DHL Dan CCCIV - The Almost Jaylen Brown Trade

Last week's big NBA trade (that didn't happen) was the Boston Celtics dealing away Jaylen Brown to the Milwaukee Bucks for Giannis Antetokounmpo. Here's Shank taking half of his Picked Up Pieces column takling about... Manny Ramirez?

Can Jaylen Brown be like Manny Ramirez and brush off nearly being traded?

Picked-up pieces during hydration breaks and stoppage time . . .

⋅ Never thought it would come to this, but Boston needs Jaylen Brown to be like Manny Ramirez. Not like Nomar Garciaparra.

In December 2003, two months after the Red Sox’ epic collapse against the Yankees in the American League Championship Series, the Sox agreed to deal savant slugger Manny and wildly popular Garciaparra in a three-team deal that would have delivered Alex Rodriguez and Magglio Ordonez to Fenway Park. It all seemed pretty done. We even saw Red Sox infielder Kevin Millar on ESPN, smiling, telling Dan Patrick, “We’ll take A-Rod!”

The whole thing collapsed a few days later because of complexities involving Rodriguez’s massive contract and MLB’s Players Association, but the baseball world knew the Sox had been ready to part with both stars.

It made for a big bowl of awkward at spring training in 2004, but Boston’s “slighted” superstars took separate paths. Manny walked around smiling, saying, “They put me on eBay,” while drum-tight Nomar sulked and said, “The priorities are obviously not for me . . . I was definitely hurt by a lot of it.”

“My first day on the job in Boston was after all that had gone down,” former Red Sox manager Terry Francona remembered this past week. “It was unbelievable. Welcome to the Red Sox, right? Manny was yelling about being on eBay, but he sort of laughed about it and got over it. And he always hit. I remember John Henry telling me when I got there, ‘Keep him on the field. That’s your job.’ ”

It Must Be Passive-Aggressive Week

We're only two days into the week and we see Shank kicking Tom Brady when he's down, and for his second act he's gonna pull a few punches with former Red Sox left fielder Manny Ramirez:

Manny Ramirez is apologetic, contrite, and renewed by his faith

All these years later, Manny Ramirez wants you to know that he loves you and that he is sorry for mistakes he made while playing in Boston.

He is sorry he knocked down Red Sox traveling secretary Jack McCormick over a ticket issue when the Sox were in Houston in 2008. He is sorry for the way he shot his way out of town and got himself traded to the Dodgers later that season. He is sorry he got popped for PEDs three times.

“It’s a mistake,’’ Manny said of his failed drug tests. “It’s like Barry [Bonds], Alex [Rodriguez], and everybody that was in that [Mitchell] Report. We made mistakes. I cannot go back and change it. I think it’s going to be good for young players to see what happened in that time. But when you’re good, you’re good. Those things don’t make you a better hitter.’’

That's as harsh ash Shank gets in the column about Manny. A few sentences later the irony meter exploded:

…
Manny signed an eight-year, $160 million contract with the Red Sox before the 2001 season and made good on 7½ seasons of the deal. He was a latter-day Jimmie Foxx, good for about .312, 40 homers, and 120 RBIs every year. He was MVP of the World Series when the Sox broke the Curse of the Bambino in 2004. Paired with David Ortiz, he gave the Sox a Babe Ruth-Lou Gehrig combo.

But he also was goofy. Fans loved it most of the time, but “Manny being Manny” sometimes triggered headaches for teammates, managers, and owners.

Readers need an occasional reminder or two or even three in order to keep the record straight - Shank was no friend of Manny Ramirez, until now.

No Price Too Low

The Red Sox have signed David Price, and The CHB is singing Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!

"Why quarrel with what the Red Sox will be paying Price if he ultimately gets hurt or falters in the final years of this contract?" he writes.

Oh yes, why indeed? Especially because the Royals -- you remember them? -- won the World Series the season after shedding their best pitcher.

Or perhaps because, just three months into their first season with the Red Sox, The CHB compared high priced free agents Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval to the "baseball version of Sidney Wicks and Curtis Rowe," two players who by the time they reached the Boston Celtics were known more for their attitude than their production.

The rewrites of history continue. Ben Cherington "failed." (Didn't the Red Sox win a World Series in 2013? I keep forgetting.) David Price is sensitive, but Manny Ramirez (the "diva") and Keith Foulke (whom upon his signing in 2003 The CHB wrote: "People in the A's front office think Keith Foulke made a mistake coming to Boston ... and some of the A's believe Foulke is too sensitive. I tend to agree.") aren't. The Boston farm system is overrated (the best player on the team in 22-year-old Mookie Betts; the AL Silver Slugger award winner as shortstop in 23-year-old Xander Bogaerts; the best defensive OF in baseball in 25-year-old Jackie Bradley Jr.; and enough prospects to land the best closer in baseball, but OK...).

And Shank, it's time to drop the "big bowl of awkward" cliche. That's twice in two months you've rolled it out, and we all know you stole it. Booyah!

Dear Shanka Claus - I

Dear Shanka Claus:

All's I want for Christmas is this - I left Boston six fucking years ago. Don't you have some other Red Sox player to run out of town? Give it a rest, asshole.

Thanks,

Manny R., destination unknown

The One Where Shank Found His Balls

Shank's doing Shank things again, ripping Red Sox players and the rest of the club:

Red Sox headlines I’d love to see:

Manny finds God, Sox lose minds

Let me see if I have this straight: Manny Ramirez hit like Jimmie Foxx for 7½ seasons in Boston, but it turned out he was cheating with PEDs the whole time. His name appeared on the list of 104 players who tested positive in 2003, and later he was twice suspended for failing drug tests. He’s the only big league star who got caught three times.

Ramirez also regularly ignored the kids from the Jimmy Fund and the soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital. He was arrested for hitting his wife. In his final year with the Red Sox, 2008, he assaulted a 65-year-old Sox employee over a ticket request, then quit on the team in midsummer, forcing a trade after staging a sit-down strike.

After quitting on the Sox, he went to Los Angeles and hit .396 with 17 homers and 53 RBIs in the final 53 games of the season. Without Ramirez, the Sox went on to lose the seventh game of the 2008 AL Championship Series to the Tampa Bay Rays.

So what happens? On the night the Sox chose to honor the most important team in their 114-year history, they made Manny the featured character. After legitimate Sox gods Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, and Curt Schilling were asked to step aside — Bloody Sock Schill was making his first public appearance while in the throes of a serious battle with cancer — Manny came out from the Green Monster and had the honor of throwing the ceremonial first pitch.

I wonder if Shank cleared this column with John Henry first?

UPDATE at 1:24 PM - Did Shank and Kirk Minihane co-write this column or something?

First, I'm on the anti-Manny side of this. A serial steroid abuser, a guy who quit on his team, skipping Jimmy Fund after Jimmy Fund event, blowing off Walter Reed, beating up old guys and his own wife -- we all know the greatest hits. He's personified everything that's been wrong with baseball the last 15 years, and the Red Sox decide to give him above-the-title billing for the 10th anniversary celebration of the 2004 World Series champions Wednesday? A stunningly tone-deaf move by the Red Sox, basically endorsing all the many transgressions of Ramirez.

Lynched

"In my view, every player has a right to remain silent. ... It’s not the guys who don’t talk that bother me."

So says The CHB today, maintaining a Lou Gehrig-like streak of consecutive columns of total BS.

Not every word of today's "effort" is false, of course. For instance, Shank writes, "Manny Ramirez exercised that right [to ignore the press] for long stretches and we didn’t think any less of him for it."

This is actually true. Shaughnessy hated Manny because he was 1) Hispanic, 2) paid $20 million a year, 3) beloved by fans no matter what he did, and 4) Hispanic. Whether he spoke with the press was moot.

He doesn't mention Nomar Garciaparra today (although he did yesterday) but Nomar would be another one. As The CHB wrote a few years ago, "What a fraud. Nobody hated the media more with less cause than our guy Nomie." Yep, Nomar didn't talk much to the media either. He was completely articulate about why, however, noting that while he recognized the press had a job to do, that making their job easy wasn't his job." But again, Nomar was 1) Hispanic, 2) paid $15 million a year, 3) beloved by fans no matter what he did, and 4) Hispanic.

This is the best part: Four grafs from the end of the column, this little bit gets thrown in, sans transitions or explanation as to its relevance: "Lynch is 5 feet 11 inches, weighs 215 pounds, grew up in Oakland and went to California. His mom’s name is Delisa Lynch and he has a brother named Davonte. A couple of his cousins played professional football. He played three-plus seasons with the Buffalo Bills and has been with Seattle since the 2010 season. He rushed for 1,257 yards this year and scored 14 touchdowns."

Thanks, Dan. Without you, I might never had known Marshawn's mother's name is Delisa. Delisa!

Mr. Manners

Booing is wrong, and people who do it are bad, bad, bad!

So sayeth the Shank, who in a way reminiscent of Miss Manners, expresses his distaste for the fans' lack of civility and his manlove for a Chief lineman who criticized the crowd for piling on after Matt Cassel was knocked out of the game.

Now, let's get one thing straight: The Chiefs fans weren't actually cheering because Cassel got hurt; they were cheering because he would no longer be in the game, manning a club that has gone 22-31 since his arrival from New England prior to the 2009 season. They had a point: Cassel's QB rating is a pedestrian 81% for his career, a mark he's topped only once in the four seasons he's helmed the Chiefs.

But this is where The CHB's hypocrisy switched into overdrive: "I’ve certainly done my share of tweaking and exposing professional athletes or organizations who don’t give an honest effort to live up to their contracts or fulfill the team-fan accord."

Would that be "tweaking" like when he called David Ortiz a sad sack of you-know-what? Was it tweaking when he called Carl Everett "the Ebola virus of the Boston clubhouse?" Or when he wrote “We have rejoiced in the retirement of Keith Foulke?” Would that be "exposing" when he wrote, "Why does America hate Barry Bonds so much? Is it because he's too good?" all while neglecting to mention Bonds' PED use for another five years. Was that exposing when he accused Manny Ramirez, the previous season's World Series MVP, of quitting on the team during a month where he put up a .930 OPS and 6 HRs in 24 games?

No, that would just be the Holy Cross Hypocrite, doing what he does best.