Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  On May 14, Ramirez, who had resumed his habit of avoiding the media, granted a rare interview to The Boston Globe’s Chris Snow as the Red Sox were getting ready to take batting practice at Seattle’s Safeco Field. There was a reason, Ramirez told Snow, he’d been slumping. “My mom’s been real sick,” Ramirez said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that. She’s now getting better. Like, what’s the name of the disease? She’s got a disease. She can’t move with her legs. It’s a weird name. She’s getting better. She’s got to get a lot of massages.” Is it arthritis? Snow asked. “Yeah, yeah, arthritis,” Ramirez answered. As for the grandmother whose illness caused him to skip out on the White House trip, Ramirez explained, “They’ve got to change her blood, stuff like that. She’s like 90 years old.”

  Ramirez’s unburdening did not appreciably change his performance on the field. In mid-June, he was still hitting only around .250. On June 20, the North Andover Eagle-Tribune’s John Tomase wrote what many in the Red Sox front office were privately thinking: “The free pass Ramirez has received this season from the fans, the media, and his teammates is mystifying…. Manny Ramirez does not care this season.” With three-and-a-half years left on Ramirez’s $160 million contract, Boston’s front office was worried it could be saddled with an immature, expensive albatross for years to come. Then, suddenly, and for no discernible reason, Ramirez seemed to awaken from his stupor. By July 26, he’d raised his batting average to .275, and was on pace to hit 44 home runs and 147 runs batted in on the season. In just the previous 36 games, he’d hit 16 home runs—almost one every other game.

  On the night of the 26th, Ramirez came to bat in the top of the 10th inning of what was by then a 9–8 game in Tampa Bay. Ramirez had some history in Tampa. Three years earlier, it had been here that Ramirez failed even to leave the batter’s box after hitting a ground ball. It had been one of Ramirez’s most criticized moves as a member of the Red Sox, and led to a confrontation with then-manager Grady Little. Surely, there would be no repeats on this night. He’d already hit one home run, and the game was shaping up to be one that would have far-reaching consequences for the Red Sox season. In the top of the third inning, right fielder Trot Nixon clutched at his side after taking a vicious swing; he’d strained his oblique muscle and would be out for several weeks. The loss of Nixon, along with the absence of Jay Payton, who’d successfully bullied his way out of town (he had been traded to the Oakland A’s for pitcher Chad Bradford), meant that the Red Sox’s once-deep bench was suddenly looking perilously thin.

  Then, in the bottom of the third, a Carl Crawford line drive hit Red Sox pitcher Matt Clement on the right side of the head. The ball was moving so fast, the sound of it striking Clement’s skull was clearly audible on the television replays, and it ricocheted with such force that it ended up in shallow left field. Clement, one of the bright spots on Boston’s beleaguered pitching staff, crumpled to the ground, where he lay for more than five minutes. While he never lost consciousness, he was eventually ushered off the field on a stretcher and taken to a local hospital.

  By Ramirez’s at-bat in the 10th inning, the game had already seesawed back and forth many times. A loss, the Red Sox knew, would push the team into second place. With Edgar Renteria on first with one out, Ramirez tapped a ball to second base for what looked to be an inning-ending double play. And, while he didn’t stand in the batter’s box, his lackadaisical jog down to first base was less than inspiring. At the time, the play received little notice; an error by the Devil Rays second baseman meant Ramirez made it safely to first base in any case. Compared to everything else that had transpired that night, Ramirez’s lack of hustle hardly seemed worth special attention.

  For the team executives and the members of the Sox baseball operations office, however, it was an ominous sight. Tom Verducci’s report had indeed been accurate: Less than a week earlier, before a game at Fenway, Ramirez had, once again, asked the Red Sox for a trade. That night, Theo Epstein, Larry Lucchino, and Tom Werner met with Ramirez in a private room off of the Red Sox clubhouse. Ramirez, still dressed in his baseball pants, began by praising the owners. “You guys are awesome,” he said. “The whole time I’ve been here, you guys have been awesome to me. But I can’t take Boston anymore. I can’t even take my kid to the park without being bothered. I need to get out of here.” Ramirez said there were a handful of teams he was willing to play for, and rattled off the Texas Rangers, the Toronto Blue Jays, the Cleveland Indians, the Florida Marlins, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, the Seattle Mariners, and, possibly, the New York Mets.

  By that time, one of Ramirez’s representatives had already told the Red Sox there was a chance that, if Ramirez wasn’t traded, he’d simply “shut it down.” “The threat [of refusing to play] was always implicit,” says Lucchino, speaking of Ramirez’s previous trade demands. “But this was a little more specific. We were obviously concerned.” That night, Epstein, Lucchino, and Werner agreed they would explore the issue. “There’s always been some interest on the part of Theo and the baseball ops people in particular to have greater payroll flexibility going forward,” says Lucchino. “So the issue of trading Manny has been debated. And [our coaching staff] at this point was…frustrated by Manny, so we felt we had to seriously examine it.”

  Lucchino was most in favor of holding onto the star, as he had been during the Pedro Martinez negotiations. “I’ve always been the most reluctant and most conservative on this issue,” he says, but even he was worried by Ramirez’s lollygagging. “I thought, ‘What the heck was that?’ ” Lucchino says of Ramirez’s performance in Tampa Bay. The team had begun documenting the various ways in which they’d bent over backward to try to accommodate Ramirez. If at some point he did flat-out refuse to play, the Sox wanted to be able to demonstrate their efforts during a possible suspension hearing.

  On Wednesday, July 27, the Red Sox’s worst fears seemed to be realized. With the team battling for first place and Trot Nixon unable to play, Ramirez, according to Terry Francona, said he needed the night off. Before Tuesday’s game, Francona acknowledged, he’d told Ramirez he’d be rested the next day. But, Francona said, Nixon’s injury changed the situation. “[Tuesday] night after the game I kind of went to him and said, ‘How do you feel? Because we’ve got obvious issues,’ ” Francona later told the press. “He said, ‘I still need it.’ So we’re giving it to him.”

  On July 26, the Red Sox fielded a team whose outfield had hit a cumulative 669 home runs and appeared in 11 All-Star games. The next night, the Sox were forced to rely on an outfield that had slugged 433 fewer home runs and appeared in nine fewer All-Star games. In right field, rookie Adam Stern would be making the second start of his career. Ramirez’s mercurial behavior was, by this point, even causing strife between him and his teammates. That afternoon before the game, according to the Globe’s Chris Snow, Curt Schilling and Ramirez got into such a heated confrontation they had to be separated by David Ortiz.*

  The next day, Thursday, July 28, was a travel day for the Red Sox, as the team returned to Boston to prepare for a three-game series against the Minnesota Twins, but the absence of a game didn’t mean the team wasn’t generating headlines. That morning, Larry Lucchino confirmed on his weekly radio appearance on WEEI that Ramirez had asked for a trade. “Our general response was, ‘It’s that time of year,’ and we’ll explore it as we explore other trades,” he said. Lucchino’s acknowledgment, confirmed later that day by Charles Steinberg, stood in contrast to what Theo Epstein was telling reporters: “It would be wise for us to refrain from talking to the media until Sunday night,” after the trade deadline had passed.

  Lucchino’s statements to WEEI, coupled with what Ramirez saw as Francona’s unfair characterization of their interaction, only exacerbated the situation. It was true that Ramirez and Francona had previously agreed that Ramirez would get Wednesday night off. What was not true, however, was Francona’s implication that he had personally appealed to Ramirez to play after Nixon had gotten injured. In fac
t, it was Francona’s bench coach, Brad Mills, who had asked Ramirez following Tuesday’s game if he still wanted Wednesday night off. Ramirez, apparently not realizing Nixon’s injury would keep him out of the lineup, said yes. If he’d been told Nixon was unavailable, Ramirez said, he would have agreed to play. Ramirez now told Red Sox officials he wouldn’t play again until he received a public apology from Francona. On Thursday night and for much of Friday, Epstein and other Red Sox executives were in near-constant contact with Ramirez and his representatives. At one point, Epstein even went over to Ramirez’s apartment to lobby the petulant slugger.

  By Friday, July 29, with a game scheduled for that night at Fenway, the Red Sox still weren’t sure what Ramirez would—or wouldn’t—do. “Manny’s going to come to the ballpark,” Lucchino remembers thinking. “Are we going to have an incident? Are we going to have an episode?” In fact, Ramirez had changed his mind again, and had sent word to Epstein that he did not, in fact, want to play for the Mets, the Red Sox’s most likely trade partner. Now he said he would prefer to stay with the Red Sox.

  Of the four major North American professional sports leagues, Major League Baseball gives its fans the greatest illusion of intimacy with its players. Baseball’s 162-game regular season is almost twice as long as basketball’s and hockey’s 82-game seasons, while football players suit up for a mere 16 non-playoff games a year. The rhythms of the game and the all-encompassing nature of its coverage help foster this sense of closeness between fans and players. When a pitcher steps off the mound with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, you can watch as he takes a deep breath, screws up his courage, and enters back into the fray. Every player on the diamond spends much of every game standing on the field waiting for something to happen. These are times in which he can be observed, times in which small quirks of his personality come through. Depending on the length of a team’s playoff run, a committed fan could spend eight months of every year watching their favorite players perform for several hours a day, no fewer than five times a week. It’s not unheard of for a baseball fan to spend more hours each year watching his team play than interacting with his family.

  The perception of ubiquitous accessibility has become an integral part of both the game’s marketing and its appeal. In baseball, even preseason exhibition workouts are an attraction. Every year, a couple of weeks before spring training games begin, thousands of fans head to Florida and Arizona to watch their preferred teams go through hour after hour of throwing, catching, and hitting drills. Baseball, fighting to compete with flashier (and less time-consuming) entertainment options, has become dependent on feeding this intimacy as a way of highlighting its uniqueness.

  That’s where the media comes into play. In addition to a seat in the press box, accredited reporters get access to the home and visiting teams’ clubhouses. Fenway’s clubhouse is notoriously cramped. The manager’s office is on one side, and the showers and trainer’s room on the other; locker stalls line the walls. In a given year, the average Red Sox player will spend anywhere from 650 to 900 hours during the regular season in a baseball clubhouse, with a little less than half of those hours at Fenway and the rest divided among spring training sites and other ballparks. On a typical game day, with a scheduled 7:05 P.M. first pitch, players arrive anywhere from noon to three. Some make the clubhouse a virtual second home: They eat there, they watch television there, they do crosswords and Sudokus and talk on cell phones there. Others scramble in just in time to shower, change, and get out on the field for batting practice.

  For around 500 of those hours—for three hours during every one of the 162 regular season games a year—dozens of reporters are there as well. In Boston, a handful of reporters are usually waiting outside the clubhouse doors for 3:30 P.M., when they’re officially allowed in. By that time, NESN broadcaster Jerry Remy, a former Red Sox second baseman, has already been hanging out for a half-hour or so. From three thirty to four, the crowd slowly grows, until anywhere from 10 to 25 scribes are waiting expectantly as baseball players shower and change around them. During this time, there’s an unwritten set of rules that dictates behavior. Don’t approach a player if he’s naked. Don’t approach a player if he’s eating or on the couch watching television. If a reporter working on a feature or a scoop approaches a player whom other reporters have no special reason to speak with, keep your distance. If a reporter approaches a player who is in the news for some reason—a recent injury, a particularly good (or bad) performance—then he’s fair game, and everyone is allowed to join in the fun.

  Much of the time, the reporters are playing a defensive game:* They’re there because they want to make sure their competitors don’t get an exclusive by witnessing a juicy scene,† even though many of the juiciest will never see print. Ballplayers will occasionally joke about needing to figure out a way to get tickets to that day’s game for both a wife and a mistress, or openly mock former teammates (and supposed friends) who have the misfortune of having a blunder broadcast on the clubhouse’s flat-screen television, or speculate about this or that player’s reliance on steroids. None of this sees the light of day. If a beat reporter were ever to print any truly salacious detail, he would be frozen out and would find it almost impossible to continue to cover the team.

  At 4:00 P.M. the reporters are herded into Terry Francona’s office, where they ask a handful of rote questions, ranging from “what are you expecting tonight” to “were you happy with how the team performed yesterday.” At 4:35, the media is shooed out of the clubhouse, only to reassemble on the field as the team takes batting practice. An hour later, they’re allowed back inside until 6:15, and then are allowed in again for an hour after the night’s game is done.

  On July 29, the mood in the Red Sox clubhouse was as tense as it had been all year. In addition to the speculation about Ramirez, there were rumors that Boston was on the verge of trading Bill Mueller to the Twins, that weekend’s opponent, for a left-handed pitcher. According to scuttlebutt, Kevin Millar was also being shopped around. That afternoon, Millar came out of the showers, looked at the throng of reporters, and bellowed at the top of his lungs, “GET OUT! GET OUT! GET YOUR STORIES AND GET OUT!”

  At first, it was hard to tell if Millar was joking or not. Since arriving at the Red Sox, Millar had been a media magnet, helping draw the spotlight away from those players, like Ramirez, who didn’t want the attention. Even when the press wasn’t around, his natural disposition helped keep the clubhouse loose. But now, watching him rant, even his teammates seemed a bit tired of his act. “You are the story,” Mike Timlin muttered beneath his breath.

  And then, as quickly as his outburst had begun, it was over. Millar quickly flashed a smile at the quizzical group of reporters and headed over to his locker. Still, when one writer approached him a couple of minutes later, he begged off for perhaps the first time since arriving in Boston. “I’m not talking today,” he explained. “I’m taking a day off.” He soon canceled most of his previously scheduled interviews for the weekend.

  After three days of hearing accounts of how Ramirez didn’t like playing in Boston and had refused to play in a game a few days earlier, after watching countless replays of his July 26 stroll down to first base, the fans weren’t in the best of moods, either. That night, during an 8–5 Boston victory, Ramirez was heartily booed for the first time in his career with the Red Sox.

  Ramirez may have decided that he’d rather stay in Boston, but unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. For the past several days, Epstein had been hard at work on a three-team trade with the Devil Rays and the New York Mets. Boston would send Ramirez to New York and some prospects to Tampa, and would receive in return outfielder Mike Cameron and prospect Lastings Milledge from the Mets, and the Devil Rays left-handed slugger, Aubrey Huff.

  “At that point…we told [Ramirez] to take a couple of days off to clear his head,” says John Henry. They decided Ramirez should take both the Saturday and Sunday games off. Since Monday was an off day, that meant Ramirez w
ould play in only one game between Wednesday, July 27, and Monday, August 1. If a trade didn’t work out and Ramirez was going to be sticking around, the team wanted to do what it could to try to soothe the situation. “Once we knew he [might be] staying, we sort of had this issue,” says Lucchino. “Would Manny be upset? Would he be a problem?” The time off, the team hoped, would show Ramirez they were willing to do whatever they could for him.

  The media, of course, were told none of this. When, just before game time on Saturday, July 30, the Fenway Park public address announcer gave the game’s lineups, Ramirez was announced as playing left field and batting cleanup. But when the players took the field a couple of minutes later, it was Millar who jogged out to left and John Olerud who was playing first base and batting fourth. Naturally, Ramirez’s absence fueled rumors that a trade was imminent—why else wouldn’t he be playing? After the game, as the Red Sox celebrated their 6–2 victory, Ramirez unexpectedly emerged from the Boston dugout to congratulate his teammates. The Fenway crowd, now seemingly worried they were on the verge of losing one of the premier hitters in the game, serenaded Ramirez on a night he didn’t play a day after booing him in a game in which he did.

  The next morning, the day of the trade deadline, Terry Francona met with the press for his daily pregame briefing. Francona’s Fenway office is a cramped, characterless place, with hardly enough room for a desk, a shower stall, a small couch, and a couple of chairs, not to mention the dozen or so reporters who squeeze in for these daily sessions. After the print reporters are finished asking their questions, the TV and radio crews file in and Francona does the whole thing all over again. It’s a tedious process.

  That Sunday, at least twice as many reporters as usual had crammed into Francona’s office, all anticipating a possible repeat of 2004’s last-minute Garciaparra trade. The local papers had doubled their representatives, and many of the national and New York–based media outlets had sent people as well. As Francona surveyed the scene, he couldn’t help himself. “Holy shit,” he muttered. “Fuck. I think the best I can hope for is one of you bumps each other and gets into a fight.”