Jonathan Robert Papelbon calls Manny a “Cancer”

  In an interview with “Esquire” Magazine Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon called Manny Ramirez a “cancer” for forcing his way out of town last year.  Just when you thought you could put the Manny saga behind the Red Sox, Curt Schilling Jr. has to run his mouth.  Now the Red Sox will have to continue to talk about Manny again.  Just move on from this, please, I’m begging you.  More from the interview with Papelbon:

“It just takes one guy to bring an entire team down, and that’s exactly what was happening,” Papelbon said, according to the magazine. “Once we saw that, we weren’t afraid to get rid of him. It’s like cancer. That’s what he was. Cancer. He had to go. It [stunk], but that was the only scenario that was going to work. That was it for us.”

 

“He was on a different train!” Papelbon said of Ramirez, according to Esquire. “And you saw what happened with that. We got rid of him, and we moved on without him. That comes from the manager, and it comes from guys likeJason Varitek and Tim Wakefield and David Ortiz. Nobody is ever going to be allowed to do that.”

 

“So Manny was tough for us,” Papelbon added, according to the story. “You have somebody like him, you know at any point in the ball game, he can dictate the outcome of the game. And for him not to be on the same page as the rest of the team was a killer, man!”

Manny Uncut

New Manny Tell All Coming out Soon – Becoming Manny

This might be the surprise of the century, Manny is authorizing a new book to tell his side of the story.   It will be available, soon.  From BecomingManny.com here is an excerpt from the book:

Selfish Slugger?

Who is Manny Ramirez?

Reduce Manny to a series of stats, and it’s easy to see who he is: one of the best batters in history. A twelve-time All- Star and nine-time Silver Slugger, Manny ranks seventeenth in career home runs and eighth in career slugging as of this writing. The only players above him on both lists are Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, and Barry Bonds. Manny is also second all-time in gram slams, behind only Lou Gehrig, and has hit more postseason home runs than anyone in the history of professional baseball. He still appears to have several years of baseball ahead of him.

But if you skip the stats, the question “Who is Manny?” gets confusing, controversial, and cultural. A favorite target of reporters and talk show pundits, Manny’s every misstep is exhaustively analyzed and then reduced to “Manny being Manny.” This oblique phrase has come to provide a shared wink of explanation for a player whose laser-beam focus at home plate seems irreconcilable with his periodic gaffes (or “Manny Moments”) in left field and outside the ballpark.

The history of the phrase “Manny being Manny” in the popular press provides a series of thumbnail portraits of Manny at his most bizarre and intriguing, and a catalogue of the baseball world’s struggles to understand him.

Its first mention in a major publication came in 1995, when Cleveland Indians’ manager Mike Hargrove was asked about the young slugger’s carefree-bordering-on-careless approach to money.

How do you explain Manny and Dominican teammate Julian Tavarez asking a Cleveland sportswriter to loan them $60,000, so they could buy a Harley-Davidson motorcycle? And what about forgetting a paycheck in a pair of boots he left behind in the Texas Rangers visiting clubhouse?

“That’s just Manny being Manny,” Hargrove told a Newsday reporter.

Several years later, a Cleveland sportswriter used the phrase to account for why Manny’s old New York City neighborhood still adored him — because of how he showed up at his old high school cafeteria unannounced almost daily in the off-seasons to eat lunch with kids, and in spite of how he forgot promises to childhood friends to leave game tickets at the stadium box offices. But the phrase became less clearly defined after Manny moved to the Boston Red Sox in 2000, and its use grew with the city’s fascination and ultimate disillusionment with their star slugger.

It has been invoked in print and online tens of thousands of times since 2000 as a shorthand explanation for Manny’s mysterious injuries, his absences, his tardiness, his indiscriminate use of other players’ bats and clothing, his silence in the clubhouse, his quiet acts of kindness to friends, his choice of an expletive-riddled song to play over Boston’s Fenway Park sound system, his childlike playfulness, his midinning break inside Fenway’s left-field wall, his failure to show up at the White House to meet President George W. Bush after the Red Sox won the world championship, and, yes, his towering home runs and unparalleled work ethic.

Manny is partly to blame for the mystery. He rarely grants interviews, and reporters who manage to breach his defenses are rewarded with little more than clichés or incendiary oneliners.

So, with little to go on but fielding miscues, baggy uniforms, flowing dreadlocks, big hits, and tired anecdotes, the public is left with caricatures of Manny as a carefree goofball and spoiled superstar.

Yet the question of who Manny really is endures, baffling his most ardent admirers and even some of his teammates. In fact, it was never more pressing than during the 2008 season, in the days before the Boston Red Sox traded Manny to the Los Angeles Dodgers, his third team in seventeen years as a professional. Manny’s dispute with Red Sox ownership over his future — and questions about his commitment to the team — convinced many once-adoring fans that he was selfish.

The day after the trade, Red Sox third baseman Mike Lowell told the Providence Journal, “For me, he’s a sure first-ballot Hall of Famer, and when he gives his speech, he’ll probably give it via satellite because he’ll be in Brazil. That’s him and that’ll be perfect. He’ll be wearing a Brazilian National Team hat when he does it.”

Lowell’s distinction between malice and oddity is insightful. On many levels, Manny and Boston were a mismatch from the start. Nothing excuses Manny’s shoving of sixty-four-year-old traveling secretary Jack McCormick, and perhaps Manny didn’t give the Red Sox his best in 2008. Still, there were reasons for his frustration. And one could argue that if Manny had behaved this way in 2004, the Red Sox front office, not yet emboldened by two championships in four seasons, would have found a way to weather the storm.

If Manny had finished his career in Boston — or simply departed under more amicable circumstances — the grandchildren of today’s vociferous fans might have even driven through the Manny Ramirez tunnel. That may sound farfetched, but Manny’s comments in advance of his exit are comparable to those of Red Sox legend Ted Williams, whose name graces the recently constructed highway that runs under Boston Harbor.

In fact, Williams was so embittered by his years of acrimony with the Boston press, Red Sox management, and fans that he refused to even tip his cap after his final hit. Manny’s “enough is enough” comment, directed to the Red Sox management in the middle of the 2008 season when tensions were at their peak, was less acerbic than Williams’s vituperations. As Leigh Montville described in Ted Williams:

[Williams] said he wanted to be traded. He said he hated Boston, hated the fans, hated the newspapers, hated the trees, hated the weather, hated, just hated. The word “fuck” or some derivative was woven into most sentences. He wanted out. And for most of Williams’ tenure on the team, Boston hated him right back.
Manny’s badmouthing was mild by comparison. Moreover, there is consistency in his teammates’ and coaches’ characterizations of him as a hardworking team player. He was, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “everybody’s little brother” in his early years and, recently, has been more of a role model and source of support to younger players than he’s generally credited for. “He was a mentor to me,” says Red Sox shortstop Julio Lugo, three years his junior. “When I went through tough times, he knew that I had trouble sleeping so he would call me early in the morning, when he knew I’d be awake, and he’d say, ‘Look, don’t worry about it, man. You’re going to do good today.’ That meant a lot to me. There’s no one like Manny.”

“To be honest,” says Pedro Martinez, “I don’t have enough kind words to say about Manny. I think he’s misunderstood.”

But Manny’s teammates are not the only ones capable of shedding light on the vexing question of who Manny is. Conversations with Manny and his coaches, agents, mentors, parents, wife, sisters, and childhood friends, as well as side trips to his neighborhoods, show that he cannot be reduced to a caricature. They illuminate a nuanced, if inscrutable, man who defines himself by what he is least known as — a dedicated athlete, a wellregarded teammate, and a beloved father, husband, and son.

Among the mentors in Manny’s life were his sandlot coach, Mel Zitter, and his then Triple-A manager, Charlie Manuel. But none have been more influential than his former Little League coach, Carlos Ferreira. In his neighborhood, Ferreira is endearingly known as “Macaco” — Spanish for little monkey. A thoughtful, charismatic man who left a medical career in the Dominican Republic to immigrate to the U.S. in 1979, Macaco, now fifty-nine, has coached several Little League teams in the baseball-crazed Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. He was — and he remains — a de facto father to many aspiring Dominican players.

The story of how Manny came to rely on this gentle, unassuming coach — from their first encounter in the basement of a Washington Heights housing project to their ongoing, daily conversations — is a window into Manny’s development and his hidden essence: his vulnerabilities, his values, his uncomplicated worldview, and what it really means to be Manny.

But to understand the story of Manny and Macaco, we first need to understand another story: that of Manny’s early life with his parents, Aristides and Onelcida, and his three sisters.

Copyright © 2009 by Jean Rhodes and Shawn Boburg

 

Also the Inside Track in the Boston Herald is sharing Manny’s side of the Jack McCormick story:

“Jack [McCormick] disrespected Manny for many years and on many occasions,” Ramirez’s former agent Gene Mato says in the new, authorized biography “Becoming Manny.” Manny’s bride, Juliana, added that her husband’s request for tickets to a Sox-Astros game was for fewer seats than the 16 cited in media reports. “Jack’s response was very rude,” she recalled. “And Jack had a history of insulting Manny in front of the other players… The team management didn’t have his back,. They gave him up to the press instead of protecting one of their own players.”

Giants Offer Manny Ramirez 4-Year Deal

From CBS5:

The San Francisco Giants are pursuing free-agent slugger Manny Ramirez and have offered him a four-year deal, a well-connected source told CBS 5.

Financial terms of the contract offer were not immediately known. The deal was said by the source to contain incentives for the third year of the contract and a club option for the fourth.

In addition, the Denver Post newspaper quoted a Major League Baseball insider as saying the Giants were “quietly making an aggressive play” for Ramirez.

The chances of the Giants signing Ramirez, a 36-year-old left fielder, were unclear. A team spokesperson told CBS 5, “it’s not happening.”

The Los Angeles Dodgers recently withdrew a two-year, $45 million offer they presented to keep Ramirez, who helped lift them into postseason play with an NL West title this past season.

Dodger officials said the team took their deal off the bargaining table after not hearing back from Ramirez’s camp.

Manny Won’t Be Going To The Yankees….Just Yet

From Bombers Beat:

Just swapped text messages with Brian Cashman, who wrote two words to splash some cold water on the Impacto Deportivo report of Manny Ramirez receiving a three-year, $75 million offer from the Yankees:

“Not true.”

There’s still a chance the Yankees make a push for Manny, but it really appears unlikely until after Mark Teixeira signs. That report said an announcement would be made Monday or Tuesday, but especially with the holidays approaching, the odds of having another huge gala press conference at the old Yankee Stadium in 2008 are dwindling.

Yankees To Sign Manny Ramirez ?

According to reports out of the Dominican Republic, the New York Yankees are set to sign outfielder Manny Ramirez to a three-year $75 Million Dollar contract. In the words of Bob’s Home Furniture, “I doubt it”. The newspaper has broken its fair share of stories over the years, but this one is unlikely. If this is true, it’s a great deal for Ramirez, who just days ago really didn’t have much interest going his way. It has been reported that Manny was seeking a 4-year $100 Million Dollar deal this offseason and all the Los Angeles Dodgers were offering was a two-year deal. Still, with the Angels now out of the Mark Teixeira sweepstakes and the Dodgers focused on signing Manny, the report of a deal seems to be a bit premature. Since the newspaper article is in Spanish, and most of my readers can barely read English, let alone Spanish, I won’t post the article. If you’re feeling up to the task, just click on the Domincan Republic link and enjoy!

Yankees To Offer Manny Ramirez Contract

Who knows, maybe next season Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez will be sitting next to each other in the same dugout because according to the NY Daily News, Ramirez expects at least a three-year offer from the Yankees. The slugger maybe confident of the offer, but its unlikely. Yankees GM, Brian Cashman has long been leery of Ramirez, if perhaps his price tag drops the Yankees could be interested. But not for three-years. Although, its entirely possible that Yankees owner Hank Steinbrenner could get involved in the mix and that may change the situation. More from NY Daily News:

According to a source, Ramirez has told friends that he is confident the Yankees will offer him a contract of at least three years, one year longer than most team officials have said they would want to go.

Ramirez has no plans to get serious about any offers until after Mark Teixeira – a fellow Scott Boras client – makes a decision regarding his own future. Ramirez has already turned down a two-year, $45 million offer from the Dodgers and has told friends he is seeking a four-year deal in the $100 million range.

Should Teixeira return to Anaheim, the Yankees and Dodgers figure to be the main competitors for Ramirez. But if Teixeira signs with the Red Sox, the Angels would likely throw themselves in the mix, making it a wide-open race.

Ramirez has been a hot topic inside the Yankees organization, according to a source, although not everybody within the team’s hierarchy is in agreement when it comes to signing the enigmatic slugger.

Hank Steinbrenner is leading the charge for the signing, the source said, hoping to reload his roster after watching the Yankees miss the postseason this year for the first time since 1993. Hal Steinbrenner is said to be warming to the idea, while general manager Brian Cashman isn’t too high on adding a 36-year-old outfielder with plenty of baggage.

Schilling Had Four Physical Run-ins With Manny

In a WEEI video that can be seen right here, Curt Schilling admits to having four physical run-ins with Manny Ramirez. There has always been talk of an incident that occurred between Schilling and the enigmatic outfielder while in Tampa Bay during the 2005 season. The pitcher admitted to that one earlier this year, while doing his weekly radio appearance on WEEI. But four! No one ever knew, or heard about those incidents. It’s amazing that it never came out with the amount of press that covers the club. The incidents involved with Manny are a clear indication of how difficult of a time Tery Francona had of managing the Red Sox during his era in Boston. And it just proves the point that he is the greatest manager in their history.

Yankees Going Hard After Manny

From NY Daily News:

One baseball official told the Daily News that the Yankees’ interest in Ramirez is more than cursory, that they see the slugger as the perfect complement in their lineup to Alex Rodriguez, forming a 1-2 punch like he did in Boston with David Ortiz.

The official believes that the Yankees are “going hard” after Ramirez, to the point where they are willing to give him a three-year deal worth from $22 million to $25 million per year.

Two other officials are skeptical that the Bombers would commit three years to the enigmatic Ramirez, who has already seen the Dodgers make and withdraw a two-year, $45 million offer this winter. Both of them believe the Yankees will linger in the background while agent Scott Boras works to gather offers, and if the market is limited, the Yanks will try to jump in with a two-year, $50 million package.

According to a source familiar with the Yankees’ thinking, Brian Cashman has been lukewarm to the idea of signing Ramirez, but the rest of the front office – most notably Hal and Hank Steinbrenner – believes he is precisely what the Yankees need to bolster a lineup that underachieved in 2008.

It’s Better For Manny If Teixeira Signs In Boston

From Jon Heyman:

The Yankees are in on the Mark Teixeirasweepstakes but don’t appear overly optimistic to outbid the determined Angels or Red Sox. Should the Yankees lose out for Teixeira, who’s drawing interest from the perennially also-ran Nationals and Orioles in addition to the three aforementioned clubs, they seem ready to pounce for Manny Ramirez.

There are those suggesting the Yankees are only in the running for Teixeira to either monitor the rival Red Sox or drive up the price for the switch-hitting slugger. But while it’s true the Yankees don’t appear as eager to sign Teixeira as the Angels and Red Sox, they do appear willing to sign him at the right price.

While the Yankees have a trio of accomplished corner outfielders — Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui and Xavier Nady -- they appear to love the idea of Manny and could still utilize Damon in centerfield on occasion.

If Teixeira goes to the Red Sox, Ramirez’s market becomes that much better because the Angels become a possibility for his services as well as the Yankees and incumbent Dodgers. If Teixeira stays in Anaheim, Ramirez loses a little leverage since the Red Sox don’t want him back. Boston’s resolve to win Teixeira is heightened since they don’t have a viable fallback option like Ramirez.

Teixeira’s agent, Scott Boras, has been telling teams he envisions Teixeira closer to Alex Rodriguez ($27.5 million, or $30.5 million annually, depending whether you count the performance bonuses)

The perfect scenario for agent Scott Boras is to have the Red Sox sign Mark Teixeira. Because no matter what, Teixeira will get his money. But with that, then the Yankees, Angels, Dodgers, maybe even the Nationals and Orioles could get into a bidding war for the services of Manny. Too date, there hasn’t been much interest in the slugger, but once Teixeira signs that will change, and Red Sox won’t be bidding on Manny, so that would takes out a big spending club which hurts Boras’s leverage. If Teixeira say signs with the Angels or Nationals, then basically Manny is left to the Dodgers and the Yankees (maybe), not the number of teams bidding on him that Boras would like. So, look for Teixeira too sign late this week with a team, most likely the Red Sox, and after Christmas let the Manny Ramirez frenzy begin.

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