Whenever there are words here or elsewhere about the ugliness and the impact of Manny Ramirez's departure from Boston, there is uniform reaction from Ramirez defenders along these lines:
1. The suggestion that Ramirez did something wrong in his time with the Red Sox is vastly overblown, and undercut by his remarkable offensive production. Anybody who sees wrongdoing in his exit from the Red Sox must also be into UFOs, because, after all, Ramirez had an OPS of 1.060 in his last month with Boston.
2. There is a vendetta here and elsewhere against Ramirez, fueled by the Red Sox front office.
Well, it's now late February. There are 29 teams other than the Boston Red Sox, 29 other teams that all want to win, 29 teams with 29 different operating philosophies. The Giants once signed
Barry Zito to a seven-year deal, and more recently, they signed
Edgar Renteria to a two-year deal, and it's difficult to find folks on other teams who like those moves.
The Twins usually don't make a lot of midseason trades, and executives with other teams find this confusing. The Cubs gave an eight-year deal to Alfonso Soriano and a two-year deal to Milton Bradley, and few executives with other teams agreed with those decisions.
The Nationals will pay about $25 million to three first basemen this year and, of course, just one is going to play. The Royals traded for Mike Jacobs, a guy who hits a lot of homers and doesn't walk much, and many rival talent evaluators would not have made the same move. The Mariners' highest-paid player is a singles hitter, at a time when teams generally pay the biggest bucks for power. The Yankees paid about $300 million for Alex Rodriguez when they probably could have had him for $200 million, and nobody could figure out why when it happened.
So they are not all working from the same script. There is a lot of independent thought going on in the game.
And yet just two teams have shown an interest in Ramirez, who hit .388 after the All-Star break last season -- the Dodgers have serious interest, but only on a deal of one or two years, apparently, and the Giants have limited interest. Ramirez is one of the greatest hitters we have ever seen, a unique talent who put on one of the most extraordinary performances of our generation in his 10 weeks with the Dodgers, and he's probably going to have to take about half of what Jim Thome got from the Phillies six years ago.
The primary reason for this, unquestionably, is the sportwide perception that he did not honor his contract in Boston and went to extraordinary depths to get himself out of that contract. These are not the on-background musings of a couple of rogue scouts, or the chortlings of conspiracy-theorist sports writers. This is the cemented belief of many executives with many teams, reinforced by Ramirez's sudden transformation into a high-energy player as soon as he moved from the Red Sox to the Dodgers. The same guy who was clocked at 5.8 seconds going from home to first base in his last week with Boston suddenly was running full-speed for L.A., his hat flying off.
You might think that Manny is getting picked on. You might think there's no real evidence that he stopped playing hard for the Red Sox.
But apparently, there is an army of decision-makers across the game's landscape who would disagree with you. It's Feb. 25 and one of the best hitters of all-time, fresh off one of the best performances ever, is still in need of offers.
This question gets asked all the time now: Did agent Scott Boras miscalculate during this offseason in assessing the Manny Ramirez market?
Personally, I don't think he did. I think that after Manny's ugly exit from Boston -- and there will always be an unsolved mystery about what role Boras played in that -- there was simply no chance that his market would ever develop. Ramirez made his own decisions, and they have come back to hurt him.
Manny is home unsigned, writes Bill Plaschke.
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Buster Olney
