Evolution of ‘Manny being Manny’: Borrowed underwear, uncashed paychecks, carefree confidence for a ‘hitting savant’
By Zack Meisel 8
When Manny Ramirez finally lifted his head, nearly 270 feet into his leisurely trot, he peered up at a visitor’s dugout teeming with howling teammates. Candy Maldonado raised two fingers. Carlos Baerga formed a stop sign with his hands. Sandy Alomar Jr. convulsed with laughter.
To his surprise, Manny’s first major league hit was not a home run, but a ground-rule double that caromed off the warning track and disappeared into the left-field seats at Yankee Stadium. As his teammates and his nearly 100 friends and family members in attendance that September night in 1993 celebrated his milestone, Manny halted his procession, flashed a smile and retreated to second base.
Thirty years ago, Mickey White discovered the shy kid with the mesmerizing swing just across the Harlem River. White, Cleveland’s scouting director, hailed from Pittsburgh, and he vowed he would never pass up the chance to draft the next Roberto Clemente.
The Indians couldn’t afford to flub their first-round pick in the 1991 draft, not with a new ballpark and a heightened sense of urgency on the horizon. This selection needed to rescue the organization from its decades-long exile from relevance. Aaron Sele, a college pitcher, seemed like a safe choice, but as the draft approached, Indians general manager John Hart couldn’t shake the image of Manny’s hallmark swing.
“He was a hitting savant,” says Dan O’Dowd, a longtime Cleveland front office executive.
Over the ensuing decade, before he bolted to Boston, before the “Manny being Manny” mania exploded and before PEDs, trade demands and quarrels with teammates, management and traveling secretaries marred his reputation, Manny blossomed into one of the league’s most imposing sluggers, the antagonist who turned up in pitchers’ nightmares. He developed into a run-producing fixture in a perennially prolific Indians lineup, and an enigmatic character who stored uncashed paychecks in his locker, gave away his trophies to the team psychologist and treated Cleveland’s clubhouse like family-style dining, as he borrowed teammates’ bats and sported their underwear.
His hitting was otherworldly. His humor was from another dimension.
“He was a professor at MIT in the batter’s box,” Hart says, “and a freshman at a junior college on the bases and in the outfield.”
“A freshman in kindergarten,” countered Hall of Fame Indians beat writer Sheldon Ocker.
In his 10 years with Cleveland, this is when Manny became Manny.
Travis Fryman would trot to the dugout from his station at third base, rest his glove and sunglasses on the bench and head to the bat rack to prepare for his trip to the plate. One day, his bat vanished. He scoured the dugout, barked at the bat boys and mentally retraced his pregame steps.
He peered at the scoreboard to view the count on Manny, who preceded him in Mike Hargrove’s lineup. Fryman was tardy for his appointment in the on-deck circle. His mind was spinning, his body frantic.
And then he noticed it, the familiar piece of lumber cocked above Manny’s right shoulder. Manny hacked at a pitch with Fryman’s bat and ripped a double off the left-field wall.
Fryman wanted to avoid the Little League ritual of scooping up and using his teammate’s discarded bat. He instead grabbed a Jim Thome model from the rack. The rest of the game, he dashed to the dugout after the third out to secure his property.
Manny ignored the customary, oft-unspoken protocols. To him, bats weren’t some sacred treasure. In one particular game, he wielded four different bats via four different teammates and recorded four base hits. In another, he socked a home run with a broken bat. Initially, reporters marveled at the might required to muscle a baseball beyond a fence after the heater splintered his bat. Manny clarified, however, that the bat was cracked before he even left the dugout.
When Ocker, who covered the team for more than 30 years, questioned why he didn’t select a sturdier stick, Manny shrugged.
“Oh, I like the bat,” he said, erasing no confusion.
Teammates never bothered to analyze his actions. They preferred to preserve the mystique. No one truly understood his quirks, but that was OK. He was Manny. Erratic, but lovable. An assassin at the plate, and affably aloof everywhere else. Always aiming to provoke laughter, but never willing to reveal whether he was in on the joke.
Manny Ramirez
Manny Ramirez in 1999. (David Maxwell / AFP via Getty Images)
If a player were missing a piece of equipment or an element of his uniform, he would make a beeline for Manny’s locker, a graveyard of teammates’ belongings. Manny’s frequent pilfering prompted several locker relocations. Pitcher José Mesa demanded clubhouse attendants banish Manny to the opposite side of the room so his gear wouldn’t vanish.
During batting practice, Manny donned the bullpen catcher’s pants, which were five sizes too big and nearly swallowed him whole. He fastened them with a belt at his chest, over his jersey top. With his teammates shaking with laughter, Manny strutted into the batter’s box to swat baseballs into the outfield seats.
No layer was off-limits. If Manny suffered through a skid at the plate, he’d snatch an article of clothing — a T-shirt, socks, even underwear — from a teammate who was thriving.
“Guys would be looking for their underwear and Manny would be wearing it,” says pitching coach Mark Wiley.
Manny coveted those laughs like he craved a 3-0 fastball. Then again, he didn’t always track the count in his at-bats because he was so fixated on recognizing a specific pitch and launching it into orbit. He’d sometimes wait for the umpire to direct him to first base after a fourth ball. He was a carefree outfielder obsessed with hitting, who occasionally dabbled in comedy as a side gig.
“Eddie Murray, every now and then,” Hart says, “he’d just look over at Manny sometimes and waggle his finger and Manny would calm down.”
“There was never an ounce of malice in his bones,” Alomar says.
On June 17, 1994, in the thick of a 10-game winning streak, the Indians huddled around a TV in the clubhouse, captivated by the O.J. Simpson white Bronco chase. One player said, “Can you believe what O.J. is doing?” Manny walked into the room, having just showered, and nonchalantly replied: “What’s Chad up to now?” The rest of the team, convinced the rookie right fielder thought teammate Chad Ogea was fleeing police in a nationally televised pursuit, erupted with laughter. Later that night, Manny notched a pair of doubles to fuel another Cleveland victory.
“We’d all have a little laugh,” Hart says, “but in the back of my mind, I was always such a strong believer in him that I just said, ‘I want this guy to be the greatest hitter that ever played the game. He has that kind of ability. I want him to be known as a great player, not as some clown.’”
In June 1991, the Indians gathered their signed draft picks for a workout at Baldwin Wallace University, about 20 minutes south of Jacobs Field and downtown Cleveland. When Manny stepped up to the plate for batting practice, Earth stopped rotating on its axis.
Cleveland’s first-rounder sprayed home runs and line drives to every nook of the outfield, wowing the college players, most older than Manny, who witnessed the performance. Bob Fisher, the longtime head coach at Baldwin Wallace, had never watched baseballs travel to these remote locations, let alone by a reticent teenager.
The showcase enabled the Indians’ front office to exhale after they had endorsed Manny in favor of Sele, Allen Watson and Shawn Estes, a trio of big league-bound starting pitchers. They had pondered whether they could draft one of those hurlers and then snag Manny with their second pick, but the proposition seemed too risky.
“All it takes is one club,” White reminded Hart.
The afternoon the team introduced him as its top pick, Manny completed his first round of batting practice at Municipal Stadium, the Indians’ cavernous, decaying dungeon. Manny treated his major-league audience to an array of opposite-field home runs.
“Nothing after that day surprised me,” Alomar says.
Later that year, after Manny captured Minor League Player of the Year honors for his gaudy statistics in rookie ball in Burlington, North Carolina, he flew to Cleveland for a debriefing of his first professional season. Mark Shapiro, one week into his new gig as a baseball operations assistant, picked up Manny from the airport and drove them to what he described as one of the most uncomfortable meals of his life. The two dined at a restaurant inside the Powerhouse, an old power plant converted into a collection of eateries, clubs and an arcade in a brick building in the Flats, the bar-speckled banks of the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland.
Manny didn’t say much. He mixed in an occasional smile between his one- and two-word answers to Shapiro’s futile bids to spark conversation. Shapiro, five years his senior, finally handed Manny a roll of quarters. Manny beamed. The two ambushed every Pac-Man, pinball and pop-a-shot machine in the venue.
“That broke the ice,” Shapiro recalls. “The rest of the night, we laughed and talked.”
Manny was homesick the moment he landed in Burlington, the antithesis of his environment in Washington Heights, where he was comforted by familiar faces, fellow Dominican Republic transplants. He threatened to quit during his first minor-league season. To persuade him not to squander his unrivaled hitting acumen, the Indians leaned on Mel Zitter, Manny’s high school mentor who had coached him in the Brooklyn-based Youth Service League. The Indians also signed veteran outfielder Donell Nixon to guide Manny through the upper levels of the minor leagues.
“His bat progressed him through the minor leagues so fast that we couldn’t develop the rest of him,” Shapiro says. “It was almost impossible.”
If not for Manny’s immediate output at the plate, Cleveland’s executives wondered, who knows how his story would have unfolded? He registered a .326/.426/.679 slash line at Burlington, with 19 home runs in 59 games.
“He was trying to survive each day,” O’Dowd says. “The only time he was ever comfortable in his life, at that point in time, was when he was in the batter’s box.”
In 1993, Hart dispatched Ted Simmons, a Hall of Fame catcher who had joined the Indians as a pro scout, to a game in Toledo to identify the talent at the team’s Triple-A affiliate, the Charlotte Knights. The Indians were aiming to bury four decades of misery when they shifted into their sparkling new ballpark the following year. Hart demanded insight on whether Manny or Thome could help vault Cleveland toward contention.
After Manny’s first at-bat, Simmons called Hart.
“Hartbeat, oh, my God,” Simmons told him. “I just saw this kid hit a ball 450 feet.”
An hour later, another bulletin.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Simmons relayed. “I just saw him hit one to right-center, the same distance. John, this guy is ready.”
Two years after he was drafted, Manny reached the major leagues, swatting home runs and doubles that masqueraded as home runs.
Manny Ramirez
Manny Ramirez homers in 1999. (David Maxwell / AFP via Getty Images)
Early in his career, Manny sat one afternoon with Julian Tavarez in the visitor’s clubhouse at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City. Manny rarely engaged in noteworthy conversations with reporters, and he never initiated the dialogue. On this day, though, he summoned Ocker to their table and asked the early-50s newspaperman for a loan.
“How much?” Ocker asked.
“Sixty thousand dollars,” Manny said.
Ocker flipped his pants pockets inside out to reveal only a few clumps of lint.
“How about $30,000?” Manny relented.
Ocker inquired about the plans for this potential windfall. Manny said he and Tavarez each wanted to purchase a new Harley Davidson motorcycle. When reporters congregated in Hargrove’s office for his pregame interview session, Ocker told the manager about Manny’s quest for cash.
“Yeah, I already know,” Hargrove said. “He asked John Hart for an advance on his salary.”
Manny landed a signing bonus of about $250,000 following the draft. By 1996, following the signing of a four-year extension, he was earning a seven-figure salary. And yet, neglected paychecks routinely fluttered out of Manny’s locker in the Indians’ clubhouse at Jacobs Field. He once left one in a pair of cowboy boots in the visitor’s clubhouse in Texas. The team’s controller required the PR director to talk to Manny about depositing the paychecks.
The PR director asked Manny: “How are you doing for money?”
“I’m doing great,” Manny said. “You need some?”
The PR director politely declined and instead suggested Manny hadn’t been cashing his paychecks. Manny rummaged through his cleats and batting gloves and teammates’ belongings at the bottom of his locker and unearthed three unopened, crumpled envelopes, each containing a check worth two weeks’ salary.
“These?” Manny asked.
“They found stuff from April in August,” Alomar says.
In those days Manny mastered the art of escaping responsibility for the dinner tab. After a night of premium seafood and a few bottles of wine with teammates, he’d excuse himself to use the restroom when the bill arrived. And he’d never return.
“You have no idea how many times he’d say, ‘Hey, I forgot my wallet,’” Baerga says.
“He’d go, ‘I didn’t bring my credit card,’” Alomar says. “Or, ‘I didn’t bring cash.’ Manny would say, ‘You guys have more service time than me. You take care of the tab.’” Of course, Manny had plenty of cash. He once left $25,000 in his locker over the offseason. A clubhouse attendant discovered the money while cleaning out Manny’s space. The Indians deposited it for him.
If Manny tapped on a teammate’s hotel room door, room service wasn’t far behind. Manny would greet Baerga or Tavarez or Omar Vizquel and say, “Let’s eat together today!”
“I’d say, ‘I just finished eating,’” Baerga says. And then, a hotel employee would appear with trays of chicken wings and burgers and French fries — all charged to the unwitting teammate’s room.
When the Indians promoted Manny to the majors in September 1993, he spent his first homestand at a Marriott in downtown Cleveland. He packed his suitcase the morning of the team’s series finale, after which the Indians flew to Texas. The bellhops at the Arlington hotel delivered each player’s luggage to his room. Manny’s was missing. Hotel staff scanned the lobby and the team bus before they deduced that Manny had never toted his suitcase to the ballpark in Cleveland earlier that day.
“He did that twice,” Baerga says. “Twice! We had to buy some clothes for him.”
“He’d buy clothes on a road trip and then leave them in his locker for the clubhouse kids to keep,” Alomar says.
Clubhouse attendants regularly drove Manny’s burgundy, souped-up Chevy Impala to the car wash. Manny instructed them to use the cash in the glove compartment. A few singles would cover the cost. Instead, as one clubbie recalled, he opened the glovebox and out spilled a pile of $100 bills, totaling about $10,000.
Manny reclined the driver’s seat as far back as the mechanism would permit, and the clubbies didn’t want to alter his settings, so they crept along Carnegie Avenue as they struggled to see over the steering wheel. Manny would cruise through the Flats, pull into a parking lot and crank the volume of his music to its limits, the bass thumping.
“One year he came in and the car was yellow,” Alomar says. “I was shocked. It looked like a taxi.”
Police officers in nearby Lakewood constantly contacted the Indians, insisting they implore Manny and Vizquel to adhere to the speed limits on their drives home. The request would work for a day or two. Then, Vizquel’s canary-colored Porsche and Manny’s black Mercedes — he eventually upgraded from the Impala — would zip through the streets on the west side of town. When busted for speeding or for boasting unlawful window tints, Manny would sometimes submit a New York driver’s license. Other times, an Ohio driver’s license — whichever card he selected from his stockpile.
Once, when an officer told Manny he had to give him a ticket, Manny replied: “I don’t need any tickets. I can get you tickets.”
After he received his penalty, a fee he could pay with one swift reach into his glovebox, Manny pulled away. He immediately made an illegal U-turn, which earned him a second ticket in a matter of minutes.
Manny smacked a thigh-high fastball and immediately dropped his bat. The baseball sailed past the center-field wall and bounced around the abandoned picnic area at Jacobs Field. By the seventh inning on a sunny Sunday afternoon in October 2000, no one was enjoying lunch with a view. Every fan was standing at their seat, many holding signs featuring Sharpie-scripted sales pitches.
One message read: “Manny please stay! Dolan please pay!” Another read: “We love you, Manny! Please stay!”
Manny admired his work for a few moments, taking deliberate paces toward first base. Then he commenced his final trot around the infield as a member of the Indians. A home run siren and 2 Unlimited’s “Get Ready for This” blared from the ballpark speakers, drowning out fans’ pleas to the free-agent-to-be. Slider, the team’s furry, fuchsia mascot, stood atop Cleveland’s dugout and bowed to Manny as fans begged for a curtain call, one last chance to acknowledge the guy who had morphed from an unfamiliar draft pick in 1991 into a lineup staple and off-the-field riddle nearly a decade later.
Manny was on the doorstep of a heartbreaking exodus, but unlike his eventual divorce from Boston — an ugly split incited by years of dubious injury claims, squabbles with the front office and clubhouse turmoil — his final chapter in Cleveland was defined by home runs and standing ovations.
Manny Ramirez homers in his final game at Jacobs Field on Oct. 1, 2000. (David Maxwell / AFP via Getty Images)
“We were the best offensive team in baseball for eight or nine years,” Hart says, “and as great as Thome was, probably one of the best power hitters, Albert Belle, great power hitter, Robbie Alomar, Carlos Baerga, great hitters — the best hitter I’ve ever been around in my 50 years in baseball has been Manny Ramirez. I had Alex Rodriguez in Texas. The absolute best hitter I’ve ever been around is Manny. I’ll go to my grave saying that.”
Manny didn’t demonstrate as much dedication to the other facets of his game. He would occasionally forget the number of outs when roaming right field, so the team psychologist crafted a laminated sheet that reminded him to track the score, the number of outs and to which base he should throw the ball. Once, when he was running on the pitch, a middle infielder for the opposition told him the batter had hit a foul ball, so Manny returned to first base, where he was tagged out. There was no foul ball.
But when it came to hitting?
“In reality, he was one of the smartest players I ever played with,” Alomar says. “He was phenomenal.”
And it’s why he has never wanted to stop hitting. He has surfaced at any ballpark on any continent that will welcome him. When failed PED tests foiled his bid to play in the majors into his 40s, Manny bounced around the minors with several clubs, played in the Dominican Winter League and a Japanese independent league and even appeared in 49 games for the EDA Rhinos of the Chinese Professional Baseball League. Last winter, he struck an agreement to play in Australia, though that partnership fizzled before he ever stepped into the batter’s box. Even as he approaches 50, he’s in search of a bat and a cage or a field.
For 7 p.m. games, Manny would stroll into the ballpark at 10 a.m. He worked out, watched video and then trekked home to take a nap. By 2 p.m., he was back in the cages. Manny could be flaky in any other situation, but never with his hitting routine.
Manny, Thome and Belle would arrive at the team’s spring training facility in Winter Haven, Florida, an hour before their teammates to occupy the two batting cages adjacent to the clubhouse. By the time the rest of the players changed into their gear, Manny would be drenched, liquid proof of his hundreds of hacks.
Manny pored over video of Juan Gonzalez and Edgar Martinez and mimicked how they positioned their hands on the bat. He studied pitchers’ tendencies with hitting guru Charlie Manuel. He modified pitching machine settings to replicate specific pitches, such as Kevin Brown’s sinker, so he would know precisely when and where and how he needed to swing to bruise the perfect spot on the baseball as it plunged toward the dirt.
Russell Branyan, a brawny, rookie slugger, was struggling to grasp why he couldn’t catch up to fastballs, so he enlisted the help of the guy who constantly obliterated them. Manny urged him to change his point of contact, to swing earlier. By the time Branyan decided to swing, the heater had settled into the catcher’s mitt. The conversation incited a Branyan power surge.
Manny could self-diagnose what was ailing him at the plate, which, in Wiley’s view, explained why he never displayed frustration in the dugout. No helmet-spiking. No Gatorade cooler-attacking. Just an occasional, softly muttered expletive.
“I think it was because of his superior confidence,” Wiley says. “He knew how good he was. He never had slumps.”
On July 16, 1995, Manny whacked an inside fastball from Oakland’s Dennis Eckersley halfway up the left-field bleachers for a walk-off home run in the 12th inning, his third consecutive game with a homer. This one sealed a four-game sweep. As Eckersley trudged back to the dugout, bewildered by Manny’s feat, he uttered a drawn-out, “Wow.”
“There’s no other way to put it,” O’Dowd says. “Manny was as gifted a hitter as anybody who has ever worn an Indians uniform.”
Manny clubbed 236 home runs with Cleveland, third-most in franchise history. His .998 OPS ranks first, ahead of Shoeless Joe Jackson and Hall of Famers Jim Thome and Tris Speaker. He racked up 165 RBIs in 1999, the most in one season by any player in the last 83 years. No one exhibited better bat speed or possessed a more alluring swing. The way he hunched forward and deliberately motioned his bat toward the pitcher. The way he could cover the entire plate so no region of the strike zone offered the pitcher security. The way he released his right hand from the handle during his follow-through. The abruptness with which he dropped his bat in the dirt the instant he struck a baseball he knew was destined for the outfield seats or the moon.
“When he came out of his mother’s womb,” says one longtime Indians executive, “God touched his head and said, ‘You’re a hitter, kid.’”
When the team squared off against the Yankees or some other daunting foe in the postseason, Manny played coy. He would chat with an opposing player during batting practice and suggest he was scuffling at the plate, that his bat lacked its usual spark, that the team didn’t need to concern itself with his plate appearances. Baerga and Vizquel eavesdropped on some of those conversations and rolled their eyes.
“We would look at each other, like, ‘Here we go again. Manny says he doesn’t feel good,’” Baerga says. “He was joking around. He never said he felt good. When the lights came on at 7 p.m., he was ready.”
Manny tallied 13 of his MLB-record 29 postseason home runs during his years with the Indians.
He amassed Silver Slugger awards and All-Star Game nods and Man of the Year honors from the Cleveland chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. He never cared to retrieve his hardware, though. One award sat atop his locker all season until he gave it to the team psychologist. Others, he attempted to pawn off on anyone he encountered, from Baerga to the guy who rubbed Delaware River mud on the baseballs in the umpire’s room before each game.
“He’d say, ‘Carlito, go and get it for you,’” Baerga says. “You know how many Player of the Month awards Manny won? Silver Sluggers? I don’t think there’s a single picture of Manny grabbing a trophy at the ballpark.”
That was Manny, mysterious and inexplicable, but always commanding attention, long before “Manny Being Manny” gained national acclaim.
“I think because people looked at him as kind of goofy at times,” O’Dowd says, “that gets lost in the fact of how serious he was about his craft and becoming the best.
“Manny told me right to my face: ‘I want to be the best hitter that’s ever played this game.’”
"I've suffered a great many tragedies in my life....most of them never happened". Mark Twain
