Manny is Manny

There was an article in the Onion about Manny Ramirez that tipped the scales to me posting about him. Check out this article in the New Yorker which includes such quotes as:

When I asked his teammate David Ortiz, himself a borderline folk hero, how he would describe Ramirez, he replied, “As a crazy motherfucker.” Then he pointed at my notebook and said, “You can write it down just like that: ‘David Ortiz says Manny is a crazy motherfucker.’"

And...

After the third such incident, Duquette ventured down into the locker room. “I said, ‘Manny, let me ask you something. I was just wondering why you get back in the batter’s box after ball four.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the balls.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the strikes, either, until I got two.’"

There's been a lot of talk about Manny's real value. No one contests that he's a great hitter, but his issues playing defense are also well-known. An article in the nyt (registration required) claimed that his defense made him a merely average player. Turns out, the metric was seriously flawed, as it was designed such that Manny was responsible for catching walls that hit twenty feet up the Green Monster (see post 27 - though the importance of that is still in some dispute).

All this being said, Manny signed a huge, long-term contract in 2000, and I think the most exceptional thing is that for every one of those years he's performed exactly as expected the day the contract was signed. Crazy motherfucker and all.