In 2004, I asked the New England Sports Fan Friend if he thought Manny Ramirez had ever used steroids.
“I don’t think Manny has the long-range planning skills needed to do something like that,” he said.
I nodded. This made perfect sense, and stuck to the time-honored Manny narrative, which goes something like this: Manny is an idiot. His one gift in life is hitting. He doesn’t need steroids to hit the way he does. But if he did, he wouldn’t be smart enough to take them. Therefore, Manny’s stupidity makes him honest.
This is a pleasant enough narrative, one that allowed Red Sox fans to blissfully believe that the teams that won the World Series were clean and pure — that they were somehow superior to the teams that triumphed with juicers such as Jason Giambi. But as everybody now knows, Manny recently tested positive for HCG — a female fertility drug typically used by steroid users to restore testosterone. And although no evidence has surfaced (so far) indicating that Manny was on steroids during the 2004 World Series, for which he was named MVP, it’s a little naive to think he started using when he joined the Dodgers.
Of course, maybe he did. What do I know? But I tend to agree with the Boston Globe’s Tony Massarotti, who wrote, “In what would be the ultimate act of selfishness, maybe Manny Ramirez took some of the shine with him. Maybe he scuffed up those World Series trophies. Maybe he tarnished what is the Golden Age of Red Sox baseball by being, for a lack of a better word, dirty. ... Now that Ramirez is playing elsewhere — or, rather, sitting — some of us are all too willing to celebrate the fact that the Red Sox traded him just in the nick of time, something that again misses the point. Ramirez is the same man in Los Angeles that he was in Boston. He is just wearing a different uniform. He is living proof that fans and spectators cheer for laundry above all else, and he is just as likely (more so?) to have masked steroid use in Boston as he did in Los Angeles.” (You can find full post here.)
Some sportswriters have even speculated that two of last year’s more absurd and inexcusable Manny incidents, his assault on the Red Sox’s 61-year-old traveling secretary and his scuffle in the dugout with Kevin Youkilis, were the result of ‘Roid Rage.
I was glad when the Red Sox traded Manny, because his antics had finally grown tiresome. But I loved watching him. When I was driving around Los Angeles in April, I kept seeing pictures of Manny in a Dodgers uniform, and they made me sad. Too bad, I thought, things ended so badly. Now, in the wake of this latest Manny circus, I’m glad he’s someone else’s problem. I’ve also concluded that it’s time to discard the Manny is an Idiot narrative, which for years enabled Manny’s fans to excuse his more damaging stunts, like quitting on his team when things weren’t going well, or refusing to pinch hit. But there are other, more appropriate words for people who behave like this, and Manny’s weird public statement (issued through his evil agent, Scott Boras) and subsequent retreat into exile suggest that we shouldn’t waste too much time waiting for Manny’s moment of candor, or contrition. Like many, I always preferred thinking of Manny as the childlike idiot savant of baseball. Now there’s a new Manny narrative emerging, the Manny is a Selfish Jerk narrative. It isn’t a lot of fun. But it may be more accurate.
ON BASKETBALL
For years, I’ve been calling the Denver Nuggets a tease. They’re loaded with talent, and so they look like a team that could contend for a NBA title, but they always lose in the first round. I’ve never taken them seriously, because they’ve always lacked that extra something that makes a championship team a championship team. But this year they might have it. This is a different Nuggets team, mentally tough, physical, determined and smart. I’m actually thinking they can beat the L.A. Lakers (or Rockets) in the Western Conference Finals. Now that I’ve made this bold prediction, I’ll have to stop calling them a tease.
ON BANANAS
When my dad heard I was giving a talk on the book “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World” (click here to read my column about this) he offered some advice. “Might want to begin your talk Monday with Harry Chapin’s epic song ‘Bananas,’ about a truck, loaded with bananas, that flipped over in Scranton, Pa. You could teach the chorus (‘Bananas’ over and over again) so that everyone would go away humming the same tune.”
This seemed like bad advice, and so I opted to ignore it. Instead, I adopted a fairly straightforward approach — an overview of the book, followed by questions and answers. Someone gave me a banana when I arrived, and so I was able to use it as a prop. (“This is the Cavendish banana,” I said, holding it up.) I spent a couple of hours on Sunday writing up notes and selecting excerpts to read — given that public speaking is my phobia, I like to be as prepared as possible. Even so, there are limits. As my friend Heather pointed out, I didn’t write the book — nobody could reasonably expect me to know everything about bananas. To prepare for the talk, I spent the weekend eating bananas. A fried banana with chocolate and whipped cream at a Mexican restaurant, and seven bananas from the bunch I picked up at the food co-op.
Anyway, the talk went well. I really appreciated the audience. They seemed genuinely interested in bananas, they laughed in the appropriate places and they asked good questions. I couldn’t answer all of them, but I gave it my best shot.
Got a comment? Add one below, or e-mail me at sfoss@dailygazette.net.
