<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"\n\n Like Walt Whitman, Manny Ramirez contains multitudes. He hits like Lou Gehrig, runs the bases like Mr. Magoo, and plays the outfield like Charlie Brown. His manner is bashful; his coif, fluorescent; his annual income, upwards of $20 million. The media often malign him, but his teammates, coaches, and fans? They adore him. Ramirez is one of the most gifted kooks ever to play baseball\u2014the latest in a line that descends from Dizzy to Yogi to the Bird\u2014and perhaps the most enigmatic.\n\n Rumors abound: Manny has five driver&amp;#39;s licenses. Manny once got a ticket for having tinted windows, made an illegal U-turn moments later, and got a ticket for that too. Manny plucks his eyebrows and wears rouge. Vexing questions surround him: Why does he prefer his teammates&amp;#39; clothes to his own? Did he really have drinks at the Ritz-Carlton with New York Yankee Enrique Wilson in the thick of a pennant race\u2014when he was supposed to be sick at home? Is it true he has tens of thousands of dollars in cash in his glove compartment?\n\n In conversations with teammates, coaches, writers, and fans\u2014and in a rare interview with Manny himself\u2014GQ set out to discover the real Manny Ramirez, a man who loves hitting so much, he sometimes forgets to run.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Manny Ramirez: I started playing baseball at the age of 7 or 8. One of my coaches, his name was Rojas, said I was not a good hitter. It&amp;#39;s true. He wanted to make me a pitcher.\n\n Steve Mandl (Manny&amp;#39;s baseball coach, George Washington High School, New York City, 1989\u201391): Manny&amp;#39;d hit three home runs and a pop-up, and when you asked him how he did, he&amp;#39;d say, &amp;quot;I hit a pop-up.&amp;quot;\n\n Adrian Oviedo (Manny&amp;#39;s teammate, Alexis Ferreiras Little League, 1985\u201386, and George Washington High School, 1990\u201391): I remember one time in Pee Wee League, we had this kid named Bo. And he had, like, size 14 feet. One day Manny didn&amp;#39;t bring his cleats to a game. He gotta borrow this guy&amp;#39;s cleats. They looked like small boats. And he went out and hit three home runs in &amp;#39;em.\n\n Mandl: He didn&amp;#39;t know whether he was on the bowling team or the volleyball team or the baseball team. All he knew was, he was getting in the batter&amp;#39;s box and swinging the bat.\n\n Joe DeLucca (retired scout, Cleveland Indians): The day he signed [with the Indians], I almost jumped off the floor about three feet. I remember showing Manny exactly what he had to do. I printed his name out, and I says, &amp;quot;You gotta sign it exactly like this. On this line.&amp;quot; And doggone if he didn&amp;#39;t sign it where his mother had to sign it. So you can&amp;#39;t erase it. You can&amp;#39;t do any cross-outs. So I gotta go type a whole new one out. I still have the original contract.\n\n Dave Chisum (Manny&amp;#39;s teammate, Appalachian League Burlington Indians, 1991): He was a first-round draft pick, and I think he got a quarter of a million dollars. He bought a white Nissan 300 ZX, and he didn&amp;#39;t even know how to drive stick. I said, &amp;quot;Take me for a ride.&amp;quot; He says, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t know how to drive it.&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;Manny, why the hell did you buy it?&amp;quot; He goes, &amp;quot;&amp;#39;Cause I like it.&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;Manny, you know they make these in automatic, right?&amp;quot; He goes, &amp;quot;Yeah, but I&amp;#39;ve heard they go faster in stick.&amp;quot;\n\n Ramirez: My mother was a seamstress, and my father was a livery-cab driver. After I got drafted and got my bonus, I said to my mother, &amp;quot;You&amp;#39;re not going to work anymore, Mom.&amp;quot;\n\n Chisum: He was real lackadaisical. He wouldn&amp;#39;t run balls out; he wouldn&amp;#39;t chase fly balls that some people would dive at. He didn&amp;#39;t want to do the extra work. I&amp;#39;d say, &amp;quot;Manny, come on, man.&amp;quot; He&amp;#39;d say, &amp;quot;It doesn&amp;#39;t really matter. I&amp;#39;m gonna play anyway.&amp;quot;\n\n Oscar Resendez (teammate, Burlington Indians, 1991): Like they say, if you hit, you don&amp;#39;t sit.\n\n &amp;quot;Video&amp;quot; Joe Catalioti (retired video coordinator, Cleveland Indians): When he&amp;#39;d get to the ballpark, he&amp;#39;d go to his locker and actually get undressed, and then he&amp;#39;d come into the video room stripped down to nothing and want to hug everybody hello. We avoided him as much as we could.\n\n Wayne Kirby (teammate, Cleveland Indians, 1993\u201396): He went in everybody&amp;#39;s locker. That&amp;#39;s one thing about him. For some reason, that kid didn&amp;#39;t like to wear none of his stuff.\n\n Brian Graham (Manny&amp;#39;s manager, Canton-Akron Indians, AA, 1992): He would come into the clubhouse, take his street clothes off. He&amp;#39;d go to one person&amp;#39;s locker, put their long underwear on. Go to another person&amp;#39;s locker; if they had a T-shirt he liked, he&amp;#39;d put that on. He&amp;#39;d just pick socks out of someone&amp;#39;s locker, put those on. He&amp;#39;d use your belt if your belt was close by. He&amp;#39;d put your hat on. If he liked your shirt or your shoes, he would wear them home that night.\n\n Jeff Whitaker (teammate, Burlington Indians, 1991): When you see Manny, tell him that he still owes me a Nike warm-up suit.\n\n Mike Hargrove (Manny&amp;#39;s manager, Cleveland Indians, 1993\u201399): The only constant that Manny had was he always went and got Jos\u00E9 Mesa&amp;#39;s chartreuse long johns every day.\n\n Jeff Manto (teammate, Cleveland Indians, 1997\u201398): You&amp;#39;d sit on deck, or you&amp;#39;d check in the bat rack, and you can&amp;#39;t find your bat. You ask the batboy, &amp;quot;Hey, where&amp;#39;s my bat? What&amp;#39;d you do with my bat?&amp;quot; And then he points to the batter, and it&amp;#39;s Manny, using your bat.\n\n Hargrove: He would hit two home runs in his first two at bats, and you&amp;#39;d look up, and his third at bat he&amp;#39;d be using a different bat. Somebody else&amp;#39;s bat. For 98 percent of the players, their bat&amp;#39;s their livelihood. There are some players that are more particular about their bats than they are about their wives.\n\n Manto: If he ever gets caught with a corked bat and says it&amp;#39;s not his, chances are it&amp;#39;s not his.\n\n Ramirez: I used to use [ex\u2014Cleveland Indians catcher Sandy] Alomar&amp;#39;s bats, just to get him mad. He was the biggest star on the team, and he always got the good wood.\n\n Charlie Manuel (Manny&amp;#39;s manager, Charlotte Knights, AAA, 1993; Manny&amp;#39;s hitting coach, Cleveland Indians, 1994\u201399; Manny&amp;#39;s manager, Cleveland Indians, 2000): He would forget to run sometimes. He gets so emotionally caught up in his hitting that he forgets.\n\n Sheldon Ocker (sportswriter, Akron Beacon Journal): Sometimes he would just stand at the plate, hold his bat, never move, take three pitches, and go sit down, like he was in some kind of a trance or something.\n\n Manto: Every day was something on the base paths. He would just stop in the middle of a rundown. The coaches would say, &amp;quot;Manny, you want to try to get safe.&amp;quot; He goes, &amp;quot;No, I&amp;#39;m out. I&amp;#39;m out.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What do you mean?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, I&amp;#39;m not gonna do it.&amp;quot; And he&amp;#39;d just stop. That&amp;#39;s it. He&amp;#39;s out! He&amp;#39;s played that game of pickle before. He knows he&amp;#39;s gonna be out eventually, so he figures, &amp;quot;I wanna be out now.&amp;quot;\n\n Ocker: One time he stole first.\n\n Graham: I remember that. He slid into second base but thought it was a foul ball and started walking back to first base. He was halfway between first and second when they tagged him out. Grover [Mike Hargrove] looked at me like, What&amp;#39;s going on?\n\n Hargrove: I went hoarse for like a week, yelling at him to get back to second base.\n\n Manto: One game he hit a ball to right center field, and he went in standing up when he should have slid. He was tagged out. Well, Mike Hargrove lost his mind. But the one thing you don&amp;#39;t do is confront Manny. Because he&amp;#39;s real sensitive when it comes to that. So Hargrove&amp;#39;s yelling\u2014not at him, but at the dugout. Manny gets the message. So his next at bat, he hits a double down the left-field line, and the infielders line up for the cutoff. Nobody&amp;#39;s covering second base. Well, Manny slides. Pops up. Claps his hands. Looks at Hargrove. Gives him two fists. Everybody started laughing.\n\n Dan Shaughnessy (columnist, The Boston Globe): He lost a ball in a game against the Dodgers at Fenway. There appeared to be some wind thing going on; it would have been hard for a Gold Glover to catch that ball. One of my friends had the best description: He said it looked like Manny had just stepped off the Tilt-A-Whirl at the carnival. You rarely see a guy move that much under a thing that&amp;#39;s coming straight down. And he didn&amp;#39;t end up anywhere near it.\n\n Joseph Tonaszuck (limo driver and Red Sox fan, Boston): They knock him so hard for his fielding, but personally, I don&amp;#39;t see it. It&amp;#39;s just that the errors he does make are so funny.\n\n Manto: He dropped a fly ball in Cleveland once. He said, &amp;quot;There goes my Gold Glove.&amp;quot;\n\n Ocker: He once hit a home run with a broken bat. I asked him, &amp;quot;Manny, you broke your bat on the pitch, right?&amp;quot; And he says, &amp;quot;No, it was broken before I went up to the plate. I just like that bat.&amp;quot;\n\n Manto: You know how the players, after they hit a home run, they cross home plate and point to the stands? He was doing that. So one day we asked him: &amp;quot;Manny, who are you pointing at?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Nobody.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You have nobody here? Then why are you pointing?&amp;quot; He goes, &amp;quot;Well, everybody else does it.&amp;quot;\n\n Manuel: We had a tremendous video system in Cleveland. We put about $2 million in it. Manny really liked a guy named Video Joe Catalioti. He used to go in there, and Video Joe would show him film.\n\n Catalioti: Manny used the video room religiously before every game. He studied the way pitchers pitched him based on what the counts were, were there people on base, whatever the situation happened to be.\n\n DeLucca: Some people say to me, &amp;quot;How smart is this guy? He&amp;#39;s stupid.&amp;quot; Let me tell you something: You can&amp;#39;t be stupid and be a hitter like he is.\n\n Ramirez: I like to read; I read on the plane all the time. Right now, I&amp;#39;m reading the book of the movie Troy.\n\n Ocker: The night of the O. J. slow chase down the 405 freeway, the Indians were playing a game at home, and after the game this was on all the TVs in the clubhouse. And everybody&amp;#39;s watching it. Manny&amp;#39;s not paying any attention. Manny keeps hearing O. J. this and O. J. that, and there was a pitcher on the team at the time named Chad Ogea [pronounced oh-jay]. So Manny hears this about eight times and turns around, and he says, &amp;quot;What did Chad do?&amp;quot;\n\n Mandl: In high school, he had Jheri curls. And Jheri curls weren&amp;#39;t the style back then.\n\n Kirby: One minute Don King, one minute Kojak. With him, you don&amp;#39;t know. You just don&amp;#39;t know.\n\n Ramirez: I like to change looks. Like Lenny Kravitz.\n\n Hargrove: It&amp;#39;s different every week. I always liked it better when Manny didn&amp;#39;t have it in cornrows and didn&amp;#39;t have it in Jheri curls and didn&amp;#39;t have it Afroed out. Just when Manny had it cut close and it looked nice. It&amp;#39;s always looked nice. I remember when I was with Baltimore and we&amp;#39;d go into Boston, or Boston would come into Baltimore, I was always curious as to what Manny had done with his hair. And he&amp;#39;s the only man I can think of that I ever thought that about.\n\n Kirby: Money is a touchy subject when it comes to big-league players. I don&amp;#39;t know nothin&amp;#39; about Manny&amp;#39;s money situation. I know he&amp;#39;s rich as shit.\n\n Kevin Millar (teammate, Boston Red Sox, 2003\u20132004): He&amp;#39;s very tight with his money. He&amp;#39;ll talk about how $160 million doesn&amp;#39;t go as far as it used to.\n\n Ramirez: It&amp;#39;s not true that I&amp;#39;m frugal.\n\n Ocker: One time he asked one of the clubhouse guys to go get his car washed, and he said, &amp;quot;There&amp;#39;s money in the glove compartment.&amp;quot; So the clubhouse kid goes out and gets the car washed, and there&amp;#39;s an envelope in the glove compartment, and the guy looks in there, and there&amp;#39;s ten grand in hundreds. In his rookie year, the team was in Kansas City, and he was sitting with Julian Tavares. I walked past, and he said, &amp;quot;Sheldon, can I ask you something?&amp;quot; I say, &amp;quot;Yeah?&amp;quot; He says, &amp;quot;Can you loan me $60,000?&amp;quot; I don&amp;#39;t even really know Manny. He hasn&amp;#39;t been on the team more than about a month. I said, &amp;quot;Manny, what do you want $60,000 for?&amp;quot; He says, &amp;quot;Well, Julian and I want to buy motorcycles.&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;Manny, I don&amp;#39;t have that on me.&amp;quot; And he said, &amp;quot;How about $30,000?&amp;quot;\n\n Manuel: We left spring training one year, and about two months later Teddy Walsh, our clubhouse guy, says, &amp;quot;Charlie, Manny keeps bugging me about his suitcase. I don&amp;#39;t know where his suitcase is at.&amp;quot; Manny was complaining that he&amp;#39;d lost his necklace and his earrings. I said, &amp;quot;Well, where have we been since spring training? We went to Nashville first, right? Maybe you want to check there.&amp;quot; So he called down to the hotel there, and they had his suitcase! They sent it up the next day, and we opened it. And he had, if I&amp;#39;m not mistaken now, $80,000 in checks in there. And he didn&amp;#39;t ever say nothing about the checks for two months. He was just worried about his necklace.\n\n Ramirez: I lost an earring in Triple A. It was $50,000 for both, and I lost one, but I had insurance and got the money back. Since then, I don&amp;#39;t wear jewelry. I&amp;#39;m afraid to lose it.\n\n Bart Swain (director of media relations, Cleveland Indians): He had like five or six driver&amp;#39;s licenses. I think they were in multiple states. I have no idea how you do that.\n\n Ramirez: That&amp;#39;s not true. People exaggerate.\n\n Gene Mato (Manny&amp;#39;s agent, quoted in The Plain Dealer, December 15, 2000): After Manny made the decision [to leave Cleveland for Boston], he cried.\n\n Ramirez: I didn&amp;#39;t cry. I&amp;#39;m a grown man. It was hard, after six years [Ed. note: eight, actually], to go to another place, but you&amp;#39;re a grown man. You don&amp;#39;t need a babysitter.\n\n Manuel: The players in Cleveland all treated him like their little brother. They loved him.\n\n Ocker: His teammates almost treated him like he was a pet.\n\n Catalioti: I was kinda like Daddy to him, and that&amp;#39;s what he called me all the years he was in Cleveland. Most guys would call me Video, but when we were talking, serious or otherwise, he&amp;#39;d call me Daddy.\n\n Ocker: I do think he&amp;#39;s self-conscious about his English, but I think he&amp;#39;s self-conscious about his education in general. I think that&amp;#39;s part of the reason he&amp;#39;s reluctant to talk to reporters.\n\n DeLucca: He came to this country when he was a sixth grader, and I think he got out of high school as a sixth grader, too, because I don&amp;#39;t think they taught him anything in high school. First of all, they didn&amp;#39;t teach him English. During spring training once, I told Manny, &amp;quot;I have to get a ball signed by you for a kid that&amp;#39;s a fan of yours, and he&amp;#39;s a heart patient.&amp;quot; He says, &amp;quot;You wait here.&amp;quot; He wouldn&amp;#39;t let me come in the clubhouse with him. So when he comes out, he hands me a ball and a written page. And I immediately looked at it: his signature, but he didn&amp;#39;t write it. And he didn&amp;#39;t want me to know that. But it was a beautiful note.\n\n Graham: He&amp;#39;s done some things in this game that come into the news, that draw a picture of him being not quite as great a guy as he is. Like going to the hotel and having dinner with Enrique Wilson when he was supposed to be sick at home.\n\n Millar: You can&amp;#39;t believe everything you read about him having a drink at the Ritz with Enrique Wilson.\n\n Ramirez: It&amp;#39;s not true that we hung out at the Ritz. And Enrique is a brother to me. We played six years [Ed. note: four, actually] together. Just because he&amp;#39;s a Yankee, I&amp;#39;m going to stop being his friend? No.\n\n Anonymous Bartender (Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Boston Common): I can&amp;#39;t talk about that. Sorry.\n\n Rod Beck (teammate, Boston Red Sox, 2001): Whether it&amp;#39;s right or wrong to hang around with a member of the opposite team, especially during a pennant race, is really irrelevant. Bottom line is, there probably isn&amp;#39;t any other place besides Boston where anyone would know about it.\n\n Ramirez: The press is nice. I have no complaints about the press.\n\n Theo Epstein (general manager, Boston Red Sox): This year, Manny has made a conscious effort to be more accessible and to share a little bit more of himself, and I think he thought that would make his life easier in the long run and make a lot of other people&amp;#39;s lives easier, too.\n\n DeLucca: He has a Web site now, you know.\n\n Jerry Remy (color analyst, New England Sports Network): I don&amp;#39;t think he likes talking to the media. It&amp;#39;s nothing personal; he&amp;#39;s just not comfortable doing it. He just wants to play baseball and get the hell out.\n\n Ramirez: If the press made things up about me, maybe it&amp;#39;s because they weren&amp;#39;t getting enough. But I&amp;#39;m turning that around.\n\n Eliza Partington (bartender, the Cask &amp;#39;n Flagon, across the street from Fenway Park): I think all the fans in Boston are wholeheartedly behind him. A year ago, they were more on the fence. Now they&amp;#39;re feeling the Manny.\n\n Shaughnessy: He&amp;#39;s a cult figure now. He&amp;#39;s a god.\n\n Mandl: He still is a kid. He still clowns around. He&amp;#39;s still the guy that if three of you are standing there and he walks past, he&amp;#39;ll tap you on the shoulder and pretend he didn&amp;#39;t do it.\n\n Beck: I think he&amp;#39;s got a perfect personality. I think you need to have a little laid-back to you.\n\n Hargrove: To say he wasn&amp;#39;t exasperating at times would be wrong. But my wife is, too. Manny sure caused me a lot more joy and excitement than he ever did exasperation.\n\n Manuel: I love him. He&amp;#39;s like my son.\n\n Catalioti: It&amp;#39;s kind of hard to describe what Manny&amp;#39;s like. It&amp;#39;s just, that&amp;#39;s Manny.\n\n Graham: That&amp;#39;s Manny.\n\n Kirby: Manny&amp;#39;s Manny.\n\n Uri Berenguer (broadcaster, Spanish Beisbol Network): There&amp;#39;s no way to explain the real Manny unless you meet the real Manny.\n\n Chisum: Well, God, that&amp;#39;s Manny.\n\n Ocker: That&amp;#39;s Manny.\n\n Hargrove: Manny&amp;#39;s Manny.\n\n Manto: That&amp;#39;s Manny.\n\n Resendez: Manny, golly."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/manny-ramirez-boston-red-sox-cleveland-indians?currentPage=4>