4:22pm: Rob Neyer has an interesting take on this tidbit. "You think Manny’s too old for a long-term contract?" he asks rhetorically, before running through Gary Sheffield’s late-30s contracts and pointing out that he’ll earn $14 million next year at the age of 40. But wait! "That hasn’t worked out too well for anyone except Sheffield and his agent…Players like Manny Ramirez and Gary Sheffield are exactly what keep teams like the Red Sox, the Mets, the Dodgers, and (especially) the Yankees from winning 100 games every year."
1:58pm: I promised myself no Manny Ramirez posts today, but…George King is reporting that "a close friend" of the slugger’s told him that Manny "wants to play for the Yankees so he can get at the Red Sox." And of course, Ramirez went to high school in the Bronx [correction: upper Manhattan].
The Yankees well know what Ramirez can do with a bat. Only two players—Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams—have more bombs against the Yankees than Ramirez does, and the New York papers greeted news of his departure from rival Boston with unrestrained glee. In 83 at-bats in Yankee Stadium over the past three years, Ramirez has hit .325/.411/.530.
But would the Yankees actually sign him? They can certainly afford him…but my hunch is that they’d prefer to keep working on their youth movement. And if it’s true, as agent Scott Boras has been saying, that Manny wanted to get out of the media-saturated fishbowl of Boston, a move to New York would be completely illogical. On the other hand, this is Manny we’re talking about…not Spock.
