He's got to be a bad guy, doesn't he?
The Boston Red Sox disrupt a heated playoff run by trading their cleanup hitter, paying the Dodgers to take one of the premier hitters of our generation off their hands, so you figure Manny Ramirez must be quite the disgruntled employee.
"The Red Sox don't deserve a player like me," Ramirez told ESPN the other day. "During my years here, I've seen how they have mistreated other great players when they didn't want them, to try to turn the fans against them.
"The Red Sox did the same with guys like Nomar Garciaparra and Pedro Martinez, and now they do the same with me. Their goal is to paint me as the bad guy."
This could be Manny being Manny. Or this could be the Red Sox being the Red Sox.
"There's a lot of truth to what he said," Garciaparra said at his Dodger Stadium locker Thursday, two hours after the Dodgers acquired Ramirez. "I can definitely understand and relate. Maybe he'll be next to me [in an adjacent locker], and we can chat and laugh about it."
The Red Sox rid themselves of a contract dispute by trading Garciaparra at the deadline four years ago, and they rid themselves of another one Thursday.
"Manny said he didn't want to leave there," Garciaparra said. "I didn't want to leave there. . . . Were we the only ones that have gone through it? There's a track record. I played with Mo [Vaughn]. I played with Roger [Clemens]."
The Red Sox have not cornered the market on bitter divorces with hometown heroes. Mike Piazza, anyone? Steve Garvey?
Piazza and Garvey prospered after the Dodgers abandoned them, and Ramirez could thrive in L.A. We love our entertainers, after all, and now the Dodgers have a left fielder whose Wikipedia entry includes a lengthy section entitled "Manny Moments."
There was the time he chatted on a cellphone during a pitching change. There was the time he took the field waving an American flag, on the day after he became a U.S. citizen.
On Wednesday, amid a flurry of trade rumors, he held up a sign reading, "I'm going to Green Bay for Brett Favre straight up!"
"He'll fit right in in L.A.," outfielder Matt Kemp said, "because L.A. loves things like that."
We love our stars too. Ramirez is a 12-time All-Star, with two World Series championship rings and 24 home runs in 95 postseason games.
