He was somewhat huffing and puffing in the moment, probably in the throes of adrenaline ebbing and a season's worth of emotional exhaustion finally bringing itself to bear. But if you were in the middle of making a long-enough longed-for celebratory racket, after Edgar Renteria bounced back to Keith Foulke, for the out that nailed down the Boston Red Sox' at-long-enough-last World Series triumph in 2004, you never forgot Manny Ramirez — freshly named as that Series's most valuable player — offering this terse but joyous post-mortem:
"I don't believe in curse. I believe you make your own destination."
How those words must come back to haunt him now, if they hadn't come back to haunt him in the years between his having done so much to yank Boston from yesteryear's sorrows to today's sagacities and his less-than-honorable exit from the game. Confronted with a spring training drug test positive for which he'd have faced a one hundred game suspension as a second-time drug test failure under baseball's incumbent program, Manchild Ramirez opted to call it a career Friday.
What a difference a fortnight makes. As spring training wound down and the regular season approached, we heard Ramirez was happy, we saw he was swinging the bat with something better resembling his former authority than he'd shown in two testy seasons in Los Angeles and Chicago. His former Red Sox teammate and lineup ward, David Ortiz, said he hadn't seen Manny being a happier Manny in a very long time.
That was then, this is now. "I don't really know the details, how everything went down," Ortiz told a reporter Friday, when he learned of Ramirez's retirement. "It's sad, man, to see a player with that much talent and who had an unbelievable career, to get out of the game with negativity."
"An unbelievable career." Talk about an unintentionally loaded statement. The manner in which Ramirez retired, and the apparent provocation thereof, leave Ramirez as quite unbelievable in the minds of only too many to whom actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances — and they are what Ramirez is believed to have been caught using once again — are no questions asked disqualifiers, for the Hall of Fame or otherwise, no matter the actualities of the substance(s) or the user.
Ramirez had signed a dirt-cheap single-year deal with the Tampa Bay Rays for 2011, had reunited with his fellow former Idiot Johnny Damon in Tampa, and had impressed one and all with his love of the game. "He's in the clubhouse at 9 AM and he's already put on his pants and shoes and his belt," said third baseman Evan Longoria, by any definition the face of the Rays. "Not a lot of guys do that. Manny just loves baseball and being around baseball."
You can probably see the head-shaking and hear the sighing, both preludes to variations on the theme of, "He had you fooled, too, eh?"
It was never a simple job to read Ramirez no matter how often you either laughed or retched over the "Manny Being Manny" schtick. There never was a single side to this manchild who could be so likable one moment and so enraging the next. The man who sprinted out to left field with a tiny American flag upraised like the Statue of Liberty's torch on the day his American citizenship became final was the same man who invented disarming and often grotesque opt-outs whenever things (dollars, whatever) were no longer to his liking.
This was the manchild who throve on the spotlight and the pressure cooker that is Boston baseball, letting little enough of it keep him from his appointed task of driving baseballs somewhere onto the Massachusetts Turnpike in the interest of putting crooked numbers on the scoreboard, and the curse in which he didn't believe into its grave. But he felt himself so unappreciated that, when he wasn't inventing obscure knee troubles to keep him on what amounted to fortnight strikes, he was decking elder traveling secretaries who couldn't scrounge 11th-hour road ballpark passes for whomever he wanted to plant in the seats.
This was perhaps the least athletic baseball player of his time, a man who could hit the ball ten miles but who could barely find his way around left field, though he had no problem whatsoever finding the gents' room inside the Green Monster whether or not his body's timing was appropriate to the game situation. "In my own romantic view of baseball and the world," writes Sports Illustrated's Joe Posnanski, "I tended to see Manny as baseball's Mozart — an often vile personality who did one thing so beautifully that you could not turn away."
It was everything else he did that caused even his staunchest supporters at last to turn away. Up to and including that pitiful 2010 day in Colorado, when he was sent to the plate to pinch hit for Dodger reliever Ronald Belisario, with men on first and third and the Dodgers now standing a reasonable chance of cutting a deficit exactly in half. Ramirez looked at one borderline pitch, hit the ceiling on plate umpire Gary Cederstrom's dime and ball one call, got tossed out of the game, and left the Dodgers to settle for one measly run on the entire inning, the Rockies going on to finish what they started, a 10-5 shellacking.
Manchild learned the hard way that not even Joe Torre, the Dodger manager who'd stood by him and admired him even those years when he'd wrecked Torre's Yankees, but who'd recently benched him for Scott Podsednik (at the time, a .336 slugger), was likely to bail him out that time.
Ramirez got shipped to the White Sox. He finished the season a further shell of his former self. The Rays took a flyer on him, marveled at his apparent revival, at the plate and in the clubhouse alike, then stood with their jaws japing Friday when Manchild Ramirez retired — informing baseball government, but not his team.
You almost don't dare to ask what could have bagged a man who'd served his first drug-program suspension, fifty games, after he'd tested positive for what turned out to be a women's fertility drug that is thought to be used as a steroid masking agent.
The reactions now are running the gamut from the absurd to the surreal and back to the exasperated. Kind of the way the reactions ran to Ramirez's act most of his career, and they only began in his Cleveland seasons, with the day he was bagged for a traffic ticket, couldn't talk his way out of it, then flipped an illegal U-turn and got himself another ticket.
The Chicago Cubs are now thought to be pondering aloud whether they were cheated out of the 2008 postseason, during which their rather magical season was stopped cold by a Dodger division series sweep. Well, now. They had the lead in Game 1, 2-0, when James Loney hit Ryan Dempster for a 2-out grand slam in the top of the fifth. The Cubs never scored again in the game; Ramirez made the Dodger lead 5-2 with a leadoff blast against Sean Marshall in the seventh, but Casey Blake singled home Blake DeWitt with nobody out in the eighth and Russell Martin took Jason Marquis into the left center field bleachers to open the ninth.
In Game 2 — which ended in a 10-3 Dodger blowout — the Dodgers hung up a five spot on Carlos Zambrano in the top of the second. Where was Manny while the Dodgers were hanging 5 with 2 base hits, a run-scoring 1-out infield error, a followup bases-loading infield error, an RBI infield hit, and a 3-run double? Why, Manny was looking at strike three to end the inning. He made the score 6-0 with another leadoff blast, this time off Zambrano to open the sixth, but unless you want to say it was a tainted one-out seventh-inning walk (which ended Zambrano's day's work) off which he came home courtesy of Matt Kemp's double to right, you can't exactly say that Manny did the big damage in that game. Not even his RBI single in the eighth, one strikeout after Rafael Furcal singled home Blake, who'd drive in the tenth Dodger run in the ninth.
And in Game 3, Manny singled his way on in the Dodger second, pushing Martin (a one-out double) to third and setting up the ducks for Loney to drive in with a 2-out double. That proved to be all the Dodgers would need, as Hiroki Kuroda, Cory Wade, and Jonathan Broxton manhandled the Cubs (whose only tally would be an RBI single in the eighth) while the third Dodger run came home on an RBI double ... from Martin.
It may not explain much in the way of figuring out Manny Ramirez's act, but it just might add to the evidence that the Cubs didn't listen when Manny proclaimed in the throes of a curse-busting World Series conquest that he didn't believe in curse, he believed in making your own destination. For better and, apparently, for worse.
A year after he didn't do the biggest damage to the Cubs' postseason prayers, Ramirez committed an unlikely jewel, and it's one of the ways I'd prefer to remember him. In the sixth inning of Game Four, 2009 National League Championship Series, with men on first and third and two out, Philadelphia's Raul Ibanez reached Hong-Chi Kuo's first pitch and hit a sinking liner to left. Ramirez scampered in and shocked one and all by catching it on the shoestrings to keep the Phillies from tying the game at 4. Unfortunately, Broxton in the ninth fed Jimmy Rollins something he could seven-iron between gap-squeezing outfielders Kemp and Andre Ethier for a walk-off double and a 3-1 Philadelphia advantage.
He wasn't known for his glove or his athleticism in the outfield, but for that one moment Manny Ramirez looked like a complete ballplayer. It was as fleeting as his manchildhood is enduring, as swift as his self-manufactured fall from grace is profound, as game-saving if not game-changing as his home runs, tainted or otherwise, so often were game-breaking.
"I don't believe in curse. I believe you make your own destination."
Manchild has made his own destination. It's not the destination even his most stubborn detractors might have imagined him to make. He came into the game's consciousness with a bang and he leaves it with a whimper, and a pregnant third-party whimper at that.
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