There once was a slugger who attacked his manager, hosted orgies, abused illegal substances, regularly showed up for camp overweight, almost killed himself and a teammate in a car crash, and made one of the most boneheaded plays in the history of baseball (making the last out of a World Series on a failed stolen base attempt). That slugger was Babe Ruth. The Red Sox got rid of him too, but at least they got cash in return. For Manny Ramirez, the Red Sox actually paid the Dodgers to take him off their hands. If history is any guide, the Sox should win their next World Series 86 years from now.

History (or your understanding of it) is no guide here. As if comparing Manny to Ruth wasn't lunacy enough, may I point out that in 1924 the Babe was not 37 years old; free agency did not exist; baseball star salaries were far more in line with what the average worker received (or at least wasn't something like 358 times the average worker's pay); and the Babe didn't tank plays or go on phony strikes. And he didn't shove a 62 year old travel secretary to the ground over getting his family some ball tickets.

Manny started believing he was more important to the club than $20 million, despite the fact that we have, every year since 2006, offered him in trade with us picking up the salary--and NO ONE CALLED until Joe Torre did. He wasn't the antichrist but he was becoming a pain in the ass--and he put plenty of fuel on the fire without the help of the Boston media with his inane press conferences in which he bashed the ownership.

The best comparison is the Nomar trade. He thought he was worth more than $60 million for four years and refused the deal, so he was traded out. He followed that doozy with a string of injuries and one-year deals making far, far less. Of course, the Sox wonh two WS since that trade, showing just how "invaluable" any one player is.

There's only one Babe of course, but did you know that according to baseballreference.com, the most similar batter to Manny Ramirez at age 34 was Babe Ruth? Manny ranks up there with the all-time greats in terms of hitting.

As you point out, the biggest difference between the two trades was that Babe was in the early stages of his career and Manny is in the latter. Fair enough. But my main point was that Babe Ruth was a far greater pain in the ass to his teams than Manny was to his. He may not have shoved a press secretary to the ground, but he did dangle his manager off the back of a moving train---you choose which was worse.

As a Dodger fan, all I know is that Manny came over with 20 homers and a 950 OPS and has done nothing but hit since he got here. The lunatic asylum that is the Boston sports media has chewed up other Sox superstars before (Ted Williams, Wade Boggs, Roger Clemens) and so long as they keep getting their jollies by driving players of Manny's caliber out of town the Red Sox won't be building any Yankee-type dynasties.

I guess as a fairweather dodgers fan (unlike jazzguitarman) you don't pay attention to baseball year 'round. Roger Clemens has been chewed up by every media, and in hindsight, we're all glad that fat ass got driven out of town. Also, Manny isn't 34 anymore, he's 36 and has been playing about 100 points below his career OPS for the past two years.

Actually the biggest difference between the Babe and the Manny trade was the context. You're right to point to the off-field issues and salary concerns being important to both trades. However, the Babe Ruth trade had as much to do with financing an off-broadway musical, as well as protecting the interests of the sox and yanks at the time. Fenway Park became the property of the sox through that trade and prevented the AL commish from truly destroying the sox as we know them.

Manny actually came over with a .929 OPS, and though he has hit well (despite grounding into a double play and costing the dodgers a game), he's only a two-month rental, and the trades your idiot GM made has cost the dodgers a ton of talent (Jazzguitarman made a solid argument for this trade, stating that the need to build a fan base was a more pressing need). By trading manny, the sox FO are actually thinking about the long-term implications, which you need to do in order to build a true dynasty.

If you're interested in a real analysis of the trade, I strongly recommend checking out the SoSH message board, or soxandpinstripes. That is where true sox fans go for their online info.

Your hostility makes the point about the toxic attitude engulfing the Red Sox nation better than I ever could. While I intend to keep my distance from all Sox message boards for that very reason, let me respond to a few of your points.

If you are the Sox fan you claim to be, you'll know that Roger Clemens and his armful of Cy Young awards was driven out of Boston before he went on the juice. He, like Babe and Manny, is an asshole, but he still had something left in the tank when the Sox jettisoned him. Just like Manny may be on the decline, but he was still by far the best hitter on the Dodgers the moment he stepped into the batters box. Even if the Dodgers were paying his salary, Manny at 20 million per season is not unreasonable, especially given the fact that LA is currently paying Andruw Jones 18 million a year for 2 home runs, 11 RBIs and a .160 batting average. Now THERE'S an underachieving bum for you. As for the ton of talent that the Dodgers supposedly gave up, Andy LaRoche does 2 things well: strike out and get injured. Besides that, he has a .610 career OPS. Not exactly a crown jewel. And if Manny signs elsewhere in the off-season, the Dodgers get a draft pick in return. So I don't see how the Dodgers emptied out their farm system any more than the Red Sox did, and the Sox are even paying Manny's salary in the bargain. A two-month rental on a Hall of Fame hitter costs the Dodgers no money and a couple of b-level prospects in exchange for a real shot at winning their division. It's a can't lose deal for LA.

Babe Ruth, Lefty Grove, Jimmy Foxx, Ted Williams, Jim Rice, Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs, Manny Ramirez. All of them were jerks, all of them were targeted by the Boston press, yet they were among the best players the Red Sox ever had. If you Sox fans could get off your high horse once in a while and just watch them play, you might find out what you were missing.

My attitude was toxic in that post? You think that's hostile? You, fairweather, are calling a born and raised bostonian on his fanhood? Either you're a troll, so you'll love this post, or you're a fool who doesn't know shit about baseball. In fact, you probably have no mental conception of what a 100 year rivalry is. I'll bet you're one of those fans who, when the team is down by more than a few runs in the 8th inning, leaves the stadium in order to beat the traffic. I pity you, fairweather, as you've been rooting for the west coast shadow of a genuine east coast team.

I could make all sorts of arguments about why sox fans hate clemens, bogg, and ruth, but in truth, one particular argument stands out: they played for the yankees. If your beloved players leave and then play for your longtime rival, you feel betrayed by said players. If you, fairweather, have any true passion for the sport you would understand this. Do I still respect them for what they gave to the sox? Certainly! I still hate them with every fiber of my body.

If you, fairweather, lived in Boston, New York, or even in St. Louis, you would recognize that most sox fans today like teddy, rice, grove, and foxx (although foxx less so). They're not necessarily our favorite players because they were assholes. Regardless, they were our assholes, for each one of them played their last full season with the sox (foxx played in four more seasons but did not have more than 230 ABs per season).

If you ask most people from Boston, they would call Ted Williams the greatest red sox hitter ever. They would name Lefty Grove as the best left-handed sox pitcher. Rice is considered by many fans to be one of the best sox outfielders. Where is the love missing, fairweather? Because our favorites are gritty, scrappy, relatively upstanding guys like Yaz and nixon? I guess the only sox fans you, know are bandwagon jumpers because that's all that exists in LA (jazzguitarman, if you're reading this post, I apologize as this douchebag really rattled my drunk-ass). Hell, I bet you can't even tell me the original name of your own team, fairweather (FYI: I'm defining original as the start of the modern world series, original name of the sox was the boston americans).

You wanna talk about underachieving bums, fairweather? You're GM is so sophomoric that you can't even recognize what is a good and a bad deal anymore. How's that nomar pickup holdin' up for ya, or Jeff Kent, rafael furcal, or juan pierre? You're team is filled with bum players who are over their prime, can't play defense, can't run and cost 10+ mil a year. Then your retard of a GM goes out and gets a 3B who can't play defense and is 35+! All the while, he trades a 22-year old catcher with a .910 ops in the minors and a relief prospect with 335 strikeouts in 262 minor league innings. That's probably why you view a 37 year old, 20 mil, two-month rental DH as your best position player. Let me put it to you this way, fairweather, even JD DREW (.950 OPS) is playing better than manny this season, when base running and fielding are taken into account.

Your perspective of good and bad deals is so bad, you can't even recognize potential when you see it, fairweather. Andy La Roche has been hitting the tar off the ball in the minors (.896 OPS). When Dustin Pedroia did that for the sox, we brought him up and he played a full season on a contending team. He hit .172 the first couple of months, and then went on to win an ROY batting over 300.

By way of comparison, Andy LaRoche was never given an opportunity for a full season in the ML on a crappy NL west team. Instead, he has a collection of 168 ABs over 3 seasons, which is hardly predictive of how good a young prospect will be. Furthermore, his BaBiP is only .200, indicating that he's been more unlucky than bad, and his walk to K ratio is about 1:1, indicating that his strikeout problems are the result of a disciplined, patient, approach. Your citation of Andy La Roche's ML OPS only reveals how ignorant you really are of your own team, fairweather.

I was trying to be friendly in my previous post and point you towards a website that many sox fans use to talk baseball, so that you could understand the trade from another point of view; you call my attitude toxic. I politely informed you of the context in which the Babe trade occurred, and how it had to do with more than just off-field issues, and you tell me to get off my high horse. I tried politely to point out that your GM essentially traded three talented players for an early playoff exit and a subsequent rebuilding season, and you call me hostile. I politely tried to inform you that dynasties are built off of young talent, not aging superstars, and you claim that I'm not a true sox fan. My previous post wasn't filled with hate, but this one is, fairweather. Enjoy your early round playoff exit, asshole.

Methinks thou dost protest too much. You need to take a chill pill and cool down. The hate that you profess for the Yankees spills too easily onto everything else. Lighten up a little.

I have no doubt that Sox fans appreciate Teddy Ballgame now that his head is on ice in a freezer somewhere, but I recall reading that when he was actually playing for you guys, Boston sportswriters were leaving him off MVP ballots and he was giving the one finger salute to the Fenway Faithful. I'm sure that 50 years from now when Manny is wheeled in to an All-Star reunion, Sox fans will applaud the Hall of Famer who helped them win 2 World Championships. In the meantime, Dodger fans are telling Theo Epstein "Thank you very much."

I am not defending Ned Colletti's other deals, which have been pretty disastrous. Ironically, Colletti's swipe of Ramirez may have saved his job. To put it another way, the Ramirez deal that fell into his lap was so good, even Ned Colletti couldn't screw it up.

As for Andy LaRoche, maybe his lack of big-league at-bats stems in part from his suckiness when he did get into the line-up. It's a lot easier to hit in Las Vegas than in LA.

I don't know what you have against LA and the Dodgers (the team was called by many names back in the early years, but I'm guess you're looking for the Trolley-Dodgers---do I get a kewpie doll?), given that your beef is with NY and the Yankees. But before you get into a pissing contest about the relative merits of the two cities, foulweather, remember that Boston uber-fan Bill Simmons moved to LA some years ago, and he doesn't plan to move back. But you can stay in Beantown as long as you want.

The dodgers went through a slew of changes as they were a NY team established in 1888. At turn of the century they were referred to as the Superbas (though they were the trolley-dodgers prior to that as well).

I was more pissed at the persona tone you took with my previous comment than the dodgers themselves; my dad was a brooklyn fan growing up in NY and hated when they moved to LA, so I kind of picked up that disdain as well.

I have no argument with the fact that the boston media is toxic. Guys like Dan shaughnessey, Nick Cardafo, etc. only write bitter toxic crap. However, the boston media is very distinct from the boston fanbase; most fans do not have the attitude of the boston media and this is reflected in writers like Gammons or Bob Ryan. Keep in mind that Gammons almost never writes something bad about a player, so when he writes a column (and a poorly written one) about manny being an a-hole, it resonates a little more truthfully than Shaughnessey writing a column about why we should hate Schilling. My point is, the boston media does not reflect the boston fanbase in and of itself, so when guys like foxx and teddy were lambasted by the media, the average fan still respected and praised what they did for the team. The same can be said of NY fans and their media as well. I can say honestly that most of us fans (including me) gave manny the benefit of the doubt after the altercations with the traveling secretary and youk. Even during that time, manny himself said he had no beef with the fans, just the management. I don't hate manny for what he did, but the team was going to get rid of him no matter what. In any case the short term impact of the trade so far has been good for all the teams involved (Bay's been pretty good for the sox so far, driving in runs in each game he's played). However, if manny goes to the yankees, I'll hate him then :)

The Ramirez deal probably saved Ned's ass, but that's not a good thing for the dodgers. Manny is a two-month rental, and I don't think you guys have the defense and hitting depth to compete against the NL central or east this year. Perhaps Manny will be resigned by the dodgers, but if he is, keep in mind that his agent is scott boras and he's looking for 100 million for 4 years. In any case, you'll still have about six aging starters on the roster that need to be replaced, and the depth to your farm system took a pretty big hit over the course of the season. This Andy LaRoche deal is the straw that broke the camel's back; it simply eliminates the remaining depth the dodgers had at the AAA level, making it very difficult to rebuild quickly next year.

Speaking of La Roche, you can't judge how good someone will be based on a sample size of less than 200 ABs. Numerous all-stars have started slow in the majors only to skyrocket after adjusting to the next level. Andy may just be a slow adjuster, and if he had been given the chance to start a full season, may post significantly better numbers. Given that your infield is a defensive liability, and guys like furcal, kent and nomar can't hit anyways. Wouldn't it be better to go with a guy who can improve vs. a guy who will definitely degrade? If you ask me, the pirates got the best end of that deal in the long run, as they basically added a whole bunch of excellent young talent that may make an impact next season.

Yeah, it bothered me to see Bill Simmons leave Beantown, but if you ask him, he still regards boston as his home. I live in St louis for two years now and I still regard boston as my hometown.

Even though you're strongly against reading sox message boards, I do recommend taking a look at the sonsofsamhorn.net forum and soxandpinstripes. I think you'll find that boston fans are more intelligent and analytical than you currently give them credit for.

Also, I think manny will get into the HOF 5 years after his retirement, not 50. Unlike other players during the steroid era, manny didn't juice; manny is just a natural born hitter. If you take a close look at his uniform (might be hard to do with the dodgers home uniform), you'll notice that he wears really baggy clothing. His outfit makes him look much bigger than he really is, so he's only 6 feet tall and 200 pounds. By way of comparison, nearly every yankee is bigger than him, and almost every red sox player as well. In fact, the only guy truly smaller than manny is juan pierre.

Ignore the manny HOF comment as I misread your comment about manny being wheeled in 50 years from now.

I too would be happy to see Ned Coletti dumped at season's end, preferably for Logan White, the Dodgers scouting director. I think if LA misses the playoffs again, he's gone. But Manny's hit .600 since joining the Dodgers, which makes them the team to beat in a lousy division, in my opinion. Once the playoffs start, anything can happen, but for what it's worth, I don't think either the Dodgers or the Red Sox will be playing in the World Series this year---my money's on the Angels and the Cubs.

I did know that the Dodgers were once called the Superbas. There's a Superba street in Los Angeles which I've always thought was named by a disgruntled Dodgers fan from Brooklyn.

Both Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were Manny's size, so obviously one doesn't need to be built like a gorilla to hit the ball hard. Just another reason that baseball's such a great game.

You obviously know your baseball, even if we disagree on Andy LaRoche's potential. I have nothing against the kid personally---I always liked his father, Dave LaRoche, from the time he threw a LaLob against the Dodgers in the '81 World Series---so it would be fine by me if he blossomed with regular playing time. We'll see. In the meantime, Manny just hit his 4th home run since joining the club. He's still a knucklehead, but man can that guy rake.

Heh, Bay's been hitting nearly .500 since he joined the sox as well (he's only had one 0-fer game for the sox so far), so I guess the trade's worked out for all teams considered in the short term :)

If you ask me, Manny's autistic. That's why he's such a great hitter but can't pay attention to anything else.

thank you for your diagnosis, Dr. Dumbass