Five years ago, the Boston Red Sox put Manny Ramirez on irrevocable waivers. Any team in baseball willing to pay his contract could have had him for $25,000. In the years since, Ramirez has hit 200 home runs, driven in 636, batted .305 AVG/.406 OBA/.576 SLG, and placed in the top four in MVP voting twice. In 2004, he won the World Series MVP award as Boston brought home its first championship in 86 years; last year, he hit .348/.508/.652 in October as the Sox won again. And for much of that time, Boston has, to varying degrees of seriousness, been trying to get rid of him. It’s less surprising that he was finally traded yesterday than that it took so long.

RELATED: What This Deal Means From a Yankee Perspective.

With the deal finally made, Boston is better; so are the other two teams involved in the deal. The Los Angeles Dodgers, who got Ramirez and a reported $7 million to cover Ramirez’s salary for the rest of the year in exchange for 24-year-old third baseman Andy LaRoche and pitching prospect Bryan Morris, are better set up for the pennant race. The Pittsburgh Pirates sent their best player, outfielder Jason Bay, to Boston for LaRoche, Morris, and two 24-year-old Red Sox prospects, outfielder Brandon Moss and reliever Craig Hansen, a good return for a rebuilding club. And the Red Sox ended an embarrassing situation while losing little on the field. It’s a smart trade, all around.

Strictly as a baseball proposition, Boston, which started the day three games behind Tampa Bay in the division race and one ahead of the Yankees in the wild card race, isn’t going to miss Ramirez anywhere near as much as you might think. Ramirez, 34, is hitting .299/.398/.529 this year; Bay, 29, is hitting .282/.375/.519, a level he’s hit at for years. Given their defense — Ramirez is an atrocity in the field, while Bay is a decent outfielder — this is at best a wash, and may even favor Bay. He isn’t a demigod of clutch hitting, but the runs Ramirez gives up with his glove are just as real as the ones he drives in at the plate.

Given the talent gap between the two leagues right now, there might be some question about whether Bay’s offense will translate to the brutal American League East, but he’s thrashed some great pitchers, hitting .359 with five home runs against Carlos Zambrano, .355 against Roy Oswalt, .400 against Ben Sheets, and .421 against Andy Pettitte, all in 20 or more at bats. He should be fine. Since he’s under contract for next year at just $7.5 million, he even spares Boston the headache of having to pick between exercising Ramirez’s $20 million option this fall and finding a left fielder capable of replacing him.

Of course this wasn’t a straight baseball trade. Ramirez had recently said the team didn’t deserve him, announced he’d accept a trade to Iraq, and called team owner John Henry a liar, among other tomfoolery. More seriously, he missed six games against top starters for vague, suspicious reasons and ostentatiously loafed on the field. He’d become an embarrassment, and you can’t blame Boston for wanting to see the last of him.

That doesn’t mean Ramirez is a bad bet for Los Angeles. Just a game out of first, they just added a hitter vastly better than anyone in their lineup for nothing they were going to use this year, and one who will presumably be well-behaved since the Dodgers agreed to let him become a free agent in the fall so he would approve the deal. They’ll miss the young talent they traded this week for Ramirez and third baseman Casey Blake, but taken together the deals probably make them the favorites in the West. The big issue for manager Joe Torre is less likely to be Ramirez acting like a moron than the fact that Andruw Jones and Juan Pierre, now his fourth- and fifth-best outfielders, are making $26 million between them; he’ll either have to bench them in favor of Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier or put to use all the ego-massaging skills he learned in a decade in New York. Or both.

Of all the teams, Pittsburgh probably comes off best; they took no risk, while Boston’s front office will take hell if the team falls just short of October, and Los Angeles gave up some real talent for two months’ worth of Ramirez. The Pirates, on the other hand, picked up some good, really cheap young players. LaRoche, reunited with his brother Adam, is right now a solid starter at third with All-Star potential, and Moss profiles as a decent platoon outfielder. The pitchers are interesting: Hansen, a reliever, has torn up the minors but been shredded in the AL East; Morris, a Class-A starter, was the no. 26 pick in the 2006 draft out of college, but lost last year to elbow surgery. Pittsburgh will be able to control them all through their primes, and none will even be eligible for arbitration for years, which is the key: LaRoche alone will likely be worth tens of millions more than the Pirates have to pay him before he hits free agency. It’s a good return on Bay.

More than anything else, though, this trade is about Ramirez, who behaved disgracefully during the last stretch, doing his bit to earn a reputation tending more toward Dick Allen than Dizzy Dean territory. It’s hard to think of any recent examples of a star of this caliber more or less openly tanking it on this scale in the middle of a hot pennant race, something far more damaging to the game than anyone’s drug use. Ramirez is going to pay for it both in the way he’s remembered and, I expect, in the contract offers he gets this fall. There will always be a team ready to sign anyone who can hit the way he still can, but there aren’t going to be very many looking to sign a designated hitter for more than the $20 million a year he would have had from Boston if he’d just kept his head down and played ball.

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GRIFFEY GETS SHOT AT RING? The other really big deal of the trading deadline saw Ken Griffey traded to the Chicago White Sox in exchange for pitcher Nick Masset and second baseman Danny Richar, a modest but fair return for a player whose best days are so far behind him. The bizarre thing is that the Sox have literally nowhere to play him: Their best players, Carlos Quentin and Jermaine Dye, are corner outfielders, they have Jim Thome and Paul Konerko for DH and first base, and Nick Swisher, a building block of the team who’s better than Griffey, plays center field, a position Junior can no more play than Thome can anyway. One likes the idea of Griffey getting a real crack at a World Series, but if Ozzie Guillen actually plays him in center, this team won’t even make the playoffs.

tmarchman@nysun.com