Apres Moi, le Deluge

Idle hands, the cliché goes, are the devil’s plaything, and that seems about as true in the sports world as anywhere else. All-Star breaks, the lead up to the NBA and NFL draft (and I hear the bars of Saskatoon and Belarus are CRAZY before the NHL draft), and the interminable stretch between playoff rounds are like a semi-annual call to boredom-bred foolishness for athletes and their journalistic enablers, and while it wasn’t exactly the A-Fraud opt-out, dinner and dancing with Pacman and Ray Lewis, or a leisurely evening drive with Eugene Robinson, Tim McCarver got things going this week by saying of Manny’s pre-trade antics: “some of the things he did were simply despicable, despicable—like not playing, refusing to play. Forgetting what knee to limp on.”

Initially this didn’t seem like anything worth writing about. Tim McCarver—the guy whose criticism of Deion Sanders playing football and baseball on the same day prompted Neon to dump three buckets of water on him after a the Braves won the 1992 NLCS—criticized a player? Tim McCarver, the bloviating expounder of endless platitudinous moralisms made incendiary remarks in an interview? About a player he’s about to cover? Really? McCARVER?!

But what got me going was this post from the usually solid Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus:
In July, when Ramirez was supposedly “refusing to play,” the Red Sox played 24 games. Ramirez played in 22 of them. This was tied for fourth on the team with J.D. Drew and Jacoby Ellsbury. He was sixth on the team in plate appearances (AB+BB) in July. Not quite Lou Gehrig’s numbers, but he helped out a bit more than David Ortiz (six games), and was in the lineup somewhat more often than peers such as Moises Alou (one game). Oh, he didn’t get three days off in the middle of the month-Ramirez played in the All-Star Game.

When he played, Ramirez killed the league. He hit .347/.473/.587 in July. His OBP led the team, and his SLG led all Red Sox with at least 25 AB. The Sox, somewhat famously, went 11-13 in July. Lots of people want you to believe that was because Manny Ramirez is a bad guy. I’ll throw out the wildly implausible idea that the Sox went 11-13 because Ortiz played in six games and because veterans Mike Lowell and Jason Varitek has sub-600 OPSs for the month.

Four days before he was traded, Manny Ramirez just about single-handedly saved the Red Sox from getting swept by the Yankees, with doubles in the first and third innings that helped the Sox get out to a 5-0 lead in a game they had to win to stay ahead of the Yankees in the wild-card race.

If all of the above is “refusing to play,” I would sincerely like to see what “trying” looks like. It would be entertaining to see a player post a .600 OBP or .800 SLG.

On second thought, they’d probably just blacklist him.

What Tim McCarver said wasn’t interesting because it was completely expected. He’s been saying the same stuff about Manny for years, whether it was the back-pocket water bottle, disappearing into the Monster, or that time Manny beat up the 10-year-old kid with cancer. That McCarver would say the same stuff now, right before he’s announcing the series Manny is playing in, when more controversy just means more ratings, was almost a foregone conclusion. Sheehan on the other hand is a different story and worse than just being predictable, he’s being hypocritical, engaging in the same kind of shortsighted, misleading pandering to his audience as the sports moralizers of the world do to their, very different, audiences.

If you’re bored enough for my full take on the Manny trade click here, but if not here’s the gist: Manny’s childishness and Boras’ lust for power (it’s bigger than just greed, he’s got enough money, it’s control he constantly needs more of) were ultimately to blame, but the Sox should have known better and handled it completely differently (feigning shock that Manny behaved childishly or that Boras would mastermind a dodg(er)y power play is about as compelling as Alan Greenspan’s excuse for the economic collapse: How could anyone guessed that Wall Street traders would get greedy? Also in today’s news: local man consumes beer; local fire consumes oxygen, carbon).


Bringing it back to Sheehan though, the thing that he and all writers, reporters, commentators, tv pundits, etc. have in common is that they write/perform to an audience, and they choose their narrative and tone accordingly. One of the easiest poses to strike when dealing with a very large audience is easy moralizing and righteous indignation (see: SpyGate, the New York Post, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, every political candidate ever). McCarver, who appeals to a broad audience of sports fans (and there’s nothing we love more than good guy-bad guy morality tales), has taken that same easy tact with Manny for years, and now the stakes are a bit higher and he amped up the rhetoric.

Joe Sheehan on the other hand writes for a smaller, wonkier publication geared towards readers less interested in moralizing. By and large the BP readership is adept with numbers, has an over-fondness for counter-intuitive narratives, doesn’t necessarily put as much stock in actually watching the games as adding up statistics, and tends to be pretty sensitive to what many perceive as racially-tinged comments about the work ethic of black and Latino players made by “hustle and bunt” old-head white guys like McCarver who spend a lot of time talking about respecting the game. And here Sheehan’s pandered to his audience as blatantly as McCarver (he even makes an allusion to Barry Bonds at the end!). Worse, Sheehan manipulates the facts to make his point.

Let’s start with his first line about Manny “supposedly ‘refusing to play.’” McCarver’s reference was to July 23-25th, when with lineup cards already made out, in two consecutive games against the Mariners and Yankees (and perhaps more notably, King Felix and Joba) Manny said he couldn’t play because of a right knee injury that came out of the blue, which he didn’t seek any treatment for, couldn’t be shown on an MRI, allegedly switched from knee to knee depending on how much Manny was paying attention at the moment, and which mysteriously cleared up as soon as he was threatened with financial sanctions for not playing and later traded. If someone can explain to me how this doesn’t constitute “refusing to play” (without using a bizarre definition of ‘refusing’ that doesn’t take passive-aggressive indirection into account) then please, I’m all ears.

So it would seem hard to attack McCarver on the facts; none of us can absolutely, 100% know for sure that Manny was faking it, but your average jury would convict him faster than OJ (the second time). The conclusion McCarver drew from those facts (that Manny’s behavior was “despicable”) you could easily disagree with, but Sheehan still goes after the “refusing to play” line in a manner Benjamin Disraeli (who coined the line about there being three kinds of deceptions, “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”) would have loved. His conclusion: that Manny played in all but two games in July, and killed the ball at the plate. What this has to do with refusing to play in the two games he did miss I have no idea—if you refused to show up to work two days in a row but did a really good job the other days, would that mean you actually did show up to work on those two other days? Didn’t think so.

Of course anyone who was watching in July already knows how well Many was hitting. The most excruciating thing about Manny’s standoff was that for every John Lackey ground ball he could have legged out and 1-0 Yankee loss he refused to pinch hit in (shades of Nomahh…) he had two games where he absolutely crushed the ball—like that third game against the Yanks that Sheehan mentioned. He was toying with the team at that point—“Look how good I can be, if only you make me happy…” Sheehan makes a half-hearted attempt at making the stats relevant to his argument by saying that “a lot of people” blame the Sox 11-13 record in July entirely on Manny and not on injuries to Lowell and Ortiz and lackluster play from guys like Varitek. Who are the people making these claims? What did they say? When did they say it? Was McCarver one of them? No one knows, but take Sheehan’s word for it, they’re out there!

I’m piling on Sheehan unfairly here because he’s not the only sportswriter writing lazy articles criticizing other lazy sportswriters in the “I’m Angry that You’re Angry” Meta-Humbrage Pageant. The earliest (and one of the worst) came in another quality, counter-intuitive loving online mag, Slate, written by the Sunday Globe’s Charles P. Pierce. It was full of the same kind of arguing against unnamed, unsubstantiated “lots of people” as Sheehan’s piece—the subtitle of the article was, “WHO’S CRAZIER, MANNY RAMIREZ OR THE BOSTON FANS WHO GREW TO DESPISE HIM?” and then goes on to not name a single fan, and stands up Gammons and Gerry Callahan as the sole examples of Manny bashing. Pierce also goofs some basic facts of the trade—like saying Manny was upset that the Sox hadn’t picked up his option yet, when in fact he was upset that they might pick it up and demanded it be dropped from his contract before he’d agreed to the trade to LA.

And while Sheehan’s stats were irrelevant to the point he was making, at least they were legit stats, Pierce throws out the ever useless Jason Bay has a “.216 average with men in scoring position this season.” What, Joe Morgan and the Elias Sports Bureau weren’t available to tell us Bay hits .137 with runners on the corners in the first three innings of games played in stadiums with more than 15 used car lots within a two mile radius?

And Sheehan and Pierce are far from the only ones (I won’t name or quote them but trust me, they’re out there!). Thankfully there’s been at least one level-headed, in depth take on the life and times of Manny from Bill Simmons. He’s a little harsh on Epstein, could throw a few more plaudits Bay’s way, but has some great sourcing, previously unreported anecdotes, is one of the only people to point out how the Sox inadvertently incentivized Manny’s pouting, and he has a great random point about the changing makeup of the Sox over the last few years: “more happy-to-be-there youngsters and businesslike veterans, considerably fewer Latinos and free spirits—guys who seemed woefully ill-equipped to handle Hurricane Manny.” Didn’t even make the over-the-top reference to Heckuva Job Brownie. With the level of reporting out there it’s no wonder Simmons is fast becoming the Jon Stewart of sports: he isn’t a traditional reporter but really more of a comedian by trade and yet along with being funnier and a much smoother writer than most of the supposed pros and experts, he’s actually beating them at their own game.