A daily accumulation of history and present as I follow the 2011 year through the baseball season and reflect on the glories and disappointments of the greatest game on Earth.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Hanley Ramriez

Oh, Hanley, you once were so talented and full of hope and life and the future. The Red Sox shipped your younger self out to Miami with Anibal Sanchez and a few others who don't really figure into 2011 for Josh Beckett. They threw in a few more players because your current team demanded that they eat Mike Lowell's contract, and they said OK. In the end, those guys combined to help Boston to the 2007 World Series over the exhausted Colorado Rockies who had ripped through the end of the 2007 series like a dream.
From September 16 to October 1st, they lost one time. The final game was 13 innings. The game before that was tied 1-1 until the bottom of the 8th, when the Rockies tacked on a 3 spot. In the end, they almost lost that 1 by allowing 2 runs in the 9th, but they won, and then they beat the Phillies 3 straight and the Diamondbacks 4 more games straight. From that point, it was a matter of waiting for the Red Sox to finish up the Indians in 7, and well, bodies get tired, and when streaks end, so does karmic energy that drives a season to something good.
And maybe that's what has happened to Hanley Ramirez who is currently out of the lineup since May 29th (a game he only played for 1 at bat). He's batting .210 for the year and the 4 home runs he hit aren't much. In the end, he is yet another player who once had so much value in serious decline. This is more of a sign of something scarier than The Year of the Pitcher Part 2 (mark my words).
According to Stephania Bell of ESPN (what, a female fantasy baseball player / writer? Can I possibly use this to my advantage to get my wife playing?!!):
Ramirez has been dealing with severe back pain and intermittent sciatica over the past week, and it appears ever more likely that he will make his way onto the DL.
In another blog, she quotes him as saying:
"I feel it doing anything. I can't even put my shoes on. To get up from bed I have to take 10, 15 seconds. I have to do everything slow,' Ramirez said. "That's the worst pain I've ever had in my life, in my career."
 That's not good for him, for Anibal Sanchez's hopes of winning a lot, for the Florida Marlins hopes of competing long term this year, and for the 8 fans of regular season baseball at Sun Life Stadium.
We can only hope that he gets better, and while he gets better, he chooses to come back a team player that we can all like and support again, so that when he eventually takes his 6 year $70million contract somewhere else when the Marlins decide to rebuild from scratch again (as they always do), we can feel good about him being the new shortstop (instead of Marco Scutaro or Jed Lowrie or someone less flashy and worthy of getting a $150million mega contract).

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