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He won 11 of his career 30 wins as a rookie with the 1997 Chicago Cubs. After that arm injuries hampered Gonzalez’ career. RIP.
*****
CARACAS, Venezuela — Former major league pitcher Geremi Gonzalez, who won 11 games for the Chicago Cubs in 1997, was killed by a lightning strike in his native Venezuela on Sunday. He was 33.
Geremi Gonzalez pitched for five major league teams and compiled a 30-35 career record.
Emergency management official Herman Bracho said Monday that Gonzalez was struck by lightning at a beach.
Gonzalez pitched for five major league teams from 1997-2006. The right-hander appeared in 131 games with 83 starts, compiling a 30-35 record.
Gonzalez also played for the Tampa Bay Rays, Boston Red Sox, New York Mets and Milwaukee Brewers. He made a combined 24 appearances for the Mets and Brewers in his final major league season in 2006.
The Toronto Blue Jays released him during spring training last year. Gonzalez then moved to Japan and pitched in five games for the Yomiuri Giants.
He was the first Red Sox southpaw to do so in 52 years.
Now he can add a no-hitter to his already amazing list of accomplishments.
The 24-year-old lefty shut down Kansas City 7-0 Monday night for the first no-hitter in the majors since Red Sox rookie Clay Buchholz threw one last September.
******
Jon Lester (3-2) allowed just two baserunners, walking Billy Butler in the second inning and Esteban German to open the ninth; he also had an error when he threw away a pickoff attempt.
Lester struck out nine, fanning Alberto Callaspo to end the game before pumping both fists in the air.
Catcher Jason Varitek, who has been behind the plate for a record four no-hitters, lifted his pitcher into the air. Manager Terry Francona gave a long, hard embrace to Lester, who missed the end of the 2006 season after he was diagnosed with a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“I’ve been through a lot the last couple of years. He’s been like a second dad to me,” Lester said. “It was just a special moment right there.”
Centre-fielder Jacoby Ellsbury made a diving catch of Jose Guillen’s line drive to end the fourth - the best defensive play of the night. Lester also got help from first baseman Kevin Youkilis, who made a nice scoop on shortstop Julio Lugo’s throw after David DeJesus hit a grounder in the third.
The fans at sold-out Fenway Park held their enthusiasm until the final out of the seventh, rising to their feet when Lester fanned Guillen on a 93 mph fastball. They remained standing for the entire ninth inning, even as German walked and moved around to third base when Tony Pena and DeJesus grounded out.
With cameras flashing and the fans screaming at full throat, Callaspo fell behind 0-2. He took a ball and fouled one off before reaching for a high and outside 1-2 fastball to end the game.
*****
Lester and Jonathan Papelbon combined to one-hit the Royals on July 18, 2006.
Buchholz no-hit the Baltimore Orioles last Sept. 1 in just his second major league start.
Mel Parnell was the last Red Sox lefty to throw a no-hitter, beating the Chicago White Sox on July 14, 1956. Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan is the only other person in history to no-hit the Royals.
*****
Varitek also caught Buchholz’s no-hitter, along with gems by Hideo Nomo and Derek Lowe.
An impressive game by an impressive person. Lester’s pitch count was high 130, and this was his first ML complete game. I hope last night doesn’t cause any arm woes. Steve Busby pitched two career no-hitters and was a hell of a pitcher for a short time, but Kansas City management(Jack McKeon) helped to blow the pitcher’s arm out by having him pitch 150 pitch games.
He died Saturday after a fall down the stairs at his home. John was strictly a bullpen catcher, but he managed to stay employed at the Major league level for 12 years. Afterwards he went into broadcasting. RIP.
PHILADELPHIA - Former major leaguer John Marzano died Saturday after falling down a flight of stairs at his home. He was 45.
The cause of his death was not immediately clear, police said.
Marzano was from Philadelphia and had been working for Major League Baseball’s Web site, where he co-hosted a show on weekday mornings.
“John was a beloved member of our team, a personable, terrific friend to all with whom he worked,” said Bob Bowman, chief executive officer of MLB Advanced Media. “He was an engaging, informed interviewer. His energy, knowledge of the game and comedic touch produced admirable results. We miss him dearly already.”
In a statement announcing his death, MLB said Marzano had fallen. MLB.com will establish an internship program in Marzano’s name, the release said.
Before joining MLB’s Web site, Marzano was a baseball analyst on Comcast SportsNet for the station’s Philadelphia Phillies postgame shows. He had also appeared regularly on WIP-AM.
“John was one of those rare persons who put a smile on your face the moment you saw him. He was joyous and he was proud,” said Comcast’s Michael Barkann, who co-hosted many of the postgame shows with Marzano. “You always knew when John was in the room. You never asked, ‘When’d you get here, Johnny?’ He always made an entrance, and it was big and it was loud and it was full of joy.”
Marzano, known for his South Philly accent, appeared with Barkann on the station’s “Daily News Live” show from the Wachovia Center before the Philadelphia Flyers hosted the Washington Capitals in an NHL playoff game on Thursday. At one point, Marzano stopped in mid-sentence, turned to the crowd and screamed, “Let’s Go Flyers!”
“The place went nuts,” Barkann said. “He did that a few more times during his segment to the same effect each time. That will be my enduring memory of John — smiling, talking sports with a sea of fans behind him. I will miss him every day.”
A graduate of Temple, Marzano earned a spot as a catcher on the 1984 U.S. Olympic team that included future major league stars Mark McGwire, Barry Larkin and Will Clark. He was drafted by the Boston Red Sox with the 14th overall pick in the first round of the 1984 amateur draft.
Marzano played 10 seasons in the big leagues for the Boston Red Sox, Texas Rangers and Seattle Mariners before retiring in 1998. He also played in the minors for the Phillies and the Cleveland Indians.
Overall, Marzano batted .241 with 11 homers and 72 RBIs in 794 at-bats in 301 games.
“He was a baseball guy and he loved life,” said Phillies manager Charlie Manuel, who managed Marzano in Cleveland’s minor-league system in 1993. “He had a personality. He was kind of a pepper-pot player. He was a go-getting kind of guy. That’s what he had to do and it worked for him.”
Marzano was popular in Seattle for his altercation with New York Yankees outfielder Paul O’Neill during a game in 1996. The two traded punches at home plate after O’Neill took exception to a knockdown pitch by Tim Davis.
Phillies pitcher Jamie Moyer played three seasons with Marzano in Seattle and remained friends with him.
“He was a lot of fun to be around,” Moyer said after facing the New York Mets on Saturday. “He was the brunt of a lot of jokes, but he could dish it out too. He always used to call everybody, ‘Cuz.’ He’ll be missed.”
The Red Sox planned to honor Marzano with a moment of silence before their game against Texas on Saturday.
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So Carlos Gomez was pulled from Winter ball as part of a trade. Frankly, Minnesota got screwed here. Both the original Boston and Yankee offers were better. Instead, rookie GM Bill Smith overplayed his hand (a phrase that’s quickly become cliched over the past week) and got a disappointing haul for Santana: Gomez, Humber, Mulvey and Guerra (the Mets 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 7th best prospects). In early December, Minny had their choice of Phil Hughes, Jon Lester and Jacoby Ellsbury - all better than any of the Mets trade chips. A Yankee offer of Ian Kennedy, Alan Horne, Melky and AJax destroys that Met offer, so perhaps it really was about the money (for the Yanks). I can’t believe the Twinkies caved and accepted an FMart-less offer. The deal still isn’t 100% done, as the Mets have 72 hours to reach an extension with Santana, but that should merely be a formality. It seems Smith was going to either (1) try to fleece an AL team, or (2) get him out of the league for the best offer he could muster.
Thank goodness the Sawx didn’t acquire him, because they would’ve been nearly unbeatable for the next three years with Santana leading the rotation. They probably could have acquired him for only Lester and Ellsbury - yes, two good prospects, but certainly not studs, and Santana would have locked up the division for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, the money seems to have been too much for them too. This is a win for both Boston and the Yanks. A true rarity.
Credit should be given to Brian Cashman for not overreacting to Boston’s (and Hank’s) interest. I’m relieved he didn’t go to Boston and that we didn’t lose Hughes, but also pissed the Mets got him for a considerably inferior offer.
The only real loser is Minnesota. If you want to feel real pity (by reading the disgusted opinions of Twins fans), visit here.
He is charged with killing a woman in Broward County Florida.
FORT LAUDERDALE - Jim Leyritz, the former Major League Baseball player known as “The King,” was arrested and charged with DUI manslaughter Friday morning following an accident that killed another driver, police said.
Leyritz, 44, was traveling north-bound on Southwest Seventh Avenue when he passed a red light and crashed with another car around 3:30 a.m., said Fort Lauderdale police spokeswoman Kathy Collins.
The accident happened at the intersection of Southwest Second Street and Seventh Avenue. A 30-year-old woman traveling west-bound on Second Street was ejected from her car, Collins said.
She was pronounced dead at Broward General Medical Center.
Leyritz was charged with manslaughter and DUI property damage after an investigation, Collins said.
Leyritz played with the New York Yankees in the ’90s, earning his nickname after htting the last home run in Game 4 of the 1999 World Series.
If found guilty and sent to jail, it will be a shame will Leyritz’s famous homer gets bloted out by one foolish night of excess.
A bit of baseball history becomes a chew toy. From AP-
BOSTON - The World Series ball is gone, and Jonathan Papelbon has an excuse: My dog ate it. Farfetched or not, that’s what the Red Sox closer insists happened to the souvenir from the final out of Boston’s sweep this year.
Really, Papelbon blamed it on his bulldog, Boss.
****
After the game, Varitek said he planned to give the prize to the team. A few days later, he said he’d given it to Papelbon.
Instead, the relief pitcher said, Boss got hold of that doggone ball.
Papelbon told a similar tale to the New England Sports Network for a story that aired Nov. 30 — but with a slightly different ending. He told NESN he threw what was left of the ball in the trash.
“It’s in the garbage in Florida somewhere,” he said
Something tells me boss secretly works for a baseball owner with the same nickname. Any baseball conspiracists agree with me?
This Holiday season, the Baseball Writers Association of America are proud to present a new film, starring Boston Red Sox righthanded starter, Curt Schilling and the 28 writers who vote yearly for the Cy Young Award. It’s the Schilling Claus! A tale of corruption, averted by pointless bureaucracy. See Curt Schilling negotiate his contract with the Boston Red Sox and add a clause that pays him One Million Dollars for getting a single vote for the Cy Young Award. Watch as the Writers band together to avoid the appearance of impropriety, beginning in 2013, five seasons later. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll wonder why.
Thankfully, there is no Christmas Musical coming to a cineplex near you. But the recent action of the BBWAA “to disqualify from its awards players who would profit from them” prompts me to wonder why.
First, why wait until 2013 to implement the rule, which has become known as the Schilling Clause? By that time, Curt will be up for a Hall of Fame vote (barring another encore for 2009) not for any more Cy Young votes. So why wait. If it is so important, implement it now. Unless, the BBWAA understands that there is a firestorm of corruption that will sweep through its ranks beginning in 2013, and nothing short of this pre-emptive strike against it will stem the tide of darkness which threatens their hallowed association. Perhaps not. More than likely, they are saying that implementing this rule now would bar deserving players from consideration. But frankly, if they want to avoid the perception of corruption, then implement it now. And let the chips fall. If not, they are implying that they swear they will be incorruptible for 2008-2012, but then all bets are off.
Second, why is this rule even necessary? Writers have a responsibility to their stories. Their coverage should be fair, even-handed, accurate and thorough. Journalists are supposed to be above reproach, seared with integrity. If they are incapable of that, then should they really be trusted? The Association is in effect saying that their members are incapable of displaying integrity in the voting process, that without such a rule, they would succumb to the temptation of filthy lucre. A rule like this would not be necessary if their members were above reproach. That such a rule is deemed necessary by their members makes me feel warm and fuzzy about the coverage I read in the paper or on the Internets. After all, they are saying (by a 41-21 vote, I might add) that either individually or corporately that they are corruptible.
Schilling of course reacted on his blog:
Give me a break. Don’t get me wrong, 100k, 500k, 1 million dollars is a huge sum of money. But to think that these guys ever approached this as anything other than them being touted as the ‘experts’ on who wins what is crap. Add to that I seriously doubt anyone ever looked at this from a perception standpoint and thought wow, they are making this guy rich. I would disagree.
The only step that hasn’t happened yet is to stop them from voting on awards altogether. They shouldn’t do it. Anytime someone is allowed to vote on this, on the Hall of Fame ballot, and that person injects personal bias into their vote, they should lose the privilege.
My only quibble is that Curt uses the conventional “Give me a break”, rather than the beloved, “Break me a give.”
But taking Curt’s point a bit further, these writers are in the making these guys rich business. Jackie MacMullan, a wonderful columnist at the Boston Globe, spilled massive amounts of ink supporting Mike Lowell’s desire to get a contract extension from the Red Sox during the season. What purpose did she have in writing these columns? To inform the fans of the Red Sox that Mike just wanted three guaranteed years (which grew to four when he won the World Series MVP)? Of course not. Her writing was to advocate for his worthiness of such a contract extension, which is directly impacting his ability to get rich.
What makes this an even greater farce is the ham handed actions of these ink-stained wretches. The annual votes on the Hall of Fame ballots provide an example of bias, score settling and flat out ignorance about the game of baseball. Rich Lederer at Baseball Analysts has made it his mission to explain why Bert Blyleven deserves inclusion in the Hall of Fame. His quixotic quest has earned him the scorn of many writers who frankly cannot understand why Blyleven deserves inclusion. Often these writers, including the ESPN’s Buster Onley, will denigrate Blyleven without looking at what he did. Their ignorance of the game they cover and about which they are allegedly experts illustrates the absurdity of having these men vote for awards.
If the goal of this silly rule is to eliminate the appearance of impropriety, then there is a simpler and less controversial solution. Open up the process to public scrutiny. The BBWAA should publish the ballots they receive from their members, with a justification of their votes. So last year, when a Hall of Fame voter submitted a blank ballot, an explanation can be offered. By doing this, the biases that were rife in past voting can be weeded out. Sunlight kills corruption. The BBWAA should let the sunshine in. Otherwise it is clear that the writers want to keep their biases in play without suffering the consequences of public condemnation.
If someone would ask who is the most influential general manager in baseball today, many people would answer, Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics. Beane, the one-time prospect, was the first general manager to put the ideas of Bill James to practical use. By using metrics that other organizations ignored, Beane built a team that has been competitive over the past decade despite operating with one of the smallest budgets in the game. Now more teams are using statistical analysis to evaluate their talent, but Beane was the first to do it. (At least this time around. Other teams did it in the past, but there wasn’t a fancy name like Sabermetrics to describe it then.) And Beane had a book written about him. How much more influential can he be?
It’s possible though, that Beane isn’t the answer. In fact an argument could be made that the most influential GM in baseball isn’t even a GM anymore.
John Hart now a special assistant to owner Tom Hicks of the Texas Rangers may have transformed the game even more than Beane has. In fact, it’s the change that Hart introduced that has helped make statistical analysis more accepted throughout the game.
Hart did set an example in the early 90’s as he brought the Cleveland Indians back to respectability and the World Series (twice). He signed his young talent to multi-year contracts before they reached arbitration. He figured that if he locked up players early, he might spend more at the beginning of the deal but spend a lot less than he otherwise would have at the end of the deal.
Back in the day when teams controlled the players (and salaries) Branch Rickey famously said “Trade a player a year too early rather than a year too late.”
For baseball, things have changed a lot economically in the past half century. Given the popularity of the sport, the free movement that players have achieved and the resulting rising salaries, identifying, signing, developing and keeping talent is the toughest challenge of every major league team. But what Branch Rickey describes that challenge.
What John Hart did in Cleveland was introduce a way to meet that challenge. But what he did behind the scenes was even more interesting.
At the time of the championship series this year, Jerry Crasnick of ESPN wrote John Hart’s family tree.
Excuse Hart if he feels as if his professional life is flashing before his eyes.
His former right-hand man, Dan O’Dowd, is riding a late-season wave with the resurgent Rockies. But first Colorado must get past the Arizona Diamondbacks, who are run by Josh Byrnes, a former front-office assistant in Cleveland at the height of Hart’s regime.
And the Cleveland Indians, the franchise Hart guided to six postseason berths and two World Series appearances from 1995 through 2001, will try to end 59 years of championship futility against Boston. General manager Mark Shapiro, yet another Hart protégé, is the man in charge in Cleveland.
That means three of the four general managers still playing consider Hart a mentor and lifelong influence. Which makes you wonder: How did he miss Theo Epstein?
How’d he develop all of this front office talent?
The John Hart front-office “tree” encompasses more than the three LCS general managers. Neal Huntington, the new GM in Pittsburgh, spent nine years in Cleveland. Paul DePodesta worked for the Indians before moving on to Oakland, the Dodgers and San Diego. And Chris Antonetti, Shapiro’s top assistant, is widely regarded as a GM-in-waiting.
Shapiro has a history degree from Princeton, Byrnes went to Haverford, Huntington is an Amherst graduate and DePodesta went to Harvard. Those academic pedigrees might seem a little highfalutin for the old guard, but Hart found a way to marry the two approaches in Cleveland. Nothing got done until John Goryl, Tom Giordano and the veteran baseball men had their say.
“This isn’t Sabermetrics,” Hart said. “I wanted our guys to hear what the manager says and how tough it is in that dugout, because I’ve been there. I wanted them to respect the old scout in the blue Plymouth who’s going from one city to the next trying to find the next young superstar out of high school or college. They all got schooled on old baseball.”
Antonetti was widely regarded as a future GM someplace else. His name came up as a possibility in St. Louis but Cleveland offered him a deal to stay in place. but look at the academic backgrounds of the men listed above. It appears that John Hart’s innovation to the front office was to introduce the interdisciplinary approach to running a baseball team.
There are still those who deride the statistical approach to baseball. But what Hart showed was that different approaches could be melded together to run a baseball team successfully.
Rob Neyer, in a similar article, four years ago had Hart describe his philosophy.
“My background was field development,” Hart recalls. “But as I noticed the evolvement of the game, I realized that while there were a lot of strengths I was going to bring, if we wanted to have the best organization, we needed to have people around that offered another skill set. When you’re in that position, you worry. You want to be good. And at some point I said to myself, ‘Here’s where we want to be. And if we want to get here, this is what I need. I can’t do this by myself.’ ”
As the new general manager, one of Hart’s first hires was Shapiro. “I knew that Mark had great leadership skills,” says Hart, “in addition to being a Princeton graduate and very bright. But what I wanted to do with Mark was get him to where he was in a leadership position, to where he could go lead a farm department. And the great thing was to get him around the baseball people, the guys that had made a living in the game for so long, the Johnny Goryls and the other 40-year guys. Mark picked it up. He just got it, and the baseball guys established a great confidence in Mark.”
But Crasnick didn’t give Hart enough credit. Hart’s model may well have been copied by the Boston Red Sox. No Theo Epstein didn’t serve under Hart, but he apparently learned quite well from him.
One majored in history at Wesleyan University. One studied psychology at Harvard. One pursued American studies at Colby College. One elected Russian studies and political science, also at Colby.
One managed two hits off future Anaheim Angel Jarrod Washburn as a sophomore at Wesleyan. One had a .301 career average for the Crimson. One began at Colby as an “OK field, no hit” infielder, took up pitching, and won nine games. One tried out for the varsity at Weymouth South High as a junior and was told “I’d made the team, but that I was never going to play.”
One grew up in Plymouth, N.H., one in Swampscott, one in Walpole, N.H., the other in Weymouth, all fans of the Boston Red Sox.
Today, they constitute much of the organization’s underpinning, literally and figuratively. Literally, they are based underground, below the Fenway Park box office at the corner of Brookline Avenue and Yawkey Way. Figuratively, they get the necessary and complex work — contracts, arbitration casework, player recruitment, advance scouting, and more — done.
But there was another way that John Hart influenced the Red Sox this year. Not in the front office but on the bench.
When he was a younger manager with the Phillies, Francona did little to distinguish himself. In four years on the job, Francona never managed more than 77 wins in a season, and by the end of his tenure he’d lost control of the team. There were also concerns that Francona overused his young pitchers in the service of, well, not much of anything. After the smoke cleared, it appeared that Francona had squandered his opportunity.
However, he then spent time in the Cleveland Indians front office and as the bench coach for the Texas Rangers and Oakland A’s. In those roles, Francona learned new approaches to the game — namely, the value of statistical analysis when it comes to making baseball decisions. Certainly, Francona never abandoned his traditionalist bearing, but his time in progressive organizations like Cleveland and Oakland helped him learn to blend approaches. That rare skill impressed the new regime in Boston when they interviewed Francona for their vacant managerial post.
At the time of his hiring, Francona’s managerial record was pocked with failure, and he was viewed by fans and media as an uninspired choice; you may recall a similar reaction when Torre was named Yankees manager. Of course, Francona promptly proved them all wrong.
Dayn Perry, who wrote the article, also noticed what I did: the similarity of the Francona signing with the Red Sox to the Torre signing by the Yankees. Each came in with a less than impressive managing career, but both emerged as top managers. Francona, was prepared for his new position, in part, by learning the Hart approach to baseball.
Baseball Musings noted something about Francona right after he was hired.
I always thought this was Buck Showalter’s strength with the Yankees, using players in situations in which there was a high probability of them succeeding. If that’s Terry’s philosophy as well, he’ll do well with the Red Sox.
So it can reasonably be argued that John Hart’s influence extended to all four teams to reach the championship series this year. And with another Hart protege now running the show in Pittsburgh the interdisciplinary approach to running a ballclub continues to spread.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
This was an e-mail I sent in to Bill Simmons (the very funny and actually intelligent sportswriter known as the “Sports Guy”) at 3:45am after reading his latest column… I decided it was good enough to post.
I’m an Indians fan currently living in NYC (yes, the ALDS rocked), and I thought you’d enjoy a few tidbits from the Indians’ announcers and an Indians fan in light of your latest article.
- 1) Tom Hamilton announced as Blood Pressure Borowski came in that “Indians fans might be shocked to learn that he had more 1-2-3 innings this year than Mariano Rivera.” My brother called me up to tell me this and say “Yep, I was shocked.”
- 2) Every ex-Clevelander I know has come up to me this postseason and said “You know, this year feels different. I’m not waiting for something horrible to happen that ends it all… I feel like they actually might win!” I’m sure that until 2004, you could appreciate that one.
- 3) Then again, as I listened online to Game 2, when Youkilis hit that liner on the 11th pitch in the bottom of the 9th, I almost had a heart attack. (I’m 24.) Within 60 seconds of that moment, I’d spoken to my brother in NY, my sister in Baltimore, and my father in Cleveland. And amazingly, we’d all survived.
- 3a) Indians’ announcer Hamilton about 2 seconds after pausing after that catch said “Cleveland, you can breathe again.”
- 3b) I hadn’t been breathing.
- 4) You haven’t seen enough Browns games. That’s the only way you can think that Indians’ fans won’t stay loud in the freezing cold. I’ve been to subzero Browns games at the end of the year when they’re WAY out of it, and you’d think they were still in the playoff hunt. 40 degrees?! That’s like a sauna to Cleveland fans.
- 4a) The Indians’ announcers in Game 2 noted in about the 4th or 5th inning that the Sox fans didn’t seem as loud as the Indians or Yankees fans had been in the first series. It could be because it’s a smaller park, but Hegan thought that they seemed like they were waiting for the World Series to get really into it.
- 4b) As a total throw-in, Bill Belichik is an *******. He completely sucked when he coached the Browns, and while he’s not at Jordan/Elway/Modell/Jose Mesa/Steelers level of hatred in Cleveland, that’s only because everyone thought he was too boring to listen to to even hate.
- 4b2) I think the only reason Romeo Crennel didn’t get fired as the Browns’ head coach after Week 1 is because people are afraid he’ll be the next Belichik: Supposed defensive genius, clueless-looking head coach, sounds like he’s going through the motions in press conferences, never looks like he cares about anything, spends a couple of years squandering great offensive talents (Kosar/Metcalf; Winslow/Edwards), brings in semi-washed up but decent LBs from his old team (Pepper Johnson;Willie McGinest)… it would be typical Browns to let him go and then watch as he somehow turns up in 7 years in his 2nd Super Bowl, citing what he “learned” in those “hard times” as a Browns head coach.
- 5) Whenever Joe Borowski enters a game, I have terrible Jose Mesa flashbacks, thinking “NO! Leave in Mike Jackson!!” (Betancourt)
- 6) You know that if the Indians keep winning these games, there’s a strong possibility there will be no good ALCS MVP choice. If Borowski has 4 scoreless innings and 3 saves, would it not be the funniest thing ever if he’s standing up there, receiving the award? Wouldn’t you (in between tears and yelling) crack up at your TV screen? This could really happen.
The ALCS will pit the Boston Red Sox against the Cleveland Indians for the honor of facing the National League Champion. Or Manny Ramirez’s current team vs. his first team.
Manny Ramirez, 16 years ago, was quite a sensation at the high school level (he played for George Washington High School in Washington Heights)and the New York Times gave him quite a bit of coverage as he was a highly regarded prospect. I suppose there was some hope he might get drafted by the Yankees and play just a few miles from his home.
Manny Ramirez, who plays center field and third base, batted .633 last season and is rated the best high school player in the city and one of the best in the country (he made USA Today’s top 25), will hit balls out of the park. He hit 16 homers last season.
His teammates say they admire Manny, the son of a cab driver, for not acting cocky. But he would like to be identified in the newspaper as the Hitman. The big-league scouts are following the Hitman; so is Washington Heights. Even the neighborhood’s greatest baseball success story — a Panamanian immigrant named Rod Carew who graduated from Washington in 1964 and was recently elected to the Hall of Fame — says he has heard of Manny Ramirez’s bat.
But the coverage continued even after he was drafted by Cleveland.
In many ways, Ramirez hasn’t left Washington Heights, the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Dominican immigrants where he rose from the Alexis Ferreira Little League to become a local hero as the star third baseman on the George Washington High School team. Last spring, with a .650 average and 14 home runs in 22 games, he was the best high school ballplayer in New York City.
Now, as the No. 1 draft pick of the Cleveland Indians, he has shown similar strengths in the Appalachian League. Batting third in the lineup, he leads the rookie league in home runs, with 14 in 49 games — including two grand slams in one week — and in runs batted in with 52.
But while the center fielder with the quicksilver swing feels at home within the confines of Burlington Athletic Stadium, the shy teen-ager from teeming, close-knit Washington Heights feels marooned here, in small-town America.
(Realizing that Manny was special, the Times followed the George Washington High School baseball team during his senior year as well as his development through the Indians’ organization.)
Manny was one of the centerpieces of a revitalized Cleveland Indians organization that was rebuilt through drafting excellent young players and retaining them. Under John Hart the team developed stars such as Ramirez, Albert Belle, Jim Thome, and Carlos Baerga, reaching the World Series twice (once in 1995 and once in 1997).
In the winter of 2000, Ramirez was lured to the Boston Red Sox as a free agent where he would become their new star. Cleveland was in decline and would start a new rebuilding era under John Hart’s successor, Mark Shapiro, which has now led the Indians back to the postseason.
Ramirez helped the Red Sox win their first World Championship in nearly a century in 2004 and, this year, to their first first place finish in nearly 20 years this year. Ramirez has been regarded as something of a flaky fellow. It was perhaps because of this perception that Boston was prepared to trade him for Alex Rodriguez prior to the 2003 season. (He still had a lot fans among his former teammates.)
By now Manny Ramirez is a great ballplayer and he’s reaching the age where a player’s skills often decline. So how does he retain his skills? Rob Bradford of Boston Herald uncovered some of his preparation in Manny has Plan.
The media, whose job it is to uncover every nook and cranny concerning each player’s makeup, is left living in the world of the fans for whom they write. This is the mystery of Manny, by all accounts one of the smartest, best-prepared hitters in the history of the game.
Few people know about the extra hand-eye coordination exercises Ramirez has added to his routine since the middle of the 2004 season. Strength and conditioning coach Dave Page fires golf ball-like spheres at the slugger’s strike zone, where they are caught by Ramirez’ right hand, acting as a bat.
Later in the workout, which is done 30 minutes before every game, Page throws four rings at Ramirez. Each ring has a different colored ball attached to it, and Page calls out the color of the ball Manny has to grab out of mid-air.
One of the toughest aspects of hitting is deciding what pitch is coming at you in a fraction of a second. So in order to maintain his skill Manny spends extra time honing that decision making. (It reminded me of Obi-Wan training Luke, without the blindfold.) It may very well be that at the end of next year, when his current contract expires, that Manny will once again be highly sought after. If so, it will be a testament, to his dedication to his job.
Friday night, the team that drafted the promising 19 year old will face the team that signed their star away. It will be the battle of Manny’s teams.
Crossposted at Soccer Dad.
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