Papelbon calls Manny Ramirez ‘a cancer’
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It was quite the stormy divorce, the one between Manny Ramirez and the Boston Red Sox. Ramirez showed up in L.A., refused to talk about Boston and just hit, and hit, and hit. The Red Sox did just fine without him, but they refused to stop talking about him. Not publicly, of course, but in anonymous smears, gleefully repeated by the Boston media.
No one -- not even Ramirez -- disputes he had worn out his welcome in Boston. There is no excuse, for instance, for shoving a 63-year-old club employee to the ground. But Ramirez was long gone, and still virtually everyone declined to speak on the record, happy to soil Ramirez’s name without putting one’s own name out there.
So, good for Jonathan Papelbon, the Boston closer, who spoke up -- with his name attached -- in the current issue of Esquire. Here’s Papelbon:
‘It just takes one guy to bring an entire team down, and that’s exactly what was happening,’ Papelbon said. ‘Once we saw that, we weren’t afraid to get rid of him. It’s like cancer. That’s what he was. Cancer. He had to go.’
The rest of the story, reported in the Boston Herald, is here.
-- Bill Shaikin