April 15th, 2007 → 6:19 pm @ Seth Mnookin // No Comments
No, really: he does. At least a little…but not to any of the Sox beat writers; instead, he decided to share (a very little bit of) the Tao of Manny with The New Yorker‘s Ben McGrath* for an article that comes out tomorrow (and is now online).
It’s quite a good piece. It’s long (it’s hard to imagine another magazine that would devote eight pages to Manny) and strikes a nice balance between introducing his Mannyness to the non-baseball world and offering insight to those of you who…well, to those of you who read my blog everyday. Some choice bits:+
* Ortiz calling Manny “a crazy motherfucker” and then practically insisting McGrath put it in the piece.
* The beautiful anecdote about how the teenaged Manny used to wake up every morning at 5:30 and run up a hill behind his high school with a spare tire attached to a rope that was tied around his waist.
* A semi-plausible explanation of why Manny’s uniform pants are so baggy — while in Cleveland, he “borrowed” the pants of 250-pound bullpen catcher Dan Williams one day before a game.
There were some disappointments as well. The Manny portrayed here is a sort of sweet, almost Zen-like figure. There’s some truth to that, to be sure; almost every time I’m asked about Manny, I tell people I’ve never met anyone who seems to simultaneously work so hard and remain so disengaged. But some of Manny’s true…well, insanity doesn’t come out.#
Another part of Manny’s personality I would have liked to have seen explored (or explained) a little more is his seemingly tenuous connection with a world in which reality is not mutable. Even after his annual “trade me/I love it here” episodes, I’ve never thought Manny was a liar; my impression has always been that Manny believes whatever it is he’s saying whenever he’s saying it.
One more complaint: in the one place where I’m mentioned, Feeding the Monster isn’t acknowledged, and there’s an unspoken rule in journalism that if you’re going to use someone else’s reporting, you do the common courtesy of letting the world know where said reporting originally appeared. (In a section that alludes to my description of how Manny, after he was placed on irrevocable waivers, called the Sox ownership “motherfucking white devils,” McGrath writes, “The next spring, according to the writer Seth Mnookin, Ramirez let the Sox ownership know that he felt angry and insulted.” This anecdote, as it’s related in the piece, also leaves what’s arguably the most crucial detail: that Manny’s reps had signed off on the waiver filing because at the time, Manny was desperate to get out of Boston.)
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out one error that somehow made it past The New Yorker‘s much vaunted fact-checkers: Manny is identified as being six feet tall, which is, indeed, how he’s officially listed. This is definitively false. And yes, I have proof. I’m about 5-11.5…and Manny, as you can see, is shorter than I am.
McGrath doesn’t quite get to the bottom of Ramirez; the Sox employee who pulled me aside and pleaded that I discover what was actually going on in his head is likely to remain as frustrated as ever. That’s not to say this isn’t a wonderful piece, and likely the best one we’ll get about the best right-handed hitter of the last twenty years.^
* Note: Ben^^ is somewhere between a friend and an acquaintance. He’s also the son of Chip McGrath, who reviewed my book for the Times. Us Red Sox fans: we travel in packs.
+ My prediction: the Boston media is going to seize on the following quote: “You know where I want to go? I want to go to China. I want to go and see–it’s a city that I don’t know how to say. It’s the Prohibit City? I saw it on the History Channel. They do a lot of tours over there.” This will serve as one more piece of evidence used to prove that Manny is a moron. That is profoundly unfair, and it goes a long way towards explaining why there are those players who say Boston is an exceptionally tough city in which to play.
# This might be a bit unmerited; after all, I didn’t include these stories — and I’m sure they’re stories Ben heard as well — in my book, and I imagine we both left them out because we couldn’t get anything close to on-the-record confirmation. That said, in his Times review, Ben’s dad criticized FTM for not including nearly enough “porn — intimate, Boutonesque details about the players’ off-diamond lives and antics,” and, you know, the whole sons bear the sins of their fathers thing…`
^ Albert Pujols has a ways to go before he supplants Manny.
^^ Ben’s demonstrated the extent to which us journalists can use our jobs to satisfy our obsessions: this is his third Sox-related piece for the New Yorker, following one on Bill James and one on Tim Wakefield (although purportedly about the knuckleball).
` Chip McGrath also said I larded my book with copious footnotes. Some habits die hard.
Post Categories: Ben McGrath & Ramirez & The New Yorker
nolofinwe
17 years ago
Here’s the link to the excellent New Yorker article on Tim Wakefield and the knuckleball. It also talks about Charlie Zink a bit, who is a knuckleballer in the Sox farm system.
I’m off to read about Manny and find the Bill James article. Not as good as watching an actual game, but given the horrendous weather here in Massachusetts, it will have to do.
-Ron
Mferguson
17 years ago
Any chance Manny was watching the History Channel in Spanish? “Forbidden City” in Spanish is Ciudad Prohibida. Sounds pretty close to Prohibit City.
nolofinwe
17 years ago
Oh, when you said “comes out tomorrow,” you meant not today. Oops. Here is the article about James – interesting read: The Professor of Baseball.
tinisoli
17 years ago
I’m not too worried about the WEEI crowd trotting out the “Prohibit City” malapropism as a proof of Manny’s idiocy; those philistines are themselves too dumb to know what he was referring to. And in the post-Imus age, nobody’s going to be testing the waters. It would actually be a real sign of progress if every year we didn’t need to have Tim McCarver tell us during a game, or Bob Ryan or Shaughnessy in their columns, that Manny is not actually retarded. It’s a little like the politicians who praise Barack Obama for being “clean” or “articulate.”
britsoxfan
17 years ago
You are teetering on Tom Cruise-style lifts in that photo, Seth.
HFXBOB
17 years ago
Good article. Next thing I’m waiting to see about Manny is some analysis of why he has been getting off to such slow starts the last couple of years. Is it a combination of age and weather? Well, when he does heat up, I’m sure that as Big Papi says (I think), somebody got to pay.
concord2123
17 years ago
Does the article mention how pixellated Manny has become?
kinshane
17 years ago
No matter how silly Manny gets, I love the man. I think it is the fact that I got to see a future first-round Hall of Famer play every time I went to Fenway these past five years. I saw Clemens pitch once and Pedro pitch once. I saw Jim Rice play a bunch of times, but who knows if they’ll ever let him in? He can get stupid and Be Manny all he wants.
Joe in NYC
17 years ago
Since this article came out, just about everybody has been referring to Manny as the best right-handed hitter of the past 20 years, clearly removing from the discussion any comparison to Bonds (and perhaps Griffey or.
But putting aside the Red Sox-Yankees context (and yes, I live in NYC and root for the Yankees, but above all I am a baseball fan), is Ramirez really a better hitter than Rodriguez. Of all the other great right-handed hitters of the past 20 years, Vlad, Bagwell, Piazza, Sheffield, Schmidt, McGwire, the 3 that rise to the top in terms of being the best are Thomas, Manny and ARod.
In terms of OBP*, they are at 424, 410, and 386.
In terms of SLG*, they are at 565, 598, and 576.
*stats through 2006
I would say that Thomas and Manny are pretty even, and ARod seems just a shade worse as a hitter because of his lower OBP.
But what complicates the discussion is their ages: 39, 35, 31. Even though ARod is by far the youngest, he plays the most and has as many plate appearances as does Manny (7841) and is only 2 seasons behind Thomas (9221). He is going to end up with counting stats far and above either Thomas or Manny.
Anyway, makes for a great debate. Are any of them as good as Wagner, FRobinson, or Greenberg were?