Did he just do that?!?

Yes, he did!!!!!

It’s been a morning of giggles this morning here at UmpBump HQ as we try to digest Manny Ramirez’s ridiculous, hilarious, awesome double play from yesterday’s game. The best part may actually be when Manny’s teammates gather ’round to watch the replay in the dugout, and Manny then performs a live reenactment of the now-famous high-five.

As Nick likes to say, Manny plays the game like a giddy five-year old. (Or sometimes an angry five-year old, such as a few innings after yesterday’s catch when he angrily tossed his helmet at the first base umpire, dreadlocks flying in rage.) And clearly, Manny’s defense is potent stuff, because the baseball blogosphere is delightfully tipsy from contact with it this morning. Soxaholix reminds us that even when the team is on a four-game skid, “the glass is half Manny.” Gowanus Rotisserie breaks the play down into “the five stages of being awesome” (hat tip to The Joy of Sox for the link, who in turn called it the “ultimate Manny moment”). Sox and Dawgs has your top ten Manny moments and Babes Love Baseball calls it “Manny being Manny being Awesome.” Manny has often talked of his dream of winning what he sometimes calls the “Silver Glove.” He’s not shy about claiming he’s the best LF Boston has ever had, a claim Surviving Grady suggests he might want to consider retracting considering that Jim Rice is still a very, very large man.

But the most apt turn-of-phrase may be found in this article by Josh Alper for the FanHouse, presciently written earlier this week:

If the Gold Glove was an award for sheer entertainment value, Manny would have a dozen of them by now. Alas, the awards are supposed to be for fielding excellence. I know, I know, Rafael Palmeiro and Derek Jeter have won them but two wrongs do not make a winning argument for Manny.

They should come up with some kind of award for that throw he cut off in the outfield, though. After 100 years it’s tough to do something in baseball that no one has ever seen, or even conceived, before.

“Something in baseball that no one has ever seen, or even conceived, before.” Yes, this is the only proper way to describe the contributions Manuel Aristides Ramirez makes to these Red Sox of Boston. Manny, may the Monster rise up to meet you, the wind be always at your back, may the sun shine warm upon your face, may soft rains fall when you want an off-day, and until you are ready to retire, may Theo always pick up your option.

Manny Ramirez is continuing to issue prophetic statements in the guise of media interviews. Adding to our collection, we now present the latest quotations, taken directly from the lips of His Mannyness and arranged by yours truly into a series of short poems and haiku:

Pimp Jobs

I am trying to
get a hit against you. You
show me up, that’s good.

The Rivalry (Come On)

That’s the game.
People like to compete.
Just because you play
For the Red Sox
And they play
For the Yankees,
You’re going to go and kill each other?
Come on.

I Haven’t Thought About 500

I just love the game.
I just like to compete.That’s
it. To be honest.

Plate Discipline

Wait.
Wait.
Wait.

All I Want (or Whatever)

After all this is over
All I want
Is for my kids to go to college
And to be their best friend.
That’s all I want.
I don’t care about home runs
Or whatever.

It Can Only Hurt the Ballclub

I don’t think much.
I love my job.
I love to compete.

Causation

He gave me a good pitch to drive.
So I drove it.

Mantra: Hitting Well in Yankee Stadium

I don’t care.
I don’t play here.
I can’t tell you why.
I wish I knew.

First Stolen Base Since 2005 (Why?)

Contract year…I thought
I was out. I was going,
‘Yeah, I got a break.’

If you want to see
The car, sometimes you have got
To let the car go.

It made me feel like
I was back in high school…Yes,
I went on my own.

For the last few years, Manny Ramirez had been something of a recluse in Red Sox nation. He stopped doing commercials. He never spoke to the papers. He didn’t go on television. But late last season, Manny emerged from his hermetic seclusion like a prophet returned from the wilderness. Nowadays, as befitting his new meditating, The Secret-reading lifestyle, he’s got the dreadlocks of a Bob Marley and the ‘stache of a Kahlil Gibran. And this week he offered some wisdom in haiku/poetic form:

Focus
It’s not hard to play.
It’s easy. It depends on
What you focus on.

Home Run Ball (Right There)
I was looking
For a good pitch–
Something that I like.
It was right there.
Like a fastball–
It was something like eighty–
Or a change.
It was right there.

Even When You Do Not Come Back
Even when you do
Not come back, we love this job
We love to compete.

All the Way
We never give up,
Man.
We just play
Hard.
All the way.

162
David’s gonna hit.
That’s why this is a hundred
And sixty two-games.

Hitting for him
He’s fine. It’s only
Fourteen games. If he doesn’t
Hit, I’ll hit for him.

Good Things
There are things you aren’t
Gonna like, but you have to
Look at the good things.

What I’m Not
Don’t know, I’m not a
Pitching coach. You got to talk
To the pitching coach.

Contract Extension (To Work Out)
Why isn’t it going
To work out?
Of course it’s going
To work out.
Everybody knows it’s going
To work out.

A Player Like Me
I
changed everything.
Boston never had a player
Like me.
They had Mo Vaughn
In the ’90s
But after that,
Nothing
Like me.
I went there,
And my attitude
Changed everything.

Booed
I can’t control that.
I just like to come and play
The game and go home.

It wouldn’t be Spring Training without a few crazy quotes. But the past couple of days have really set a high bar for nuttiness.

First, there’s Manny Being Manny, patting himself on the back for showing up on time to camp for the first time in a while: “I might be late two years in a row, but I’m always on time.” I think he’s just joking. But he said it with a straight face. And with Manny, who knows?

Then there’s Ichiro Being Ichiro: “If the other corner outfielders have too much speed and too much ability and try to do too much, it’s hard for me.” Fortunately, since Ichiro will be flanked by Raul Ibanez and Brad Wilkerson, that shouldn’t be a problem.

But what could be better than Sheff Being Sheff? Yes, Gary Sheffield, always good for a few words, is back and at it again. Discussing his ongoing dispute with his former agent, Scott Boras, he described his experience with the Uber-Agent thus: “Total hell. I shouldn’t have ever introduced myself to him. Period. Bad person.” Sheffield also vowed that no one would be able to stop him from saying more “ugly things” once the case is resolved: “No fine is going to be big enough. No suspension is going to be long enough.” No one puts Sheffy in the corner!

How can you tell spring is in the air? Forget Punxsutawney Phil. I know the sap is rising when Manny starts being Manny again.

Training in Tempe, Arizona this offseason, Manny Ramirez is conveniently located for this weekend’s Super Bowl in Glendale. But he’s not going to just take the day off, no sir. According to WZLX in Boston, his agent is calling around town to the various Patriots bars in the area, asking them if they’d like to have the 2004 World Series MVP drop by during the game.

For $10,000.*

Now, you may be asking yourself, why would a man who makes twenty million dollars a year scrounge around under the seat cushions for that kind of chump change? Why would Manny Ramirez, who, we’ve been told, is shy, want to spend Super Bowl Sunday with a bunch of drunk Pats fans when he could spend it with his Hot Baseball Wife and Cute Baseball Babies? And if he needed ten grand, why wouldn’t he just sell some more stuff on eBay? But these are foolish questions, baseball fans. As we should know by now, Manny is as Manny does.

I just hope that wherever he watches the Super Bowl, he doesn’t see his shadow. I’m not ready for six more weeks of winter.

* Note of comparison: Maybe Manny should ask for more money. After all, Paris Hilton, Mariah Carey, and Britney Spears command appearance fees well into the six figures. Even Kim Kardashian gets $75k for party appearances, and I still don’t know why she’s famous.

At this point, this week’s Boston Metro column seems a bit like piling on–after all, what else is there to do on the off-day after three consecutive losses but rip the manager? But I promise you, gentle UmpBump readers, that when I wrote it at the crack of dawn Tuesday morning, I was a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

Now, however, there’s a new mini-scandal in the Boston papers this morning concerning (who else?) Manny Ramirez. Yes, he actually talked to reporters! And though he said he would trade his individual records for another World Series in a heartbeat, this is the phrase that raised eyebrows today:

“It doesn’t happen, so who cares? There’s always next year. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.”

Asked about that comment this morning on WEEI, Boston’s sports talk station, Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino said the only thing that made sense: that such “calmness” is what makes Manny Ramirez such a great hitter (and, I might add, such a dangerous hitter with two strikes against him).

I’d like to go one step further with that comment, however. In 2003, Red Sox Nation turned an offhand comment by Kevin Millar into the postseason slogan, “Cowboy up.” In 2004, it was Curt Schilling’s rhetorical question, “Why not us?” Clearly, what was lacking from the 2005 playoffs was a catchphrase. Let’s not make that mistake again, Sox fans. I submit for your approval, the 2007 postseason mantra, courtesy Manny Ramirez:

“Who cares?”

It’s bold. It’s shocking. It’s completely counterintuitive. I like it.

Manny Ramirez seems to have become a kind of Rorschach ink blot; what you say about him reveals more about you than it does about the enigmatic Red Sox leftfielder. Must be time for a big, sprawling profile as only the New Yorker can do a big, sprawling profile. Of course, who has time to read big, sprawling anythings these days? Without further ado, the good parts:

HIS TEAMMATES: When I asked his teammate David Ortiz, himself a borderline folk hero, how he would describe Ramirez, he replied, “As a crazy motherfucker.” Then he pointed at my notebook and said, “You can write it down just like that: ‘David Ortiz says Manny is a crazy motherfucker.’

IN HIGH SCHOOL: Onelcida Ramirez worked as a seamstress in a dress factory; Aristides drove a livery cab and fixed electronics. Manny and his three older sisters, Rosa, Evelyn, and Clara, lived in a sixth-floor walkup on 168th Street. They had no telephone. The neighborhood at the time was one of the city’s worst—only East New York, in Brooklyn, had more homicides in 1990. Every morning at five-thirty, Manny left the apartment to run up Snake Hill, behind the high school, with a rope tied around his waist attached to a spare tire that dragged on the pavement behind him. “He was the hardest worker I ever had,” Mandl [his coach] said.

AS A MINOR LEAGUER: Ramirez raided his teammates’ lockers, borrowing their bats and clothes—even their underwear—for luck. The baggy-uniform look, now popular across the league, can be traced to his swiping the pants of Dan Williams, a bullpen catcher in Cleveland, who outweighed him by at least fifty pounds.

IN THE BATTER’S BOX: “When Manny first came to the Red Sox, he would stand in the batter’s box, and the umpire would call ball four, and he would get back in the batter’s box,” [said Dan] Duquette, [who signed Manny to the Sox]. “He did this in his first series at Fenway Park and again on his first road trip.” After the third such incident, Duquette ventured down into the locker room. “I said, ‘Manny, let me ask you something. I was just wondering why you get back in the batter’s box after ball four.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the balls.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the strikes, either, until I got two.’ Then he said, ‘Duke, I’m up there looking for a pitch I can hit. If I don’t get it, I wait for the umpire to tell me to go to first. Isn’t that what you’re paying me to do?’ ”

IN THE FIELD: In 2003, [Bill] James identified fifty-three instances in which Red Sox players had demonstrated a game-altering failure to hustle; twenty-nine of them involved Ramirez. He also concluded that Ramirez was the team’s second-sloppiest fielder. [The New Yorker, tantalizingly, fails to tell us who the first-sloppiest fielder is.]

ON THE PERENNIAL TRADE REQUESTS: Since his arrival in town, Ramirez has expressed interest, at one time or another, in playing for more than a dozen different teams… According to a Sox official, he even once requested a trade to Pawtucket, the team’s AAA affiliate in Rhode Island.

ON MANNYISMS: [H]e remains a man of few words. Those words, however, have a way of sounding aphoristic: “All I need to see is the ball,” or “Do what makes you happy.” In 1999, after he’d established himself as a superstar with the Cleveland Indians, written messages began appearing on the backs of his cleats, like admonitions from a prophet: “There will be hell to pay”; “Justice will be served”; “Can’t we all get along?”; “Live and let die.” Greg Brown, a journeyman minor-league catcher who worked out with Ramirez last winter, said, “Sometimes I think it’s Manny’s world, and we all just exist in it.”

When Johnny Damon played for Boston, we had “WWJJDD (What Would Johnny Damon Do)?” tee-shirts, playing off of Damon’s then-Christlike coiffure. Maybe what we need now is a sort of Buddhist, New Agey alternative sporting Manny’s visage and a tagline of just “Being.” I’m thinking earth tones, I’m thinking orange accents, I’m thinking fake Sanskrit. Whaddyathink? I’d totally buy one.

This week’s Metro column, in which I turn drama critic.

Well, do you want the good news or the bad news? The good news is that Manny Ramirez might not have been faking an injury to get out of going to the Yawn-Star Game.

The bad news is that Manny might actually be injured.

David Ortiz, designated hitter and designated explainer of all things Ramirez, defended Manny to the Boston Globe, citing the knee problem, which has kept Ramirez out of some games. “You know Manny has been having a problem with his knee,” he said. “Manny’s not a baby anymore, so he needs time off. I think three days will be good for him to shut it down, especially after those long games in Chicago.” This can be pretty easily shrugged off—Papi and Manny always have each other’s backs (see photo).

But then Will Carroll at Baseball Prospectus got specific:

The top vote getter is taking a disproportionate amount of heat for missing the game, even getting openly questioned on yesterday’s Fox telecast. Tim McCarver said the worst thing about his knee injury was “remembering which leg to limp with.” It’s easy to say that Ramirez is faking an injury, but almost as easy to actually check on the injury. Ramirez is suffering from a small tear in the medial meniscus of his right knee. It’s an injury he can play with, but one that can “grind,” a bone-on-bone situation that is unpredictable and painful. The decision was made a while ago by the Red Sox to keep Manny on the field as much as possible. One possible solution that’s been mentioned is using Ramirez at DH more often, moving Kevin Youkilis to LF and David Ortiz to 1B. There’s some defensive penalty to be paid, but it keeps the best bats in the lineup.

Dear God, do not let this come to pass. No one wants to see David at first. I implore You. These games are family viewing! Please…think of the children.

After the jump–meniscus?!?!?

Read the rest of this entry »

For the third time, Manny Ramirez will not play in the All-Star game after being elected to the team. During today’s Fox Game of the Week, the announcers were slamming on Ramirez and decrying the habitual “Manny being Manny” excuse—accusing him of not being a spokesman for the game, castigating him for disrespecting the fans, and even intimating that he was faking a knee injury to get out of going. Even Manny’s hometown paper is getting on his case: not just for missing the game, but for missing it while playing so well. (Only in Boston, folks.) Maybe if he sat out a few games and made a couple of errors they’d feel better about it. Yikes.

But fellas, I have to stand up for the guy. Perhaps it’s because I’ve become accustomed to hearing the “Manny being Manny” excuse over the years—in other words, Fox, welcome to my world. Or perhaps I’m biased—as a Red Sox fan, I’d rather Manny take some time off, recoup a bit, and be able to play the second half of the season. Some may see Manny taking a mid-July break as laziness, but in Boston it just seems like he’s putting the the games that count ahead of an exhibition game. I think this may be the year that Manny finally gets the respect he deserves in Boston. After years of ups and downs, playoff games and trade demands, this year we’ve gotten to know another side of Manny.

He showed up to Spring Training in the best physical condition of his career. He arrives early at the park every morning to take extra BP—those gaudy numbers are no accident. And even his oft-maligned defense has improved in recent years. He accurately barehands wall-balls in a notoriously tough outfield and can make the glove-to-hand transition as quickly as an infielder (he had 17 assists last year; this year his fielding percentage is .992).

Not to mention, which is often overlooked, that he plays almost every single day. Jason Varitek gets every 5th game off (when knuckleballer Wakefield and his specialty catcher Mirabelli take the field) but is universally adored in Beantown and elsewhere (including, of course, Chez Sarah). Trot Nixon is similarly respected for his hardscrabble style, even though he’s a bottom-of-the-order type hitter who usually sits against lefties. And David Ortiz is everbody’s hero—show me someone who dislikes Big Papi and I’ll show you a New Yorker. He too plays almost every game, but he’s a DH—if his knees were bothering him, it wouldn’t be a problem, since he rarely has to do more than a home-run trot anyways.

Yeah, Manny has the crazy dreds and the pajama-baggy uniform and the pine tar-smeared helmet and okay, so he may have an occasional mental lapse. But he plays hard and he plays hurt. He doesn’t get much credit for it, of course, since he rarely complains about any injuries, but any player who plays almost every game (more than 150 for each of the last three seaons) has to be hurt some of the time. So he’s not going to the All-Yawn Game. His average at the moment is a mediocre .307, but his slugging percentage is .621. He’s second in the AL in walks and third in OBP. And since 1995, he’s driven in more runs than anyone else in the Majors.

Now that’s Manny being Manny.