By Ryan McGowan
It’s the first week of August, and there is so much to talk about here in the Hub. We have the first place Red Sox, fresh off a recent eight-game winning streak and, we hope, soon to start to creep away from the Yankees and claim the AL East for the first time since the Otis Nixon-Jose Canseco era of 1995. We have the Patriots, coming off three of the last four Super Bowl titles, set to defend their crown with a laundry list of fresh challenges, not the least of which are the absences of Tedy Bruschi, Ted Johnson, Romeo Crennel, Ty Law, Charlie Weis, and Bill Belichick’s wife. We have the revelation that Rafael Palmeiro’s body has been somehow trying to process the effects of both Viagra and designer steroids, leading one to believe that Raffy’s organs will eventually cry “SYSTEM OVERLOAD” and blow up like the Fembots in the original “Austin Powers.” We have a governor that is convinced that he is going to be your 44th President of the United States and I have heard rumors that the NHL is returning to the ice in the fall.So what topic dominated the sports radio airwaves over the last few weeks? Manny being Manny, of course. As ridiculously annoying as that phrase is, the vicious invective that has been thrown back and forth by people representing both sides of Mannygate has been much worse. You would think that some of the callers defending Manny and most of the hosts criticizing Manny were arguing over who was going to get custody of their first-born children, rather than debating whether keeping Manny Ramirez or trading him was the best course of action to take for the Red Sox.
Never in my lifetime have I seen a player who has had a more polarizing effect on the fandom than Manny. With Nomar last year, there was certainly a camp that hated him and wanted him out of town, but there was never any real debate about the merits of trading him because very few people actually believed that Theo would pull the trigger on a deal. Most just assumed that they would let him play out his contract and take their chances. With regard to Clemens in 1996, people can poke fun at Dan Duquette all they want for the “twilight of his career” comment, but the fact is that the majority of fans in Boston were fed up with Roger’s lack of production, inconsistency, frequent negative attitude, and increasingly growing waistline.
With the Manny groups, it’s totally different. There is the one group that says that the Sox should never trade Manny, that we have to look past his mental mistakes and foibles and focus instead on the ridiculous production numbers he puts up. So what if he occasionally hits a comebacker to the pitcher and just does a 180 and heads back to the dugout? Who cares if he has the sporadic desire to jog down to first base while running out a double-play ball in the 10th inning? Is it really a tragedy if for one week every year, he decides he wants four or five days off and wants to get traded to the Mets or Yankees? He is good for 40/130 every year, his teammates like him, he entertains us; let him do whatever he wants.
The other camp paints Manny as one of the most vile, abominable human beings ever to set foot on the planet. In his occasional brain farts, they see not a lovable, immature freak of nature but rather a sadistic, manipulative Antichrist who will do whatever it takes to topple the greedy Red Sox ownership that refuses to pay him more than $20 million a year. His annual trade requests are carefully crafted ploys by this diabolical evil genius to undermine the powers-that-be in the organization and to rupture an irreplaceable hole in the social order. If we tried harder, we could even blame Manny for 9/11, the Kennedy Assassination, and the murder of Trey Atwood on the “O.C.” (It’s been a while since I snuck in an O.C. reference.)
Like most of these silly controversies, the truth lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Do the Red Sox need Manny? They certainly do; just take a look at what happens to David Ortiz when Ramirez is not hitting behind him in the lineup, replaced instead by Helmet John Olerud and Roberto “The Lost Tenor” Petagine. Opposing teams just throw slop to Big Papi, taking the Barry Bonds approach and putting him on base time and again, where his superior speed and agility on the basepaths always adds another dimension of threat. With Manny in the lineup, the Sox have two legitimate, top-10 sluggers in the middle of their lineup; without Manny, they have zero. Couple that with the fact that our starting pitching this year is about as reliable as a birth control pill from Tijuana, and it stands that Manny needs to be in the middle of the lineup.
But is it too much to ask him to run out ground balls, or to play when the team needs him to? I understand that it is a long, grueling season, and players need an occasional day off for both a mental and physical recharging. But is the anti-Manny camp not justified to be a little angry when he decides on a whim that he isn’t going to run out a double-play grounder in extra innings in Tampa, a play which ultimately resulted in the game-winning insurance run? Are they not justified to be a little annoyed when he then turns around and says he wants to get traded? The team is in the middle of a campaign which as of this writing has the Sox in first place, 3.5 games in front of the Yankees (who, if the season ended today, wouldn’t make the playoffs), with every game from now until October having heightened importance because of the need to win the division to make the playoffs. Do they think it’s a good thing to have their best player tell management he wants out because he can’t go to eat on Newbury Street without throngs (or “thongs”, as Pete Sheppard humorously said on the air last week) of people following him?
The pro-Manny camp castigates the other side to “chill out”, to accept everything that Manny does on and off the field because of the greater good of his production. These are probably the same people who, five years ago, were mad at Dan Duquette for his defense of Carl Everett’s off-field actions, saying that the only thing that mattered was his on-field production. Most of these people have conveniently changed their tune when the enigma in question is the likable Ramirez rather than the volatile Jurassic Carl. So the question remains: what matters more? Is it production on the field only, or should a player’s behavior and conduct off the field and on the field (his adherence to traditional “baseball etiquette”) influence management’s assessment of him?
I don’t have the answers, but it is an interesting debate. Manny isn’t a negative clubhouse presence like the ’04 Nomar or the ’01 Everett. His teammates all like him. At the same time, many of the same fans who chastised the manager for not “standing up to the star players” and “holding them accountable” (whatever that means) have been bashing Francona for “throwing Manny under the bus” and “trying to run Manny out of town”, and have criticized Larry Lucchino for running a “smear campaign” simply because he told WEEI’s Dennis and Callahan that the club was looking into all options of moving Ramirez before the trade deadline. As a fan base, we seem to be very schizophrenic. Just a short time ago, we wanted our manager to be more old-school, to stop coddling his players and start calling them out in public when they screwed up. And then, when Ramirez refused to play against the Devil Rays, Francona told the media exactly what happened, and the fans still criticized him. I can’t say I would ever want his job. If he protects the players in the media, he’s soft and coddling. If he tells the truth, now he’s trying to smear Manny and run him out of town. If that’s not the sign of a schizophrenic fan base, I don’t know what is.
Maybe this whole episode doesn’t have anything to do with Manny being Manny after all. Maybe it is more about Sox Fans being Sox Fans. Maybe all this talk about “Manny Moments” is just to distract us from realizing that after all these years, can we just make up our mind and figure out what we want? I am not saying that all fans should think alike, but rather that the prevailing sentiment of the Nation changes more often than Stewie Griffin’s diaper – and more irrationally. It’s not Manny that’s bipolar; it’s us.
