Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  The questions, and the day’s routine, began as usual. A promising Red Sox rookie, Jonathan Papelbon, would be making his first big-league appearance as that day’s starting pitcher. Francona had last seen Papelbon pitch during spring training, where the pitcher made a memorable debut. In his first game with major league players, Papelbon threw a fastball up and in on the Orioles’ Sammy Sosa in retaliation for Orioles pitcher Daniel Cabrera hitting Jay Payton earlier in the exhibition game. “I’m trying to get him out,” Papelbon insisted at the time.

  “Your first impression of somebody, you know how it is,” Francona said that morning in his office. “You have to be careful in spring training of doing that…but his first impression was really good.” Francona was about to continue when suddenly Kevin Millar and Manny Ramirez materialized in the doorway.

  “I’m translating,” Millar shouted to the astonished reporters before bursting into his high-pitched, giggly laugh. “I want to introduce you to Manny Ramirez.” Ramirez, who was wearing an All-Star game T-shirt and clutching a bat, grinned his crooked grin and said simply, “I’m back.” Francona gamely played along. “Manny kind of wanted to have an opportunity where me and him were together so people didn’t think we’d want to kill each other,” he explained to the assembled reporters.

  Millar pointed to Ian Browne, a reporter from the Red Sox website, and told him to ask the first question. Browne complied. “Manny, are you still happy with the Red Sox and how do you feel about probably playing the rest of the season?”

  “I want to stay here,” Ramirez said. “I want to help the team win a World Series.”

  “That’s Manny being Manny,” Millar cut in, before shouting out some gibberish in Spanish. “Manny being Manny. There he goes again.”

  The Globe’s Gordon Edes went next. “Manny, there was a story in the Boston Herald that you’re unhappy with the manager, that he doesn’t talk to you, that you’re not his kind of player.” Edes was referring to a story in that morning’s Herald by Michael Silverman, who was sitting a few feet away, in which “a source close to Ramirez, authorized to speak for the slugger” said that Francona and Ramirez “don’t talk” and that the Red Sox manager “had it [in] for Manny for a while…. Francona has one way of thinking and there’s one type of player he wants on his team and that’s not Manny.”

  “Nah, I never said that,” Ramirez said. “My situation with Terry’s perfect, man. I never had no problem. The thing that happened, you know, I was supposed to get Sunday off in Chicago, and I told Tito [Francona], ‘No Tito, I was going to play on Sunday. Why don’t you give me Wednesday off…?’ So, OK, when Trot got hurt, one of the coaches came up to me and said, ‘Do you still want Wednesday off?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ If they came up to me and said, ‘We want you to play Wednesday,’ I’d say, ‘Yeah.’ I’m here to play. I’m here to play. I’m a player. That’s what happens. I’m not here because I don’t want to play or whatever. I’m not that kind of guy.”

  Now the questions came more quickly. Did all the trade talk bother him? “No way, man. I’m strong. I’m just here to play, win. I’m a gangsta.” (“You bet your ass you are,” Francona said.) “I’ve always played the game and have fun. That’s the way I deal with things…. I’m still here. I’m here to win. I’m here to help this team.”

  Millar announced that Ramirez would take one more question. He was asked if the booing on Friday night had bothered him. “It doesn’t bother me, man. This is not my first time, you know, getting booed. The fans, I don’t care about that. I’m just going to go out there and play the game.” With that, Millar announced the interview was over. “We gotta go,” he said. “Thank you guys. Gracias.”

  When Millar and Ramirez left, the assembled reporters looked around the room at one another, utterly confounded. Over the years, there had been no shortage of bizarre scenes in the manager’s office. Once, when asked why he hadn’t been called on to close the first game of Joe Kerrigan’s tenure, Derek Lowe told reporters to “go ask that motherfucker in there.” There was Joe Morgan’s odd repetition of “Six, two, and even,” a nonsense phrase from The Maltese Falcon, and Jimy Williams’s vituperative blasting of his boss, general manager Dan Duquette, during one pregame media session.

  This one, though, might have been the strangest of them all. First there was Ramirez acting as if he wanted to do nothing more than hang out and shoot the breeze with the press. There was Millar, who was constantly reminding reporters of the intangibles he brought to the team during his abysmal first half; this incident almost seemed as if he was trying to show people he was needed to help soothe the moody Ramirez. And even in a sport in which the players were pretty much expected to flat-out lie to the media whenever it suited their needs, the juxtaposition of Ramirez asking one of his confidants to tell a reporter that he and Terry Francona didn’t get along and then refuting the resulting story the very next day was a bit much to take. (“He wasn’t lying,” a reporter said later that day. “He just changed his mind.”)

  Francona did an impressive job acting as if this was nothing out of the ordinary. “Actually, when I was talking to Manny this morning,” he began, subtly referring back to, and refuting, Silverman’s story without actually addressing its content, “he really wants to speak to you guys with me. I think my concern was—first of all, I thought it was pretty cool that he wanted to—but people are going to think, ‘OK, he’s fucking dragging him out there.’ ” That, Francona said, was definitely not the case. “I’m not mad at [Ramirez,]” he said. “We get through these things. But he really wanted to do that, and that’s OK.” So would Ramirez be playing that day? “I’ll see how the day progresses,” Francona said. “I’m not sure I want [Twins manager Ron] Gardenhire to know.”

  When the lineup for that day’s game was posted, Ramirez’s name was missing. Once again John Olerud would bat cleanup behind David Ortiz, with Kevin Millar in left field and Gabe Kapler getting the nod in right. It was, by any measure, an exciting game. Papelbon, the 6-foot-4-inch right-hander the Red Sox had drafted two years earlier, was already drawing comparisons to a young Roger Clemens.* He opened the game by striking out Shannon Stewart with a 95-mile-per-hour fastball; after three shutout innings, he had five strikeouts.

  Still, most of the attention in Fenway was not focused on the field, but on one of the players not in the game. R9 and R10 are the two luxury boxes designated for use by the team’s minority partners. The suites sit down the first base line, just over the Red Sox dugout. From there, one can see across the diamond into L1, Larry Lucchino’s suite, and into the glassed-in owner’s box where John Henry often spends the game. The team’s minority partners knew nothing more than the fans in the park, and when Henry appeared in his box, the partners strained to see if they could learn anything from his appearance. Was he smiling? Did he appear grim? At one point, Theo Epstein walked in and the two men had a brief conversation. Had a deal been made?

  A couple of hundred yards away from the partners suite is the Fenway Park press box, which sits directly behind home plate, above the grandstand and the .406 Club. The front row is reserved for local writers, with preference going to members of the Baseball Writers Association of America* and print reporters who cover the Red Sox for daily papers. The second row seats the overflow local scribes as well as visiting media. The obstructed view rows above are usually first-come, first-served, and generally seat TV and radio reporters. Space is tight even under normal circumstances, and on July 31, the press box was bursting. Most of the reporters were not watching the game; instead, they were emailing sources or ducking out to take cell-phone calls from league officials, all in an effort to glean some intelligence about what to expect. At one point, a rumor began circulating: Bill Mueller would be traded for the Twins’ J. C. Romero. Later, this rumor shifted: It was Kevin Youkilis who was going to be traded. All the while, the latest permutation of this or that Manny Ramirez deal was floated up and batted down.

  Four o’clock came and went. If a trade h
ad been made, it would have to have been completed by then. Mueller remained in the field, meaning he definitely wasn’t going anywhere—a player can’t play for his old team after a trade has been finalized. But Ramirez still hadn’t made an appearance, and everyone remembered how, the year before, the announcement concerning Garciaparra’s trade hadn’t been made until around four thirty.

  By the eighth inning, the score was tied, three all. With the Twins’ Juan Rincon now on the mound, Gabe Kapler led off the inning with a strikeout. That brought up the top of the order, and Johnny Damon grounded out to third base. With two outs and nobody on, Edgar Renteria doubled into center field. David Ortiz was up next, followed by Adam Stern, who’d entered the game as a defensive replacement in the top of the inning.

  When Renteria reached base, Ramirez began prowling around the Red Sox dugout, eventually walking toward the rack of bats. He picked up a batting helmet, then sat back down, grinning. As Ortiz strode to the plate, Stern came out and settled into the on-deck circle. With first base open and two men out, Twins manager Ron Gardenhire ordered Rincon to intentionally walk Ortiz. There wasn’t a manager in baseball who wouldn’t prefer to face the rookie Stern with the game on the line.

  At 4:49 P.M. after the first two intentional balls had been thrown to Ortiz, Ramirez popped out of the dugout, summoning Stern back inside. The cheers in Fenway Park were deafening. “I was confused,” Ortiz said later. Why were the fans suddenly cheering his intentional pass? “I looked back [toward the dugout]. I saw my man.”

  When Ramirez comes to the plate, he’s impassive. Often, he’ll stare vacantly into the crowd, and it’s hard to tell if he’s even fully aware of what’s going on around him. As he walked to the plate, the fans surrounding home plate began maniacally screaming his name. The Fenway Park PA system blasted a couple of chords from “Superman.” If Ramirez noticed any of this, he gave no indication.

  In the Boston dugout, Terry Francona couldn’t help but smile. Despite all his problems with Ramirez, he knew this was a special moment. “You get chills when that stuff’s happening,” he said. “Our dugout was alive. The stadium was alive. That’s as electric as you’ll see.” Papelbon, just a couple of hours removed from his big-league debut, turned to Manny Delcarmen, another rookie pitcher whose first big-league appearance had come just five days earlier. “Man, I got goosebumps,” Papelbon said. Delcarmen laughed. “They’re going up your neck,” Delcarmen said. After the game, Papelbon, a Louisiana native, told a group of reporters about that moment. “Man, I tell you what, he had goosebumps, too,” Papelbon said in his Cajun drawl. “I think, to be honest with you, I bet you everybody on the bench did.”

  Ramirez wears his jersey loose on his frame, and as he walked up to the plate, he shrugged his arms, as if trying to get comfortable. Once in the batter’s box, he squinted at Rincon, as if he couldn’t quite make him out. Rincon, a fastball specialist, reared back and threw one over the plate. Ramirez didn’t lift the bat off his shoulder. Strike one. The next pitch was a bit outside, and Rincon followed that with another fastball for strike two. Three pitches into the at-bat, Ramirez still hadn’t taken a swing.

  Ramirez fouled off the next pitch. In L1, an anxious Larry Lucchino turned to his wife. “Life is not good enough for him to get a hit here,” he said. And then, on Rincon’s fifth pitch to the man often regarded as the best right-handed hitter in the American League, Ramirez stroked another fastball right up the middle. The ball wasn’t hit particularly hard, but it snaked its way over the pitcher’s mound and into center field. On this day, there was no loafing out of the batter’s box. Ramirez took off for first like a man possessed. Renteria, running from second base on contact, scored easily, giving the Red Sox a 4–3 lead. As Ramirez settled onto first, he began clapping, as if congratulating himself for his performance. He took his helmet off, scrunched up his face, and gave his signature doubled-handed point into the Boston dugout. Fenway Park erupted. An inning later, the Sox had won, with Ramirez’s hit providing the deciding edge. After the game, NESN reporter Eric Frede caught up with Ramirez as he walked into the clubhouse. “This is the place to be,” Ramirez said, a huge grin on his face. “Manny being Manny. It’s great, man.”

  In the end, the Mets’ insistence on extra money to offset Ramirez’s salary and the Red Sox’s unwillingness to provide it had been the key factor that killed the most discussed proposed trade. But the money hadn’t been the only consideration. Just as they’d done the year before with Nomar Garciaparra, team officials had quietly polled the other players as to Ramirez’s impact on the clubhouse. Garciaparra had been so bitter and upset that almost everyone agreed he had to go. (His trade had also made the Red Sox a better team.) Ramirez was sometimes frustrating, but he certainly wasn’t poisoning the team.

  Instead of sulking, he was more likely to put his cell-phone camera down his pants, take a picture, and interrupt other players’ interviews to show them the image.* Ramirez may have been inscrutable and sometimes obtuse, but he wasn’t so significant a distraction to his teammates that trading him became imperative. What’s more, a Ramirez trade might have made the Red Sox better in 2007 and 2008, and maybe even in 2006, but it would have almost certainly made the team worse in 2005.

  Another factor impeding potential trades was the issue of Major League Baseball’s new steroid policy. Earlier in the year, baseball and the players association reached an agreement that would allow for random tests during the course of the season and penalties ranging from a 10-day suspension to a year-long ban for those who tested positive. After just a half-season of the new policy, it was clear there were, as one high-ranking official in baseball said, “a lot of players not going on the field with the same support system they once had.” That made searching for artificially undervalued players considerably more difficult. Since Theo Epstein, Josh Byrnes, and Bill James had joined forces two-and-a-half years earlier, they’d been relentless about searching for ways to add impact players at below-market rates. One way they did so was by searching for players who’d had a half-season’s or a season’s worth of performances that were worse than what could be expected from looking at their career trajectories.

  Now, every prolonged slump raised a red flag. If a player averaged more than 30 home runs a year in 2003 and 2004, but hit only a handful before the All-Star break in 2005, was that the result of a tweaked back muscle? Or was it because the player was no longer on steroids? “If you’re looking at a player whose production has dropped suddenly…you have to be concerned about the possibility that there may have been some steroid use involved,” says James.* The Red Sox front office could only guess what was going on among its own players. How could it know what was going on in other clubhouses?*

  In a press conference after the game, Theo Epstein tried to be philosophical about the fact that, for the first time since he’d become general manager, the team had not made a significant trade-deadline deal. “I think it was the ultimate sellers’ market,” he said. “If you’re a buyer and you’re in the ultimate sellers’ market, it’s hard to make a fair deal. It’s hard to make a deal that doesn’t hurt you more than helps you. I kind of liken it to if you need a carton of milk and put five bucks in your pocket and go to the store…and all of a sudden milk is $100, you may walk out of that store without some milk. That’s what we did.” Soon, Epstein’s colleagues had fashioned a sign that read MILK—$100 and put it in the window of his office. It would remain there for the rest of the season.

  *The 2005 trade deadline was, for all intents and purposes, the last time Ramirez could be traded by the Red Sox without his permission. Ramirez doesn’t have a no-trade clause in his contract, but he’d become a “10-5” player at the conclusion of the 2005 season, with at least 10 years of service time in the major leagues, of which the last five were with the same team.

  *The Herald’s Michael Silverman reported several days later that the confrontation began when Ortiz said, of that day’s Tampa Bay pitcher, “Man, that guy’s got some
nasty stuff,” to which Schilling responded, “Yeah, that’s why Manny took the day off.” According to Silverman’s article, Ramirez then said to Schilling, “Screw you, I can hit anyone in baseball, including your ass.”

  *Considering the eagerness for material, it’s confusing that no media outlet has seen it fit to assign a Spanish-speaking reporter to the team. In 2005, not a single regular Red Sox beat reporter spoke Spanish, the native language of a third of the Red Sox regular starting lineup: David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, and Edgar Renteria. Former Boston Herald columnist Howard Bryant, who often wrote about the Sox, is fluent in Spanish.

  †On September 21, 2000, many reporters missed Carl Everett’s violent tirade at teammate Darren Lewis because it occurred before the first game of a rare weekday doubleheader. Expecting upward of 10 hours at the ballpark, a number of the Red Sox beat reporters opted to skip the normal pregame clubhouse ritual.

  *Papelbon is unquestionably a poised, dynamic pitcher, but the comparisons to Clemens say more about how the local press invariably hypes players than it does about his actual ability. At this point in his career, Papelbon’s only truly outstanding pitch is his fastball, though his split-fingered fastball has shown marked improvement; in 2005, his breaking pitches were still very much works in progress. A pitcher might be a successful reliever with only one plus pitch, but it’s unlikely he’ll be a dominant starter, never mind one of the best pitchers to play the game.

  *The BBWAA was founded in 1908 as a way for writers to guarantee themselves access to press boxes and clubhouses. Membership is limited to daily print reporters who cover baseball as a beat writer, columnist, features writer, or editor, although members who leave the daily print world to cover baseball for the Internet or a magazine can retain membership. BBWAA members vote on most of baseball’s major awards, including the MVP, Cy Young, Rookie of the Year, and Manager of the Year, and writers who’ve had membership for 10 years are eligible to vote on whether players should be elected to the Hall of Fame.