No More Manny

This blog is officially in mourning today. After a two-week express train of quotes bandied about, media frenzy and the media meme "He's gone too far; he's hurting the team; Manny has to go", Manny Ramirez has been traded to the Dodgers.

This season's hurting the team numbers: .299 average, .398 OBP, .529 SLG, .926 OPS, 66 runs, 109 hits, 22 doubles, 20 homeruns, 68 RBIs. Oh, yeah, the guy was fucking killing us.

I don't see where trading our best hitter for the past 8 years (.312 lifetime average with the Sawx), one of the only three hitters hitting well after the All-Star break (Youk & Pedroia are hitting, too, and the rest of the team are swatting at flies) helps the Red Sox very much. The pitching staff except for Lester has been shaky; the middle relievers worse; this doesn't help any of that, except that Jason Bay may be a slight improvement in left field. Once he figures out how to play the Monster which will probably take until next season.

Well, all the media haters are wicked happy. They got their man. Gerry KKKallahan at the Herald (he of the METCO gorilla yukfest, the guy wears his racism on his sleeve) and the CHB, aka the Shank, Dan Shaughnessy at the Globe, and Peter Gammons of ESPN who has been particularly vitriolic towards MBM. They're all gleeful today.

These gasbags have all mentioned at some point during this road to disaster that they want someone who will play the game "right". They'd be happier with a .220 hitter who hustled down the line into all his 6-4-3 double play groundouts. Well, they got rid of their man, and they may just have gotten their way.

Me, I loved Manny's Joy of Sox, how he enjoyed himself, how he never got down after a bad at bat or a flub in the field. My favorite play of this year was that crazy one in Baltimore where he caught a ball on the warning track, leaped into the stands to high-five a fan, then turned around and threw the ball in to double the runner off first. (Here's the sequence in photos.) Priceless MBM moment.

And the other thing about Manny was that because he never took anything too seriously, these kinds of scuffles with management never lasted. He could ask to be traded and hit a home run in his next at bat. The whole "he has to go" thing is made up out of whole cloth, because these kinds of situations have happened repeatedly during Manny's time with the Sawx, and he just kept hitting and producing in the clutch.

I have to take the way I feel this morning with a grain of salt, because this is the way I felt after we traded away Nomar in '04, and we all know how that worked out.

I read lots of Sawx blogs last night, and this is the line that stood out for me, from Jere at A Red Sox Fan From Pinstripe Territory:

The Red Sox' historic efforts to be the first team to successfully trade their best player for no reason continues. Next thing you know, the media will convince us that we're rooting for gas prices to reach 10 dollars per gallon. "I just can't take low gas prices' antics anymore!"

Farewell to the MVP of the 2004 World Series Champion Boston Red Sox. I for one will miss you.

Boston Globe Photo Gallery: Manny Through the Years

Boston Globe Photo Gallery: Manny's Moments

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same 2.0

That's Gerry Callahan on the left, next to John Dennis. What do these five have in common? Hmmm.
The local Boston talk radio station that carried Don Imus's radio show, 96.9 WTTK, is looking for another show for the Imus time slot.

And what new voice are they considering? Of course they're not considering a new voice. They're not considering a woman's voice. They're not considering a black voice. They're looking backwards to an old voice, an old pair of voices with their own long, sad history of racist and sexist comments.

BostonHerald: 96.9 eyes ‘Dennis & Callahan’ for Imus slot

"Dennis and Callahan" is a local sports radio station which is most famous for a September, 2003 bit in which they compared an escaped gorilla to a poor black kid bussed out to suburban schools. Classy:

METCO Controversy

On September 29, 2003, during a segment called 'headlines', where they read and comment about current news stories, Callahan and his morning co-host John Dennis made what were taken to be racially insensitive remarks while discussing a story about an escaped gorilla.[3] The gorilla had escaped from the Franklin Park Zoo and had been recaptured at a bus stop. According to newspaper articles, the exchange allegedly was: [4]

Callahan: "They caught him at a bus stop, right -- he was like waiting to catch a bus out of town."

Dennis: "Yeah, yeah -- he's a METCO gorilla."

Callahan: "Heading out to Lexington."

Dennis: "Exactly."

METCO is a state program that buses inner-city Boston students to nearby suburban schools. Many perceived the comments to be comparing poor, mostly African-American children to gorillas. WEEI general manager Tom Baker suspended both hosts for two days, then extended the suspension to two weeks after the Blue Cross-Blue Shield (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts) pulled $27,000 in ads and in turn donated that money to METCO (another report alleged that Blue Cross increased its advertising by $27,000 one week later [5]). Dunkin' Donuts responded by ceasing all advertising that involved the voices of John Dennis or Gerry Callahan. [6] Both hosts apologized and were sent to sensitivity training.

Are they sexist? I've certainly always thought so, from the fact that they very rarely have women on their program and never cover women's sports. According to the blog 'The Starting Five', during the Imus controversy (I didn't hear it myself) Dennis and Callahan claimed the Rutgers women's basketball team were guilty of extortion, and that they were anything but victims because they certainly had hip hop songs like 50 Cent on their iPods. Well, thousands of iPod owners probably have offensive lyrics on their iPods. Does that mean national TV/radio hosts can attack them with impunity, with racist and sexist taunts? Apparently Dennis and Callahan think so. And they're in line to get the Imus slot.

We may be having a national conversation on racism and sexism, but the guys in the suits filling the airwaves aren't listening.