chicot60
04-09-2011, 01:34 AM
Manny being Manny was perhaps the best way of summing up a mercurial figure in sports history, and sadly it is now defunct. Manny Ramirez retired from baseball Friday, which means the catchphrase must now be awkwardly crammed into the past tense. Manny was being Manny? Manny had been being Manny? Manny will have been being Manny?
Either way, he has ceased to be as a professional athlete, and baseball is poorer for it. Manny was not only one of the great hitters who ever lived — the folks at Baseball-Reference.com list the most similar hitters as Frank Thomas, Jimmie Foxx, and Ted Williams, and Manny’s career adjusted on-base-plus-slugging, or OPS+, puts him a shade behind Hank Aaron, Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays — but he was a character. And sports needs characters.
Peeing in the Green Monster, his absentminded work in the field, his childlike moments, his endless stream of self-contradiction — Manny always seems to exist in a slightly different reality, floating through a life only tangentially related to our own. Sportswriter Michael Weinreb wrote yesterday that when the O.J. Simpson chase was occurring, Manny thought his Cleveland teammates were talking about then-teammate Chad Ogea.
But when he was in a batter’s box, he came into full focus. Manny finished his career ninth in MLB history in career slugging percentage (.585), ninth in on-base plus slugging (.996, though both came in an inflated era of hitting), 26th in total bases, 18th in RBIs (1,831) and 14th in home runs (550). For this he was paid approximately US$200-million in his career, which was not so much that he did not once try to sell a grill on eBay for US$4,000, saying to one newspaper, “I need the money.” He told another paper, of course, that the grill belonged to his neighbour.
The way it ended was ugly — Manny was facing a potential 100-game suspension for testing for a banned substance for a second time. The time before it was a female fertility drug, so even that was different. And nobody expected this.
The last great profile of Manny came in The New Yorker in 2007, when he said, “Baseball, you know, one day you’re here, the next day you’re in another place.” In the same piece, it noted his teammate Julian Tavarez had told The Boston Herald, “There’s a bunch of humans out here, but to Manny, he’s the only human.”
He was the only Manny. That was enough.
http://sports.nationalpost.com/2011/04/08/no-more-manny-being-manny/
Either way, he has ceased to be as a professional athlete, and baseball is poorer for it. Manny was not only one of the great hitters who ever lived — the folks at Baseball-Reference.com list the most similar hitters as Frank Thomas, Jimmie Foxx, and Ted Williams, and Manny’s career adjusted on-base-plus-slugging, or OPS+, puts him a shade behind Hank Aaron, Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays — but he was a character. And sports needs characters.
Peeing in the Green Monster, his absentminded work in the field, his childlike moments, his endless stream of self-contradiction — Manny always seems to exist in a slightly different reality, floating through a life only tangentially related to our own. Sportswriter Michael Weinreb wrote yesterday that when the O.J. Simpson chase was occurring, Manny thought his Cleveland teammates were talking about then-teammate Chad Ogea.
But when he was in a batter’s box, he came into full focus. Manny finished his career ninth in MLB history in career slugging percentage (.585), ninth in on-base plus slugging (.996, though both came in an inflated era of hitting), 26th in total bases, 18th in RBIs (1,831) and 14th in home runs (550). For this he was paid approximately US$200-million in his career, which was not so much that he did not once try to sell a grill on eBay for US$4,000, saying to one newspaper, “I need the money.” He told another paper, of course, that the grill belonged to his neighbour.
The way it ended was ugly — Manny was facing a potential 100-game suspension for testing for a banned substance for a second time. The time before it was a female fertility drug, so even that was different. And nobody expected this.
The last great profile of Manny came in The New Yorker in 2007, when he said, “Baseball, you know, one day you’re here, the next day you’re in another place.” In the same piece, it noted his teammate Julian Tavarez had told The Boston Herald, “There’s a bunch of humans out here, but to Manny, he’s the only human.”
He was the only Manny. That was enough.
http://sports.nationalpost.com/2011/04/08/no-more-manny-being-manny/