're not willing to put in the work, you're not going to be successful. You're just not. ... If you are not willing to do that, I can't have you here, and I will send you to a better place for you.''

Williams sounds less like a professional baseball GM and more like a high school football coach chiding his players at halftime. What's the matter, Kenny?

Kenny's not going to respond to that directly -- who responds to rhetorical questions from the Internet anyway? -- so we'll go ahead and see if we can guess. There are two possible answers here. Either Kenny genuinely thought the team he put together this year was good enough to compete for a spot in the playoffs, which, no, not really it wasn't; or two, Williams is pretending to be upset in an attempt to prove that no, this year wasn't a rebuilding year, that the White Sox expect to win every year, so please keep buying those season ticket packages, OK? We're betting it's the second, but you never know. Maybe Williams really did believe.

Either way, he's not exactly going about it in the best way. These White Sox didn't underachieve. They merely achieved. They were an OK, middling, average baseball team, and that's how they're going to finish the season. Williams put the team together; he has to live with the result. Chiding an entire roster of grown men about "quitting" doesn't seem the most diplomatic way to handle that process.

But this is Kenny Williams, and these are the White Sox. They're a team in transition. They know it. They'll just never, ever admit it.

Eamonn Brennan is a Chicago-based writer, editor and blogger. You can also read him at Yahoo! Sports, Mouthpiece Sports Blog, and Inside The Hall, or at his personal site, eamonnbrennan.com. Follow him on Twitter.