Ramirez's Circus Has No Place in Pennant Race

Baseball is filled with inscrutable mysteries. Who will buy the Chicago Cubs? How does anyone hit the knuckleball? Why is it that Barry Bonds is seemingly blacklisted from the majors while Boston outfielder Manny Ramirez plays on? Each question is as unanswerable as the next.

Bored as anyone may be by the newest ring in the Ramirez circus, the show still amazes. For the third time in the last four years, the pride of Washington Heights has all but demanded to be traded in the middle of a pennant race. "If the Red Sox are a better team without Manny Ramirez, they should trade me," he told ESPN on Sunday. That may be difficult. Since April he has, in no particular order, shoved a 64-year-old Red Sox employee to the ground, called owner John Henry a liar, said he would approve a trade to Iraq, and slap-boxed with a teammate in the dugout. Players have been run out of the majors for less.

Given all this, that the Red Sox would need to fetch an equally dominant hitter in a trade, and his contract — he has the right to veto a trade and is owed the balance of his $20 million salary for the rest of the year — it's nearly impossible to imagine Ramirez going anywhere by Thursday's trade deadline. That's a shame; what's quickly becoming a truly classic pennant race in the American League East shouldn't hinge on the whims of such an embarrassing figure.

The latest brouhaha came to a head when Ramirez, citing knee pains, took himself out of the lineup Friday before a game against Joba Chamberlain and the Yankees. With a playoff spot potentially on the line, Sox officials didn't even bother hiding their disgust, and promptly sent their man out for tests on his knees, which came back clean. On its own, this may not have been a great scandal, but this not only wasn't the first time Ramirez had missed a start against a flame-throwing ace, it wasn't even the first time he'd missed Chamberlain.

As ESPN's Peter Gammons pointed out in a column yesterday, this year Ramirez has missed two Chamberlain starts, two Felix Hernandez starts, a Justin Verlander start, and an Edinson Volquez start. In three of these games, he was fine to play both the day before and the day after; in the other three he was fine to play in one or the other. Boston lost three of these games, one 8-0, and two — the two Chamberlain started — by one run.

The best possible interpretation of all this is that in an unbelievably unfortunate coincidence, nearly every game when Ramirez has come up too lame to start has been one in which the opposition was rolling out some beast with a 95 mph fastball. The worst is that he's has been deliberately jaking in these games, hoping to blackmail the Red Sox into picking up his $20 million option for next year or signing him to a new contract. Gammons, who's as wired into the Red Sox as any reporter anywhere in the country is to any beat, pretty clearly thinks it's the latter, calling Ramirez a "man who chooses to be judged by numbers and salary, with no regard for character or integrity." So, more to the point, does Red Sox management; sending a star player out for MRIs just because he begs out of the lineup for a single game is by no means normal.

Every ballplayer signs a contract that asks surprisingly little of them. The main legally enforceable clause involves a commitment to perform "diligently and faithfully," language that can certainly be interpreted broadly but just as certainly doesn't excuse invoking phantom injuries as an excuse not to have to face the best pitchers in the league in a contract year. Considering that Boston reportedly mulled suspending Ramirez if he'd begged out of Saturday's and Sunday's games against the Yankees, it's plain that those most familiar with the situation aren't entirely convinced that Ramirez has been wholly diligent and faithful to the cause of winning.

Barry Bonds, the best player in baseball history, is sitting at home despite being willing to play for any team in baseball for the minimum salary, entirely because he was indicted for perjury as a result of a trumped-up investigation into whether or not he'd taken drugs in an effort to make himself a better ballplayer. On the scale of baseball offenses, is this really worse than what Ramirez has been all but accused of by the Red Sox?

If Ramirez has been the victim of the most unfortunately timed injuries in baseball history, he's had a rotten deal; but if he's done what it certainly looks as if he's done, he's an outright fraud. And if Manny being Manny really amounts to Manny all but throwing a pennant out of petulance, he's a far better candidate for a blackballing than anyone who was, however misguidedly, at least trying to help his team win. Whatever the case, any team with postseason aspirations should stay far away from the whole scene. Who, after all, knows when the man's knees might start to act up?

tmarchman@nysun.com