On May 31 Manny Ramirez slugged the 500th home run of his major league career. Nine days later Ken Griffey Jr. socked the 600th home run of his career.
The two sluggers reached their rare milestones in close proximity. Now, however, they have been linked in even closer proximity. They were traded on the same day, making sure that this is one deadline day that won’t soon be forgotten.
In the past few years, the most notable players traded on the last day that teams could trade players without securing waivers on them were Mark Teixeira, Greg Maddux, Randy Winn and Nomar Garciaparra.
In 2004 Boston traded for Dave Roberts, and he wound up getting the stolen base that set up the amazing run that carried the Red Sox to the World Series championship. In 2003 the Yankees acquired Aaron Boone, who hit the Game 7, extra-inning home run that beat the Red Sox in the playoffs.
We will have to wait to see if anybody who was traded on this year’s deadline day will have an impact on post-season play. But we already know the significance of the coincidence of two of the trades that were made. The Boston Red Sox traded Ramirez to the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds traded Griffey to the Chicago White Sox.
Ramirez and Griffey traded on the same day. Two players with more than 1,100 home runs between them. When did that ever happen? Never.
The Red Sox traded Ramirez because after seven and two-thirds seasons they had finally had enough of the enigmatic Ramirez. I wanna be traded, I don’t wanna be traded. I don’t like playing in Boston. I like playing in Boston. And finally:
“The Red Sox don’t deserve a player like me,” he told ESPNdeportes.com. He added that in his time in Boston he had seen how the Red Sox had “mistreated other great players when they didn’t want them to try to turn the fans against them.”
However the fans felt about Ramirez, they didn’t like his sitdown strike last week any more than the team did. Coming up with a mysterious knee injury, Ramirez sat out two games, including one with the Yankees. That stunt went beyond Manny being Manny, and if the Red Sox needed a last straw, that was it.
Ramirez unquestionably was a feared and productive hitter during his $160 million tenure with the Red Sox. At his departure he led the team with 20 home runs and was second in runs batted in with 68. Jason Bay, whom the Red Sox got from Pittsburgh in the three-team deal, is a solid hitter, but he’s no Manny Ramirez. On the other hand, Bay will show up, do his job and say nothing and do nothing outrageous. He will create no distractions.
Ramirez is the Dodgers’ headache now. But in the two or three months he will play for the Dodgers, several factors will keep him on his best behavior.
One is Joe Torre, the Dodgers manager. Torre has his faults as a manager, but managing players isn’t one of them. Torre will gain Manny’s loyalty by telling him how happy he is to have him in his lineup after having faced him for a dozen years when the Yankees played the Red Sox.
Another factor is Ramirez’s contract status. His Boston contract included two option years at $20 million a year, but those clauses were struck from the contract to induce Ramirez to waive his right to block a trade. That means Ramirez will be a free agent in November, and he will spend his time in Los Angeles showing potential suitors why they should give him the millions that his new agent, Scott Boras, will seek in his behalf.
Boras is a third factor. He lives in southern California and has a seat in the front row at Dodger Stadium. If Manny doesn’t play up to his capabilities, Boras will be there to remind him, maybe holding up a large poster with a dollar sign on it.
Boras, in fact, most likely orchestrated the entire deal, figuring that was the only way to insure free agency for his new client. To create the potential for a lucrative contract for Ramirez and himself, Boras had to get rid of the option years, and they were perfect for the quid pro quo in which Ramirez would agree to a trade.
It’s even possible that Boras suggested to Ramirez, urged him, to make negative public comments about the Red Sox, who had already stretched thin their tolerance for Manny. Boras is an expert at knowing how to play teams he deals with.
The only team he missed on was the Yankees last winter in his effort to get a huge free-agent contract for Alex Rodriguez. What resulted was an embarrassing development for the agent, but Rodriguez still got his huge contract, and that, after all, was Boras’ goal.
“I think it makes absolute perfect sense,” an executive of another club said. “Boras doesn’t stand to make any money whatsoever unless he gets out of that contract. He’s an expert in using levers to get him out.”
The only thing that would surprise him, the executive said, was that it was the Red Sox who were the target of Boras’ alleged plan.
“I thought he had a good relationship with the Red Sox and wouldn’t want to jeopardize that,” the executive said.
Two years ago the Red Sox signed J.D. Drew after he exercised the opt-out clause in his $55 million Dodgers contract. Some Dodgers officials privately accused Boras of tampering by speaking to the Red Sox about a contract before Drew opted out, but Boras and Boston denied the allegation.
Skeptics might suggest that the Ramirez deal is Boras’ payback for Drew’s departure. Boras did not return a telephone call seeking comment.
Now that he has moved west, Ramirez could be a factor in two division races. His absence from the Boston lineup figures to dilute the Red Sox offensive efforts in their attempt to win the American League East title, and his presence in his new team’s lineup could tip the balance in the Dodgers favor in the National League West.
The Dodgers have not spent a day alone in first place since the first week of the season, but they have been tied for first on several days in recent weeks, and they were no more than a game out of first during most of the month of July. It’s as if Ned Colletti, the Dodgers general manager, told Torre “just keep us close and I’ll figure out something.”
The Red Sox were so eager to rid themselves of Ramirez that they agreed to pay the approximately $6.5 million left in his 2008 salary. The Cincinnati Reds will give the White Sox money to pay part of the approximately $8 million left in Griffey’s contract, but they offered him no inducement to waive his right to block a trade.
Griffey was in his ninth season in Cincinnati, but his stay there wasn’t what he had hoped for when Seattle traded him to the Reds in 2000. He was ready to leave the Reds now for a chance to play in the playoffs and maybe get to the World Series for the first time.
The White Sox have led the A.L. Central the past two and a half months and have fended off Minnesota’s attempts to supplant them at the top of the division standings. Whether Griffey can help the White Sox remain at the top remains to be seen. He is not the productive hitter he used to be.
A .300 hitter seven times in an eight-season stretch with Seattle, Griffey has batted .300 (.301) only once in the last 10 seasons. He hasn’t driven in 100 runs or hit 40 home runs since 2000. This season he was hitting .245 for the Reds with 53 runs batted in and 15 homers in 102 games.
The White Sox are expected to use Griffey in center field, where he hasn’t played regularly since 2006. He was once a great defensive outfielder, but he no longer holds that rank.
Griffey was once considered the best player in baseball, an assessment that irked Barry Bonds. Griffey was also the player considered the most likely to break Henry Aaron’s career home run record. But he encountered a series of disabling injuries that cost him many games and many home runs, leaving Bonds a clear path to the home run record.
For someone who remembers Griffey as a fun-loving 19-year-old rookie in 1989 with a brilliant career ahead of him, it’s difficult to think of him twice that age with little time left in his career. If there’s no other reason to root for an A.L. team to get to the World Series, it would be nice to see Griffey make it.