BF GIS HoF: MANNY RAMIREZ

Manny Ramirez: Too Beautiful for Baseball

"Ramirez steps to the plate looking like an unmade bed," as Tom Cheek used to say.

It was surprising, for about a second, to learn yesterday that Manny Ramirez had chosen to retire rather than be suspended for failing another drug test. If it was anybody else, you might have been genuinely puzzled at how this could have happened, but because it was Manny it didn't take all that long to get from disbelief to acceptance on this one, did it? And now, so many feelings. You are welcome to debate where Ramirez, one of the game's all-time great right-handed hitters, is likely to stand with Hall of Fame voters now, and you can talk about tarnished legacies or whatever if that is your preference. But my hope is that you will join me in focusing on what I believe really matters here, and that is that Manny Ramirez was hilarious and awesome, almost unprecedented levels of both. I ask you to love Manny. Love him.


I also ask you to have a look at this Ben McGrath article from 2007, because it owns. 


KS

Memories From When The Game Was Pure, Or: The Complete Leave The Memories Alone Series

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Remember how Barry Bonds totally took some stuff and then said he didn't know what it was?

Looks like crazy chest hair at first, but I think he's just standing behind a fuzzy headed person.

You could be forgiven for not realizing that the Barry Bonds perjury trial is underway, but a jury has been selected and everything. This thing is happening. Stephen Brunt has it right in the Globe and Mail, though, when he says (or I guess the headline writer does, but whatever), "Bonds hits court, and the world yawns."  Pretty much!  I mean, make no mistake, I think it would be kind of awesome if he was found guilty -- not because it will have made any of this worthwhile or anything, except for the sake of lolz, which is an end in and of itself I suppose -- but I'm actually way more into the looming Roger Clemens case, just because Clemens has so thoroughly played himself in all of this that it's going to be a much better show. If Bonds perjured himself, he totally did it in his own idiom, which is not caring at all what you or anyone else thought about him, or about anything, really.  Bonds' perjury, if that's what it is, is a perjury of not giving a fuck: "Not that I recall," "No," "No, no," and "Right" are the four counts of perjury.  That's kind of awesome, and way cooler than Roger Clemens' (alleged) perjury, which revealed him to be a total carelord.  Watch again, if you haven't recently, the testimony that got him charged with obstruction of congress (obstruction of congress!), and it's like, well done, your carelordship. 


Anyway, they're both probably going to go down.  Or maybe they'll both get off, who cares?  I don't, really.  But I think it's worth noting that, yeah, the specific ways these guys perjured themselves (allegedly) is revealing of their characters. Bonds: so arrogant that, strangely, you almost admire it. Clemens: such a try-hard that you can't help but feel even worse than you already did for poor Mindy McCready, who Clemens may have had a decade-long affair with, but who he totally didn't statutorily rape, right?


KS

Gregg Zaun: Another Guy Who Retired

Man the light is shitty in the Dome when the roof is closed. Also, a bat!

Gregg Zaun retired yesterday, which is fine.  He's been around for kind of a long time.  He was a solid backup catcher -- which means you can start in Toronto -- who got on base a little bit.  But he's also, like, just a little bit of a douche, or at least he played one on TV in his role as Rogers Sportsnet in-studio playoff analyst alongside the ginger menace Jamie Campbell (who used to do Blue Jays play-by-play, and whose home run call sucked, and so he got shitcanned).  People seemed to like Zaun in really dumb pinstriped suits pontificating about whatever, but I generally didn't (who cares, I know, fine). He is partially redeemed by the Flash-intro genius of his personal website, which suggests an IRL Kenny Powers level of self awareness.  "Bring your Z-Game!"  Join the "Zaunbie Nation" fan club!  Etc.! 

The thing I like best about Gregg Zaun, though, is that he was named in the Mitchell Report, and handled it really, really badly. The accusation was that he'd bought steroids and paid for them with a cheque (who wouldn't? cheques are convenient as hell), and then when asked about it, said, first, "If you want to investigate what is going on in the game of baseball right now, fine, but what happened years ago, who cares?" and then, "You're talking about one check of thousands that I've written over the last seven years. I'm supposed to recall why and when and to whom and where?" Ahahahahaha awesome. Eventually he came out with a pretty plausible story, really, and I neither know nor care whether or not Gregg Zaun purchased or used performance enhancing drugs.  If that is something that you care deeply about you should ask yourself if you are spending enough time thinking about foreign policy, or, like, Proust. But that was the career highlight from my perspective, the aftermath of the Mitchell Report.  Zaun himself was probably way more into the 1997 World Series, but whatever.        

KS