G Player YearSchmidt actually reached 11 in 12 games thanks to a two-homer effort on April 26, 1976. Even that feat was topped by his hitting four home runs on April 17, an exploit I recall reading about in a March 1978 Boys' Life magazine article that it turns out was written by former major league hurler Jim Brosnan (Brosnan wrote the pre-Ball Four diary The Long Season as well as a bio of Ron Santo that I must have read three times during elementary school).
12 Mike Schmidt 1976
14 Alex Rodriguez 2007
14 Albert Pujols 2006
14 Luis Gonzalez 2001
15 Willie Stargell 1971
15 Willie Mays 1964
Ramirez, now entering his seventh season with the Boston Red Sox, is the best baseball player to come out of the New York City public-school system since Sandy Koufax, and by many accounts the greatest right-handed hitter of his generation, though attempts to locate him in time and space, as we shall see, inevitably miss the mark. He is perhaps the closest thing in contemporary professional sports to a folk hero, an unpredictable public figure about whom relatively little is actually known but whose exploits, on and off the field, are recounted endlessly, with each addition punctuated by a shrug and the observation that it’s just “Manny being Manny.” When I asked his teammate David Ortiz, himself a borderline folk hero, how he would describe Ramirez, he replied, “As a crazy motherfucker.” Then he pointed at my notebook and said, “You can write it down just like that: ‘David Ortiz says Manny is a crazy motherfucker.’ That guy, he’s in his own world, on his own planet. Totally different human being than everyone else.” Ortiz is not alone in emphasizing that Ramirez’s originality resonates at the level of species. Another teammate, Julian Tavarez, recently told a reporter from the Boston Herald, “There’s a bunch of humans out here, but to Manny, he’s the only human.”McGrath chases down the legend of Manny, the over-reported incidents which have dogged his Boston career -- taking a leak inside the Fenway scoreboard, drinks with Yankee Enrique Wilson while claiming to be sick, the difficulty of locating him at times, the annual attempts to get rid of him on the part of the Sox, the eBay grill auction, and so on. My favorite bit was this one:
[Boston GM Dan] Duquette had been following Ramirez’s career since high school, but he now concedes that he had no idea “exactly how unique” his new left fielder was. “When Manny first came to the Red Sox, he would stand in the batter’s box, and the umpire would call ball four, and he would get back in the batter’s box,” Duquette, who is now the president of the fledgling Israel Baseball League, told me. “He did this in his first series at Fenway Park and again on his first road trip.” After the third such incident, Duquette ventured down into the locker room. “I said, ‘Manny, let me ask you something. I was just wondering why you get back in the batter’s box after ball four.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the balls.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the strikes, either, until I got two.’ Then he said, ‘Duke, I’m up there looking for a pitch I can hit. If I don’t get it, I wait for the umpire to tell me to go to first. Isn’t that what you’re paying me to do?’Absolutely classic. Don't miss it.
Labels: gloves, Hit List, Red Sox, Yankees
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