Manny Ramirez, one of the best hitters in baseball history, is retiring because he wants to see his children more. And what I mean by "wants to see his children more" is that he failed another drug test. Presumably, this makes it less likely that he gets into the Hall of Fame, and more likely that baseball writers will be penning less-than-flattering pieces about the flakey former Red Sock for years to come.
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8 replies on “Manny has left the building”
I don’t know about you guys, but this is sad for me. The best pure hitter I’ve ever seen and he’s a complete fraud through and through. Bonds never tested positive.
well i’m beginning to wonder if theo knew and/or suspected something way back when he kept trying to dump manny from the team…i never bought the notion that his contract was too big and cumbersome…not for one of the best hitters in the game…
and in other totally unrelated, but equally unflattering news for sox fans, henry and werner have signed lebron to some kind of personal services contract:
http://bostonherald.com/business/media/view.bg?articleid=1328973
since yankee ownership’s missteps and faux pas are always fair game for ridicule, i couldn’t pass up this one…could they have found a more universally disliked and disrespected nba player to represent them in whatever ventures they’re envisioning?…maybe they’re hoping the folks outside the US that they’ll be dealing with don’t really know lebron all that well…i can’t wait for the big 2 hour special on nesn where jim gray asks lebron where he’s gonna take his talents…of course that will be followed up by a splashy pep rally at fenway, or maybe liverpool fenway with henry, werner, and lebron swaggering across the stage to fireworks and rap music…wow…i mean, who’s advising these guys?…
I for one will be sad that Manny and Damon won’t be in Boston next week when the Rays come to town. At least we won’t have the whole, should the fans boo or cheer them thing the media loves to drum up when controversal players come back to play against the Sox.
Shouldn’t have added “…and Damon” there, he will be playing in the Sox-Ray’s series obviously.
dc, Theo knew Manny was a bad presence, whatever his skills. Manny ran himself out of town.
I find this end a sad one, but frankly Manny left my cone of vision a few years ago, I hadn’t even known he signed with the Rays. Maybe that fact, that I didn’t know for what team he played, is the saddest statement about a guy who was so important to the Sox for so long.
Manny HOF? Yes. Sweetest swing I ever saw. Put a dozen asterisks around it, I don’t care.
Fraud? Whatever. Baseball has committed many frauds, and has been “convicted” (or more accurately taken to task) for a couple of them, but not even the most egregious ones.
I don’t care who cheated. It is a business and a game lousy with cheaters, and that’s how I know it.
I should probably leave that last comment where it lies, but COME ON! Who thinks that players that took some drugs are the boogey men in face of the litany of abuse generated by the ownership of major league baseball clubs over the history of the game?
Whatever. Manny, if you took some steroids, I don’t care. If anything, I hope it sustained your body. It was a pleasure to watch you play, and I wrote many public jokes about you while secretly coveting your phenomenal abilities as a ballplayer. I am grateful you weren’t born fifty years earlier when you wouldn’t have had the chance to pick up a bat and make a shit-ton of money for the (predominantly white) ownership of MLB where your talents were so well marketed.
If Manny finished with 420 homers and never topped 35 in a year, I highly doubt we’d call him the greatest hitter we’ve ever seen. He’d be very good not awesome. And therein lies the rub. Which player was he? We’ll never know.