Tonight We Drink Presidente

Tonight we drink Presidente. Tonight we open the beers, one by one, and roll them into our mouths, letting the heat try to pry them back out. Tonight we don’t talk about the man we are drinking, but we are thinking about him the whole time. We drink the beer of the Dominican Republic; we don’t have to say his name.

Somewhere Manny is on a plane.

Somewhere Manny is on a plane.

He is on his way to Los Angeles, to play for Joe Torre and to play with Nomar, to fire balls around Dodgers Stadium’s spacious outfield, to lose the ball in the sun and lope out grounders, to a place where he is singular and epic and beloved all at once.

We have let Manny go because there was no keeping him, now. It was, we were told, the last straw. We had given up guessing how many straws there were, but we figured there was at least one more. There he was, asking to be traded for Brett Favre and smiling and acting like the guy who his teammates liked at times and hated at others but never stopped loving. And then Theo Epstein did something strange: he actually traded him. He actually traded him.

Manny is gone, and he’s not coming back. Not ever. To paraphrase Rick Pitino, Manny Ramirez is not walking through that door. And we can’t even exhale, because if we exhaled we wouldn’t acknowledge that our team got painfully, painfully worse today. There’s no more Manny-n-Papi connection. Nothing lasts forever, but this lasted five years — an eternity in modern baseball.
Tomorrow, Manny will play left field, or maybe right field, where he is better suited, and he will bat fourth and probably get a base hit or two.

The Yankees will cheer. The Yankees will exult. The Yankees will do what they do, when they do it, because they are free of Manny’s curse. Manny made Yankee Stadium his own personal ballyard, mere miles from a house in which he grew up and which he most assuredly could not find.

We are left… here. We are left in a new place. Manny is gone, and David Ortiz will seem so alone now. Now we are a team of laser artists, seeing-eye dogs with high on base percentages and all the fundamentals. Eight years ago, we signed a punk, spacey guy from Cleveland for 8 years and $160 million, and for the first time people finally wanted to come to Boston again. That was Manny. Somwhere Manny is on a plane.

Tonight we drink Presidente.

•••

A beer eight years in the making tastes great. It tastes just like you imagined it would taste: sweet, refreshing, relaxing. It does the job. I remember where I was the Red Sox signed Manny: I was in my apartment in Chicago, and when my college roommate came home with the news, I turned on the local radio station and listened to the news update every 10 minutes just to make it feel real.

Nobody ever came to Boston. Nobody. It was shitty place to play with a shitty stadium with shitty locker rooms and shitty fans who would call you a piece of shit the first moment it looked like something was going to go wrong. They blamed you for everything, and would later treat Manny like it was their birthright to tell him how to do his job. Manny was Manny, is Manny, so he didn’t care. He cared in fits. But eight years ago, he felt about Cleveland the way he feels about Boston, and floated his way here after a winter’s worth of negotiations. Eight years, $160 million, with options to push it up to $200. The numbers were so blinding that they were an achievement in themselves. We had someone who made money and deserved it. We could get players.

Manny was the first to come to Boston voluntarily, though Pedro agreed to stay here. I don’t want to think about what happened to him, and the similarities. Look: it’s like a marriage, only the problems only arise once the deal moves past six years. Then people start to get upset. They want freedom. The front office has taken them for granted. They talk. It happens. It happens with almost every long-term free agent. It’s not their fault. We should let it be.
Manny had to go at some point, and it wasn’t going to be later than after this year. But you still felt like they weren’t going to trade him. Everyone in that dugout knows how good he is. David Ortiz knows how good he is. So does Derek Jeter. So don’t everyone. Tim Lincecum’s job just got a lot harder.

Here’s how we should honor Manny: by rooting for him. It costs us nothing. To root against him would cost us everything.

•••

The Rangers refuse to win baseball games

Another day, another eighth in rally. It was an often maddening but ultimately rewarding game in which we witnessed:

• Manny get ejected
• The Sox strand 25 men on base
• A rare Sox double steal!
• Wake go 8 innings on 86 pitches
• Ortiz tie the game with his speed
• Wilson walk in the winning run
• Lugo play the ninth in left field

The Manny ejection was inexcusable. Perhaps the pitch was a little low and outside, but you can’t get tossed in the second inning of game where your lineup is already without three regulars. But, you know, he's been pretty good lately, so we can cut him some slack. Frustration with Manny mounted when his replacement in the cleanup spot, Joe Thurston, stepped to the plate in the fifth with Lugo on third and Ellsbury on second and promptly grounded out to Michael Young to end the inning. The following inning Ellsbury popped out with the bases loaded and it seemed like it was just one of those days where no matter how many base runners the Sox got they would not score.

Then came the Rangers bullpen and the second eighth inning rally in as many games. C.J. Wilson, who entered the game a perfect five-for-five in save opportunities, gave up two runs on two hits and three walks without retiring a batter. Brutal. Credit due to Drew and Casey who had great at-bats against the lefty, both of them working a walk.

The Sox caught a break in the second when Ron Washington opted to have David Murphy sacrifice bunt. This was odd for a couple of reasons. It’s the second inning of a game you’re leading 1-0 and you give an out to Wake, who is prone to big innings and has just surrendered consecutive singles, and you’re putting two men in scoring position and leaving it up to Gerald Laird and Ben Broussard to take care of business. Laird grounds out, scoring the lone run of the inning, and Broussard strikes out. But let's not pile on Washington, he's got enough detractors as it is.

A perfect 5-0 weekend
And the Yankees grow more hilarious by the day
More on our pal Tommy Holmes

Manny might get to 600 by August

Joaquin Benoit? Please. It's disrespectful, having Benoit face one of the best all-time hitters with a man on in the eighth inning of a 3-3 game. Manny took his displeasure out on a pitch low and in and cranked it over everything in left. A no doubter the second he stepped in the batters box. Really, I started composing this paragraph before a single pitch was thrown.

That's three late-inning wins this week by my count. Moxie! The lifelessness of the first few weeks of the season is but a distant memory.

Of Lester's start we can say that he threw strikes and he battled. Making it into the seventh inning was great to see and although he allowed 10 hits he was able to limit the Rangers to three runs. Lester came up large in the third with two runners in scoring position when he struck out Murphy and Laird to end the inning. All in all, a step in the right direction.

We must also give some reluctant praise to Javier Lopez, who in the eighth inherited two men in scoring position and got Josh Hamilton to line out (on a screamer) to Ellsbury, ending the inning and keeping the deficit at one. He picked up the win for his one pitch of work.

Pedroia double. Ortiz single. Tie game. Manny. Game over.

Congrats to German Duran for collecting his first big league hit, a single in the second inning.

Jason Jennings kept the Boston bats very quiet in the middle innings. After an awful start to the season, and an ugly start to this game, he cruised.

Lugo extended his hitting streak to five games, but geez, he really is atrocious. He ended a budding rally in the seventh by hitting into an easy double play on the first pitch he saw.

Millwood and Wake tomorrow.

Week in Review: High Five

Manny: High Five
Javier Lopez: High Five
Royals!: High Five
Tommy Holmes: Sad High Five
Craig Hansen: High Five?
Lugo: ... nope, can't do it

And one more round of applause for Manny, who's really just out of his mind right now.

(And thanks to Funny or Die for making their videos an unwieldy size... yeesh.)

Your crew is featherweight

That was a well-timed ode to Manny by Bryan. Tonight was Manny's night. By the third inning he had smacked two home runs off Mussina, passing Lou Gehrig and Fred McGriff on the all-time home run list in the process. Manny now has 495 career home runs, 55 of those have come against the Yankees. In the seventh, future hall of famer Kyle Farnsworth chucked one past Manny's ear. The Bronxfolk cheered, Manny grinned. Following the game Manny put a quarter in the clubhouse juke box and dedicated this classic piece of American songwriting to Messrs. Mussina and Farnsworth:



The anthem of the A-Rod era.

Manny was asked if he was excited to be approaching 500 career home runs. “Not really,” he said. “Because I’m going to 600.”

Also, Beckett was good. The middle relief looks dazzling when the starter goes 8, don't it? They're quite good sitting down, spitting sunflower seeds into a receptacle.

On Baseball Tonight Gammons gave creedence to something I had been thinking about just this morning. Craig Hansen and his 0.00 ERA and 0.55 WHIP in 9.1 innings at Pawtucket is likely to be up with the big club sooner rather than later. Gammons claims Hansen has rediscovered the delivery he had at St. John's. To which we can only say:

That He will guard thee by His might,
And be thy shield in every fight,
Thou champion of sacred rite,
Old St. John's! Our dear St. John's!

Gammons also added that Crisp could be headed to the Cubs, who are without Soriano and aren't getting any production from Pie. He mentioned Cubs' 22-year-old Boston native Sean Gallagher as a guy the Sox have interest in. I'll say again, we should not trade Coco Crisp.

Slow day in Blogsville
Beane v. Sabean
Perplexed Over C.C. Sabathia
Why the Tampa Bay Rays should sign Barry Bonds
Miguel Tejada needs two more birthday candles this year

Your Profanity-Free Thursday Afternoon Post

There's plenty I could be doing today that's not writing for the 40 or so of you who log on, dutifully, every day, to hear what two guys you may or may not know say about the Red Sox. Hell, I run a semi-respectable business magazine (Though that's all I'll say about it lest I end up like XMas Ape). But no: I'm going to talk baseball, or at least talk something. And before I continue let me just say I appreciate it, especially our Icelandic following, which, lest you think I'm kidding:

Though I worry a bit about the Icelandic economy in light of this week's New Yorker article that indicates the subprime disaster in the U.S. might take a toll on the island nation; like most of James Surowiecki's articles, I admire the writing and reasoning even if I'm straight bankrupt, intellectually speaking, on the subject.

If all of this is supposed to be a lead-in to some Red Sox thoughts... well, I'm not sure what to make of the team yet, except they're freaking awesome, and Manny is on a tear, and I can't believe this is probably his final year as a Sox. Or at least potentially his final year. For all that's happened in the last 10 years to transform the Cursed Sox into the Model Franchise, there was nothing bigger than when the Sox signed Manny. It's hard to remember now, but absolutely no one wanted to play in Boston in the late 1990s. Say what you want about Clemens' rampant a$$holitude, the man wasn't exactly breaking news when he said players hated the Sox' management. Add to that Boston's unsavory racial history, and suddenly a lot of people are using the "Fenway's locker rooms are too small" excuse not to play here. There was a time, in 1999, when we signed Jose Offerman and Sox fans got atwitter. That was the free agent we could get, that's the type of franchise we were, and nothing was going to change that.

Then the winter of 2000/2001 came along and fundamentally changed what it meant to be a free agent in baseball. The big names were A-Rod, Manny and Mike Mussina, though Darren Dreifort got a 5-year, $55 million contract too. Everyone got paid. Mussina went off the blocks early, but A-Rod and Manny dragged on and on and on. ESPN.com had a page where it would have all the free agents and the news of the day next to their faces; I must have reloaded this page at the college newspaper office once every five minutes. It just never occurred to me that a player could want to come to Boston, and yet the Manny saga dwindled to a two-team race between Cleveland and the Sox. I just assumed he would go back to Cleveland, but he didn't. One day, at my non-cable television home, my roommate came in and told me it was a done deal. I flipped on the radio and listened to the all-news station for an hour, waiting to hear the announcement every 10 minutes: "Manny Ramirez has signed with the Red Sox for 10 years, $200 million."

The next year, Manny hit a home run in his first Fenway Park at-bat, and it was on. People hated him from the get-go, though, because he didn't look like the typical Boston ballplayer, but all he did was hit and hit and hit. Through the years, people have attacked his spaciness, his oversized uniform, his dreadlocks, his tendency to admire home runs and doubles, his defense, his baserunning, his phantom injuries, his real injuries, his late-night drinking habits with Enrique Wilson, his trade demands, everything, and the guy just goes out there and hits like he's in a time warp. He's 35 years old now, but he might as well be 25. I chuckled when I read Baseball Prospectus' preview this year, because for all their number-crunching, they flat out blew it. They wrote that it was "fundamental that he is in decline." This based off one bad season, which increasingly looks like it's going to be sandwiched between two typically hall of fame years. So it goes.

At this point, Manny will leave the Sox as the second-greatest hitter in their history, and, like the first, he was not always beloved by the press. And in truth, David Ortiz has stolen some of Manny's thunder the last few years, but here's Ortiz, faltering for the first time in five years, and Manny keeps raking. Let's realize what we have before it's gone and give Manny the appreciation he deserves. To the best Sox hitter in 50 years. Hear hear.

Moon Over Parma

No wait — that was just Manny's home run ball. Still:

Revenge

After taking two of three from the hapless Tiggers and the beat-up Yankees respectively, the Sox head to Cleveland for a two game set. With last season's ALCS defeat still fresh in their minds the Indians are going through the "it's just another series" song and dance. But is it really even that? What's with these two-game series? I hate 'em.

Lester vs. Westbrook in Game 1 and Wake vs. Byrd in Game 2. Westbrook has been quite good in his first two starts, allowing 2 runs in the first and 3 in the second. He's coming off a complete game victory against the Angels. Mr. Byrd has been in the news recently. Good for him. Perhaps he'll celebrate by lowering his 11.05 ERA.

And and yes, there's this, one scribe in Cleveland is calling for Manny's head (or ribs): "He needs to be knocked down -- at the least." But is Jake Westbrook really gonna put fear in Manny Ramirez? Please. Paul Byrd? HaHA! No, the only things that frighten Manny are barbers and clowns. So unless the Indians plan to reincarnate Sal Maglie or trade for Julian Tavarez, all payback attempts shall prove ineffectual.

Old friends Shoppach, Marte and Breslow are on Cleveland's roster.

Red Sox batting stances

Via Deadspin. Youk taking a third strike is special.

Reminds us of this fellow, who assembled a more diverse cast of characters. The commentary, the office setting and the fact that he's doing it with a golf club add a nice flourish. His Boggs belongs in a museum.

2008 Preview: Manny Ramirez

Name: Manuel Aristides Ramirez Onelcida
Bats: Right
Throws: Right
Age: 35
2008 Salary: $20M
Fun Fact: Manny Ramirez and Henry Kissinger both attended George Washington High School in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Manny Ramirez does not have a Nobel Peace Prize, Henry Kissinger does. This is an outrage.

During a given season Jason Varitek will probably run into more outs than Manny Ramirez. But when Manny runs into an out he has a way of turning it into a sideshow (amusing or infuriating depending on the situation) with all the telltale Manny flourishes: the playful smile, the shrug, the palms turned towards the sky. It looks something like this. The little league coach in you says, “Come on, get your head out of your ass!” When Varitek runs into an out he unleashes an expletive, wears a scowl, and darts for the dugout to don his catching apparel. The little league coach in you says, “Shoot, if only he had better wheels.” It is the unreasonable man who draws from the two players' very different responses the conclusion that Manny cares any less than Varitek.

For all the ink that is spilled about Manny’s off-field whimsy, his production at the plate speaks for itself. While it is common practice to paint the man as an idiot savant, his teammates have long been effusive in their praise of his hard work in the batting cage and in the video room. He is the greatest Red Sox hitter from the right side since the man they called Beast, Jimmie Foxx. Ten home runs shy of 500 and tenth in OPS all time (1.0023), Manny is a lock for the Hall of Fame.

Alas, his best years appear to be behind him. Dominate in the postseason, oh yes he did. But the 2007 regular season was a bit of a struggle, with Manny often looking uncomfortable at the plate, taking awkwards swings, and looking at a lot of called third strikes. Aside from a scorching hot July and October it was a pedestrian season for Manny, who finished with his lowest home run and RBI totals since he was a young pup in Cleveland. While Sox fans may be optimistic that Manny, inspired by a contract year, has arrived at spring training on time and in wonderful shape, the output of several similar thirty-six year-old sluggers before him tells a compelling tale. Stargell, McCovey, Bagwell, Walker, at thirty six none of them knocked more than 30 out of the park or drove in 1oo. With $20 million team options for 2009 and 2010, this may very well be Manny's final year in Boston.

Manny Ramirez's 2008 ZiPS projection:
.278 AVG/.381 OBP/.493 SLG
75 Runs
123 Hits
26 Doubles
23 Home Runs
98 RBI
71 BB
98 K

Comedian in Chief

On Manny Ramirez:
"Sorry ... Manny Ramirez isn't here, I guess his grandmother died again."

On Jonathan Papelbon:
"Guy pitches as well as he dances. And I appreciate the dress code. Thanks for wearing pants."

On Daisuke Matsuzaka:
"His press corps is bigger than mine. And we both have trouble answering questions in English."

George Walker Bush! He'll be here all wee- err, rather until noon on January 20, 2009. But who's counting....

Recasting the Best Picture nominees

No Country for Old Men
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell: A laconic, soon-to-retire small-town sheriff.
Mike Timlin: The guy’s seen it all and he’s got four World Series rings to show for it. You’d like to see him ease his way into retirement but then you’re in the ALCS and the Indians have two runners on with nobody out and the elderly righty gets the call to pick up the slack for his struggling partners.

Llewelyn Moss: A man who flees with $2 million in drug money he finds in the desert.
Craig Hansen: Young man got his $1.3 million signing bonus and while he did not flee he’s hardly been heard from since.

Anton Chigurh: An assassin hired to recover the drug money.
Jonathan Papelbon: Probably more nuts that Chigurh. Thankfully he just breaks batters' spirits rather than their skulls. Although he has not been asked to recover Hansen’s signing bonus he has filled the closer role originally slated for Hansen rather adequately.


There Will Be Blood
Daniel Plainview: An obsessive loner who hits it big in California's turn-of-the-20th-century oil rush.
J.D. Drew: He’s a loner and five years, $70 million = striking oil.

Eli Sunday: A charismatic evangelical preacher and faith healer.
David Ortiz: A charismatic evangelical preacher and faith healer.


Michael Clayton
Arthur Edens: An eccentric and brilliant lawyer who suffers a mental/existential breakdown.
Manny Ramirez: An eccentric and brilliant hitter who is due for another "episode" in which he demands a trade.

Michael Clayton: The fixer.
Scott Boras: Scary thought, eh?


Juno
Juno MacGuff: A pregnant teen.
Bartolo Colon: Yeah, I said it.

Paul Bleeker: Michael Cera
Nobody replaces Michael Cera.


Atonement
No, they'd have trouble with the accents and there's nothing I hate more than bad British accents. I'm looking at you, Costner.

Manny Signs With Boras: The Conversation

Scott Boras: Hi Manny, my name is Scott.
Manny: Hi Scott.
Boras: Do you want to sign with me?
Manny: Sure.

I mean seriously, what else would there be?


Ben: Hmmm, I had imagined the conversation going totally differently. Here's how I saw it:

Scott Boras: Hi Manny, my name is Scott.
Manny: Hi Scott.
Boras: Do you want to sign with me?
Manny: Will you represent Eno Guerrero, too?
Boras: Sure.
Manny: Okay.

Happy President's Day