Barring their recent winning ways, the White Sox have had a pretty mediocre start to what will in all likelihood be a pretty mediocre season. It's just the way the team's built. Fortunately, the Sox can be mediocre and still sneak up and win the AL Central. The division is just that bad.

But if manager Ozzie Guillen is interested in maximizing his roster's talent, he doesn't do himself any favors playing Dewayne Wise. In 33 plate appearances this season -- an admittedly small sample size -- Wise has hit for the following (I'd tell you to sit down, but you're at your computer anyway): .161/.188/.161. That's Wise's batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage. That is utterly atrocious. Wise's OPS -- the addition of on-base and slugging, a crude but handy method of looking at how effective a player is offensively -- is .345. That, by itself, would be a bad on-base percentage. And we would laugh if this wasn't so sad.

And yet Ozzie refuses to not play Wise. From yesterday's press conference:

"If they don't like it when Wise comes to hit, turn the TV off, turn the radio off or turn around and start walking toward the concession stand," Guillen said. "They don't have to watch him hit. If they don't like it, that's not my problem," Guillen said. "There's only one guy I have to tell why I play Wise, [general manager] Kenny Williams. That's it. Every time I read it, all of the sudden they're in love with Brian Anderson."

"I like Brian. Some people tell me I hate Brian, I have something against Brian. Please, I give [Wise] at-bats because he needs it and I want to get him in hitting shape the best I can, the quickest I can."

This is stupid in about 10 different ways. For one, people don't "all of a sudden love Brian Anderson." It's not like people prefer Anderson to Wise because Anderson makes a mean casserole and picks up after himself when he comes over. It's because he's much better at baseball than Dewayne Wise. He's hitting .263/.346/.337, which isn't amazing, but if you'll notice, Anderson's OBP is one point higher THAN WISE'S OPS. Brian Anderson is just better. There's no way of getting around this.

Unless, of course, you're Ozzie Guillen, and you're borderline insane, and you think you need to do things like "get Wise in hitting shape," whatever that means, instead of just playing your best players and trying to win as many baseball games as possible. If winning a World Series means you get to say and do bat-crazy things like this, man, we want some of that action.

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.