So, about this Manny guy

Photo by Junko Kimura

The first baseball game I ever got to take my dad to (and by “take” I mean “I paid for the tickets and made him go with me”) was Opening Day 2001 at Fenway Park. The seats were dead center field and the weather was incredibly shitty. It rained all morning and I was convinced that my father was going to back out. Surprisingly he didn’t, and he sat through most of game getting rained on (not torrential rains, but when you’re in the bleachers and it’s gray and rainy, it can be pretty damn miserable) and refused to leave until the last out.

It was an 11-4 beatdown of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays with Trot Nixon as our leadoff hitter and at a time when I didn’t yet think Shea Hillenbrand was a dink. For me, the biggest draws were Nixon and Brian Daubach. I just loved watching them and was thrilled to be at the game. My dad wanted to see Manny.

From the moment they signed him, my father was skeptical. He knew who Manny was and what he could possibly accomplish in Boston, but the Sox had just been stung by Mike Mussina and Dan Duquette threw buckets of money at Manny to help make we fans forget that. I come from parents who don’t forget ANYTHING and my dad wasn’t willing to concede that Duquette made the right decision until he saw it for himself.

My dad is Irish. And there are times when some of the stereotypes reveal themselves. Growing up,I never saw my dad be overly demonstrative with his feelings. It just wasn’t him. You knew he was happy because he’d smile or upset because he’d frown, but he wasn’t a yeller or a cheerer around we kids. So watching this man, 65 at the time, jump out of his soaking wet seat and SCREAM for Manny when Manny hit his first homerun (also his first hit) at Fenway, is still one of the happiest memories I have of me and my dad. He told me that day that Manny was something special and that, in person, even in the bleachers, you could see it. At home that night, my father talked about the game to my mother non-stop, describing the homerun in great detail – and my mother was hooked too.

We are a family of Manny defenders. We are part of that group of people who refused to let the Boston sports media dictate how we felt about him because what they thought didn’t matter. (Hell, it still doesn’t!) There were times when we couldn’t defend him and it made us sad, but there were, for us, fewer of those times than there were times when we were thrilled and proud that he was on the team that won the first World Series for the Sox in 86 years. My father has told me time and again that I should appreciate being able to go on over to Fenway and watch possibly the best hitter I’ll ever get to see in person because talent like his is a rarity. I do appreciate that. I’ll never forget what Manny meant to me, or my family, or the Boston Red Sox. Manny was involved in almost all of the best moments I’ve seen live at Fenway.

I got to see his first Red Sox homerun in person…and his 500th career homerun in person too. This isn’t something you just ‘forget’ because Dan Shaughnessy tells you to.

But when Manny said “The Boston Red Sox do not deserve a player like me” I felt my heart tear because I knew that was the end. There was no way to mend that rift. You can argue for or against “chemistry” and “personalities” meaning anything significant on a winning team, but what do you do when your star player won’t stop telling the press how miserable he is? How were the fans supposed to react to that? In the same interview, Manny said “I love Boston fans”, and I believe that he does. I do. But loving the fans, to me, includes doing what’s best not only for you, but also for the team when you can. Buster Olney, who has no connection to Boston sports media and who, seemingly, has no agenda against Manny struck a nerve when he said, “All Manny has to do is show up and play and he won’t even do that”.

Again, we can argue all day about whether or not Manny hasn’t “shown up” to play. The fact that during the last Yankees series he was thisclose to being reprimanded for doing just that makes me think, at the very least, that the team believes he hasn’t been showing up to play. But who knows? I feel like Manny was given everything in Boston, including free reign to “Be Manny” and he threw it away. I also think Scott Boras had a lot more to do with this than even the front office. No big pay day for Boras if Manny re-ups with the Sox, right? (Since he wasn’t the agent who brokered the deal? Is that how it goes?) In any event, it’s done. And I’m sad and will miss Manny terribly.

But I won’t miss the drama, the real drama or the drama created by the media. And as a fan of change, in general, I look forward to what this team can do with Jason Bay.

I DO hope Manny loves the Boston fans because, I’ll tell you what, we sure as hell love(d) him.