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.”

Manny to Retire?

Reports have surfaced that Manny Ramirez is unhappy with the lack of offers he has received and he is actually considering retirement.  The Boston Globe sheds some more light on the situation:

According to a report in New York Newsday, former Sox slugger Manny Ramirez is growing extremely upset about the lack of suitors for his services, so much so that he has told friends he would contemplate retirement if a suitable offer doesn’t arrive soon, a person close to the situation told Newsday. Meanwhile, Los Angeles Dodgers GM Ned Colletti is prepared to wait out Ramirez. The NL West champions made the free agent slugger a two-year, $45 million offer this fall but haven’t heard whether he will accept it. Colletti said he last spoke with Ramirez’ agent, Scott Boras, on Monday night. …Besides being in on virtually every big ticket starting pitcher on the market, the Yankees are also mulling trying to sign Manny Ramirez as well, according to SI.com’s Jon Heyman. “Yankees co-owner Hank Steinbrenner is said by people close to him to want Manny Ramirez in pinstripes,” writes Heyman. “Unlike his father, who dreaded dreadlocks, Steinbrenner the junior is said by a Yankees person ‘not to give a (hoot) about his hair.’ ” … According to ESPN.com’s Jayson Stark, agent Scott Boras met with the Dodgers late Monday to discuss Manny. Stark reported that Boras told the Dodgers that Ramirez is open to coming back to LA, but sources familiar with the meeting told ESPN.com that the Dodgers did not put their two-year offer back on the table. … Stark surveyed some baseball people on when they thought each big-name free agent would sign. The average signing date predicted for Manny was Jan. 18, later than any other free agent.

You Can Never Hear Enough Manny Stories

With the Red Sox playing the Phillies this week, it gives Manny’s old hitting coach Charlie Manuel a chance to tell a few Manny Stories:

Manuel, the Phillies’ fourth-year manager, started laughing recently when he recalled the day Ramirez arrived in Charlotte. Ramirez came right from the airport to the ballpark. He burst through the clubhouse door like a young colt, laughing and giggling, showing the carefree wackiness (and absentmindedness) that has come to be known as Manny being Manny.

“The first thing he says is, ‘Hey, Charlie, I got no money,’ ” Manuel recalled. “He’d taken a limo from the airport and couldn’t pay the guy.”

Manuel sent the clubhouse attendant outside to square up with the limo driver.

A few minutes later, Manuel asked Ramirez where his suitcase and equipment bag were.

Huh?

“He left them at the airport,” Manuel said, laughing. “Just didn’t bring them.”

Reliever Jose Mesa, who had two stints in Philadelphia after leaving Cleveland, once called Ramirez his all-time favorite teammate.

“He’s hilarious,” he said.

Asked for an example, Mesa alluded to Ramirez’s almost charming forgetfulness.

“One time, we went to Detroit and Manny forgot his glove,” Mesa said. “He asked me if he could borrow mine. I said sure. He used it that night and never gave it back. He never said anything. He just kept it and used it the rest of the season.”

The forgotten luggage in Charlotte? That wasn’t the last example. Manuel was there when Ramirez asked the clubhouse boy in Cleveland to get his car washed. The kid said he needed money. Ramirez told him to check the glove compartment. There was 10 grand in cash inside.

“I remember the day he flushed a towel down the toilet and messed up the whole water system at Jacobs Field,” Manuel said.

Ramirez thought nothing of it.

In Cleveland, Ramirez would have mail sent to Manuel’s house. Manuel knew Ramirez well.