All duck as Manny is just being Manny

AMERICA AT LARGE:THE LOS Angeles Dodgers and their eccentric star Manuel Aristedes Ramirez host the Philadelphia Phillies when the National League Championship Series gets under way tonight.

Tomorrow night, an ocean away in St Petersburg, Florida, Ramirez's employers of the past eight years, the Boston Red Sox, initiate their defence of the American League title against the upstart Tampa Bay Rays.

That the paths of Ramirez and the Red Sox might converge in an October showdown has loomed since July 31st, when the Boston club shocked the baseball world, nipping the trading deadline to unload their superstar outfielder in a three-way trade. The Red Sox gave up four minor-league prospects, and got Canadian-born Pittsburgh outfielder Jason Bay in the deal, but so anxious were they to purge their clubhouse of Ramirez's presence that they agreed to pay the remainder of his €13.9 million 2008 salary if only the Dodgers would take him.

One need not be a baseball fan - indeed, one need never have even seen a baseball game - to understand the dynamics at play here. Every sport has its Manny Ramirezes - uncommonly gifted players who insist on turning a team sport into an individual pursuit, with one set of rules for themselves and another for everybody else, and whose effort seems to be switched on and off like a tap.

And no matter how many times the above-described prima donna wears out his welcome, there is always another team and another manager convinced that he can succeed where others have failed in harnessing this boundless talent. And in the case of Joe Torre and the Dodgers, he seems, for the present, to have been right.

Ramirez's 2008 season can be divided into two distinct parts. In the two-thirds of the year he spent in Boston he batted .299 (respectable for most major leaguers; somewhat less than ordinary for Manny), hit 20 homers and drove in 68 runs.

Since he donned Dodger Blue on August 1st, he has batted nearly 100 points higher (an otherworldly .396), swatted 17 homers and driven in 53, despite playing in half as many games. Some have attributed this remarkable upsurge to his enhanced contentment in the laid-back southern California atmosphere. Others would say that in Boston he wasn't even trying.

Whatever sport you played in your youth, you probably had a team-mate like Manny Ramirez somewhere along the line, and if you didn't, you surely played against someone exhibiting that maddening combination of talent, arrogance, and sublime indifference. It is an age-old story.

Although he was paid slightly in excess of €117 million for the eight years (and two world championships) he spent in Boston, Ramirez apparently now views that experience as an unhappy interlude. On the other hand, the evidence suggests what many long suspected: that despite his prodigious accomplishments, Ramirez was a disruptive influence whose whims, coddled by ownership and two managers, eventually gnawed away on his team-mates to the breaking point. Over the years his distracted attitude was explained away under the catch-all "that's just Manny being Manny". Some team-mates even wore that slogan on T-shirts beneath their uniforms, though it's hard to imagine they were amused.

A highlight film of his Boston sojourn would include Manny Moments such as (a) Manny standing in the batters box to admire the trajectory of a presumed home run, only barely make it to first base when the ball unexpectedly stayed in the park, (b) a disappointed Manny breaking into a slow trot after hitting a ground ball and getting thrown out anyway despite the fielder having juggled the ball (c) Manny catching a fly ball in the outfield and jogging toward the dugout, only to be reminded that it had been only the second out of the inning, and (d) Manny being thrown out at the plate in a World Series game last year because he had slowed down to steady his batting helmet, which, burdened by the pile of dreadlocks stuffed inside it, had threatened to fly off his head as he rounded third.

Historians of Ramirez's Boston tenure will also probably recall that shortly after his arrival he attempted to dry off his rain-soaked mobile phone in the clubhouse microwave, or perhaps the occasion in Pawtucket (where he had been sent to rehabilitate a broken finger) when a game was interrupted for nearly 15 minutes while the grounds crew and players from both teams combed through the infield dirt in search of a €11,000 diamond earring dislodged when Manny slid into third. Or the time this summer when Manny flattened the Red Sox's 64 year-old travelling secretary, Jack McCormick, because he was displeased with the number of complimentary tickets he had been allotted for a game in Houston.

"I told him," Manny recalled that episode, "I can't have you disrespecting me in front of my team-mates."

That the precarious situation was coming to a head was evident earlier in the summer when Ramirez came to blows with team-mate Kevin Youkillis. By July he was openly defying both ownership (whom he dared to trade him) and manager Terry Francona. Claiming a knee injury, one which was undetectable by any conventional diagnostic tools, Manny refused to play for several days in a row. His position might have attracted more sympathy if only he had been able to remember which knee he was supposed to limp with.

The injury miraculously disappeared the day he was traded to the Dodgers, and he has been a man possessed ever since. It is not a coincidence that the Dodgers, 54-54 and in second place on August 1st, began their run for the division title the day he arrived.

"Every day I thank God I came here and had the chance to show people who I really am," Manny told a Los Angeles Timesreporter a couple of weeks ago. "I was unhappy in Boston for eight years, but I still put up great numbers."

While fans, with great anticipation, await what would seem to be foreordained trajectories as Ramirez and the Red Sox hurtle toward a World Series collision, the Dodgers, were they more accustomed to his modus operandi, might view another of his recent pronouncements more ominously.

"I think I can play another four or five years," the free-agent-to-be told the LA Times' TJ Simers.

In Los Angeles? Simers asked.

"It depends," said Ramirez, "how badly they want to win."

The English translation of which might be phrased "Sign me to a four or five-year extension right now, or be prepared to step aside and watch the Yankees and Mets bid into the stratosphere a month from now." But then, that's just Manny being Manny.