"The Fictional Story of Manny Ramirez"

"The Fictional Story of Manny Ramirez"


Orgullo del Capital



As the story has been told by the many decrepit but verbose Viejos of the Island and the Baseball-drunk Grandmothers of The Heights, in birth, Manny Ramirez emerged from his mother's womb with the hand-eye coordination to snatch the doctor's stethoscope, tight right fist over tight left fist, and on his back, shifted every ounce of his weight to his right in perfect position to hit a baseball. As a toddler he never picked up the habit of dragging his homemade baseball bats and broomsticks on the ground as the others did in play, hitting anything-walls, other children, or chickens, and he took his first steps and carried his first improvised bats with a ballplayer's bop that from that time has never left him.


Tiny Manny, the understanding of the game and its cerebral and telepathic qualities obvious on his infant face, examined the thirteen-inch, black-and-white television in his mother's kitchen, mimicking the way Rod Carew took practice swings or the way Pete Rose tapped his bat to his cleats with his tiny tin spoon before he could even use the spoon to feed himself. Soon, his older siblings and cousins were tossing ginnepas at his homemade high chair and he was smacking them away with a short and stiff branch, splashing sweet juice all over the cabinets in right field, splattering green stains all over the ice box in dead center field, and he of course pulled long drives that toppled the stacks of tin cups over the sink in left field of the kitchen, which erupted in terrible noise and the scattering of feet and beatings for everyone involved. When he could stand and then walk, there was no reason for the older children to exclude him from the neighborhood baseball games, even though it took him five times as long to run his tiny legs through the dusty lot to the cardboard bases that were set up. At three years old, playing against seven year-olds who threw curveballs, he was shifting his weight to his rear foot and waiting and smacking those curveballs off of the sides of chicken coops and outhouses in right field and when he could finally speak in sentences he explained confidently: “Lo quise hacerlo.”


At five years old, Manny was rented by his parents for four pesos per day (including meals) to a man named Gustavo Collado who had a traveling team of eleven and twelve year-olds nicknamed "Los Collados" and wanted to swindle men in Santiago and San Pedro out of the money people paid to watch the teams play. Los Collados, after Gustavo‘s discovery of Manny in a sandlot game, would travel sometimes hundreds of miles in their tiny and pathetic purple van after Gustavo would make lengthy and grainy phone calls to team managers in Santiago or San Pedro, and Gustavo would sometimes jump out of the van before it was fully parked, offering bets on the outcomes of the games to the opposing manager, always including the full earnings from that games ticket sales as the winnings. Los Collados would usually be near the end of warm-ups and batting practice when Gustavo would make his always best and final offer. "We will play the bat boy"and the opposing manager would laugh and call him a lying piece of shit and joke that he'd have to bat him fourth and with a smile, Gustavo would say,"Whatever you wish primo."


The game would begin and every time the fourth place in the lineup came, five year-old Manny would bop to the plate with the letters BB on his back for "bat boy" (Gustavo always paid attention to American details on his personally designed uniforms) and destroy pitches from the best eleven and twelve year-olds on the island. Los Collados were already an exceptional team, always displaying solid hitting at every slot in the lineup, no matter the pitcher, and stellar defense that according to their fans, made the field look to be Collados' purple instead of green. With the five-year-old Manny in their lineup, they were a dynamic offensive team. By his fourth plate appearance in a game, managers and pitchers were mentally spent and would simply walk the five year-old slugger, still expecting the worst if any of the pitches came within a foot of the strike zone.


Los Collados did not lose a game for nineteen months, Manny returned from his traveling service a child hero (as the stories were phoned to the Viejos and relayed about the Capital) and the people of the Capital celebrated his return with a huge, snaking parade of streamers and women in colorful skirts that lined the main street leading to and stopping at his family’s home. People from all over the town who did not even know Manny but knew his remarkable story and dreamed of his limitless possibilities brought him gifts and foods that developed strength and confidence. One after the other, visitors came and smiled and rubbed the young boy’s head of curly hair and left their potes full of brown and clear liquids on the rug in front room, each exclaiming that what they’d brought would assure that Manny would be the greatest baseball player that the earth had ever known, and that his family would have unlimited riches.


Although all of the potes had remained corked and sealed (and tightened by Manny’s mother before bed that night), they left a stench so terrible that his father slept with a clothespin on his nose. The smell invaded Manny’s bedroom and that first night home he slept on the smell as if it were a cloudy bed of thoughts and he dreamed he was running in fields with men with dark skin and long hair and spears through places that looked no different from the capital aside from the lack of stores and borrachos lying on the ground everywhere. The land, in the dream, was underdeveloped and the people roaming wore few clothes and spoke a language that he could not identify, but they all looked and behaved like the people he knew. The boys his age that he could see walked with his same bop, and they played their games and made their jokes and smiled their smiles he as he did and wanted to. The men were huddled in groups, looking to be planning a hunt, and there were women everywhere gathering supplies, preparing to treat the men’s kill. A man with burly arms and hair as long as the women yanked Manny by the arm and dragged him into a hut and began to speak in the same language, only Manny began to understand it as he did his mother’s Spanish. He was ordered to sit and did so and men with wildly-colored headdresses made of flamenco feathers and Mahogany leaves were all around, listening to the abrasive tones of the man who had grabbed him. The man spoke, delegating and affirming their duties. The impending hunt was “for survival,” “for unity,” “for the earth, the land, Kikeya” and with at last reason the men cried their most enthusiastic cry and met at the center of the hut and stared at each other with intent faces. The man with the burly arms avoided the crowd and walked straight to Manny, hoisting him above his shoulders. Fire light shined orange on Manny’s brown face. The men looked at him intently as the burly-armed man exclaimed that this child would be the greatest man that the Kikeya had ever produced. He would not only be the hardest worker, but the most diligent and methodical in his preparation. His skill, the man said, would lead their people into the recognition of whatever existed past the horizon.



Manny awoke without the desire to do any of the things he'd always done, and for the first few weeks, his parents blamed it on the traveling. They would summon Gustavo to their home and have lengthy interrogations about how Manny's trip had changed him and Gustavo would insist that he had returned the same boy. He also insisted, with some vigor, that the family move to Florida, in America, to ensure that Manny have every opportunity to be the greatest baseball player ever.
"It is your obligation to our people, you understand his talent, you must make all of the sacrifices."
During the last and most lengthy of Los Interrogatorios de Sr. Morado (as they were called by the joker aunts and uncles of the house), there was a tearful rant by Gustavo about his reasons and methods:
"This child is too amazing for either of you to understand. By the time he was getting into newspapers outside of the Capital, all of these teams knew that they would need to pitch differently to him. One team from Santiago, Los Diablos Rojos, employed extra pitchers so that they would have four pitchers to walk him whenever he came to the plate. I used him at first, the teams were fooled, and I will admit, they lost their money, but by the time we played Los Diablos Rojos and their manager knew of this young Manny Ramirez of the Capital, there was a strategy. A strategy to stop a six year-old! Their pitchers not only walked him, they threw pitches at his head and into his ribs under his arm and in the five series we played against them, your magnificent son batted one thousand, by basically hitting every single pitch that needed to be thrown for a strike..."
Manny's mother, visibly jaded, interrupted,
"The child no longer wants to play baseball, I've asked him."
and the silence of realization passed through the entire house as all three of them took note of the fact that they had not actually seen Manny play baseball in many days, and that this was plainly opposite of the way he usually behaved. In fact, Manny had not mentioned baseball since he'd returned, and didn't say much of anything past his first night at home. His seventh birthday party was one of silence and watchful, worried eyes and he could barely maintain the attention to open his presents. More potes full of brown and clear liquids were brought, the bearer of each ensuring that they could bring back Manny's desire to play. When the visitors left, his mother threw all of the brown and clear liquids into the outhouse and crushed the glass so that she could have Miledys' store melt it and shape twenty-four glass figurines. A complete set of baseball players (and a few extras if he chose to play imaginary games with them), and also a board with a drawn-out baseball diamond to put place them on, a fitting gift she thought, for her son on his birthday. Someone dusted and shined and cleaned those figurines every day until they had to be brought to America, and by that time, there was enough money to pay someone to tend to them. Gustavo never relented in his quest to send Manny to America, and for years to after, even after Manny had long left for New York City, watchful relatives the Viejos saw him wandering around the Ramirez house, asking for Manny in vain amongst his young relatives, until he disappeared for two more years. Gustavo Collado was finally found lying on his face in a red circle of bloodied grass in front of the pitcher’s mound at a field near Manny’s home, the renovated sandlot where he’d first discovered the boy, his right index finger loosely tangled around the trigger of a revolver. The big and bright LOS COLLADOS shined white on his purple jacket, and the first few to discover the body knew exactly who the dead man was. By that time, Manny was in America, playing baseball again.


While Manny’s parents were away struggling and working odd jobs in New York City or living like royalty (this depending on how a particular family member might interpret his mother’s letters), Manny found every reason to leave the house to explore. Exploration in the Capital meant stealing from Miledys’ store, fistfights, terrorist bicycle rides through busy shopping centers-smashing fruits, toppling over old women with bad joints, and most of all, attracting the attention of the police. It came to be that nearly every day a policeman was at Manny’s home, with or without Manny, to discuss some new rebellious event in Manny’s life, but there was absolutely no way that the family could keep him indoors. There had never been a problem with his behavior before because he had always wanted to play baseball, and never went anywhere other than the sandlots, but soon, Manny’s friends and cousins no longer came to the rear entrance of their home to ask for him to play because he never chose to play, and always chose his newer friends instead.
Soon, shaggy-looking young boys were around Manny when he was at home, swearing and using slang no one understood. Manny would be seen with girls on the back of his bicycle who wore lipstick and skirts so short that they showed their panties to the world when Manny rode faster. He was mostly seen around the house eating, or standing with a limp body as a family member stopped to lecture him on why it was important that he “comportaste, comportaste, comportaste bien” in case his parents ever returned from America. When his parents did return, the home was unrecognizable, and Manny, old enough to assume some of the roles of a man around the house, did not and would not. His aunts flew around the house cleaning every mess and wiping every mouth, and when they completed each task, there were more messes, and more crusty mouths. The decision was made immediately by Manny’s father to move some of the family to New York City so that he could properly supervise the full relocation of the family even if the finances were not yet right.


Everyone in their neighborhood warned of the dangers that children faced in New York City, and Manny, with those warnings still new in his parents’ minds, was guarded from any place other than school or the library. School was a place of minimal understanding and interaction and the intense ridicule that American children usually express toward foreigners with accents, but the library, both the Spanish and English sections, became a place where Manny’s imagination and absorption would be unleashed for hours until his sister came to take him home. In his first two years in New York, he quietly learned how to build, clean and dissemble a handgun; how to perfectly skip rocks across water; how to train, eat and prepare to climb a mountain; how to control air traffic with radar; how to kill mice; how to make elaborate pulley systems, and anything that he could maintain in his young mind until he chose to forget it and reread those same books to learn it again.


On the first day in his twelfth year that the sun colored the city streets a warm orange for the entire day and boys wore shorts to school, Manny’s father waited for his son outside his school for the first time ever in his rickety taxi cab. When the indifferent Manny got into the car, there were two new baseball gloves and an aluminum baseball bat with the $15.99 price tag still on it in a corner of the back seat. They drove through streets lined with Dominican flags and identical taxis that always nearly scraped the double-parked cars that were on every street, and soon they were crossing a bridge that lead to the largest park that Manny had ever seen.


He found the game to be unfamiliar at first, the handle of the aluminum bat and the cold air of late afternoon did not feel like the baseball of the Island. During his visits to the library and his lengthy obsession with the technical aspects of nearly everything, he came across a thin white book called THE SCIENCE OF HITTING by an old baseball player named Ted Williams, who Manny admired as a baseball-hitting technician as he admired other technicians. Manny compared the book to his memories of sandlots and purple uniforms and there were things that he read that he naturally knew. Even though the components of his pre-teen swing were not perfect, it was obvious to all present that first day at the park that the book had reminded him to use the entire field, to understand the strike zone, and to use that knowledge to expand his own hitting zone.


He was once again, a beautiful child of baseball. At first, his father took time away from driving the taxi to coach and teach, and in two weeks, when the hitches in Manny's swing were gone, the weather was even warmer, and the Baseball-drunk Grandmothers of the Heights-those chastising historians, were sitting at the school field or at road games in Central Park with Budweisers and Presidentes yelping "señor, señor, señorita" for "Gee Dubs," he needed no more schooling. He also no longer needed a ride anywhere, cab drivers lined up at his building to take him to school, or from school to the field, or from the field to El Malecon to eat, sometimes for free. It was understood that he go to Dubs. Just as Gustavo Collado had said on that day when the family first thought that Manny might be apart from baseball forever, it was now once again their obligation to other Dominicans.


At Dubs, Manny Ramirez began to fully understand baseball. In his freshman year, he hit the ball hard, he ran, he smiled enough to not be discouraged about his outs, he drove in runs unlike any fourteen year-old anyone had ever seen. In his sophomore year, his aluminum bat rained sizzing meteors over young outfielders heads and he made the PSAL commissioner think deeply about disallowing the intentional walk, so that all see his true potential. In his junior year, he saw thirteen strikes in thirty-six games. He hit seven home runs, five doubles, and had one infield single that he hit into the stomach of a pitcher who made fun of his accent in junior high school. In his senior year, he was playing professionally.


When Manny was drafted by Los Indios and was preparing to leave the Heights, there was once again a festival celebrating his accomplishments, only the streamers and women in colorful skirts were replaced with banderas. Flags were everywhere; pasted to and hung from the walls, covering tiny Hondas and old Cadillacs, in the hands of everyone visible for miles, and in the hands of those ready to join them from the subway. The Baseball-drunk Grandmothers sat on fire escapes with cold beers on that June night when the people of the Heights celebrated the talents of Manny Ramirez and all vowed, some aloud, that they would support Los Indios as long as they continued to employ him.


So when Manny returned to New York as a player, after becoming a young legend in the Carolina, Eastern and International leagues, that same celebratory crowd greeted him at Yankee Stadium, whole sections of the place were moving with electric life, and the sounds of maracas and more yelps of "señor, señor, señorita" were heard every time Manny came to the plate. The Baseball-drunk Grandmothers mostly tell the story of those three nights as if it were the fiction of the younger women who watched novelas and fabricated stories, only it was not neighborhood gossip, it was a three-day event of Dominicans showing the highest level of their pride. In the first game, Manny hit a double over Mel Hall's head that bounced into the stands, and the noise and Dominican flags caused him to lose sight of the ball. He truly thought that the ball had gone over the fence into the sea of white crosses that were everywhere. He was had to be told to go back to second base. His teammates laughed. Manny, understanding the silliness of the game, laughed at himself (and so began Manny Ramirez' life as a team jester). In the second game, he hit two home runs. One was hit into the far away upper deck in left field of Yankee Stadium that even made the pitcher, fellow Dominican Melido Perez take off his hat as Manny crossed the plate, amidst the thickest noise of cheering and music. One was a line-drive blast that made it seem as if the box-seats in left field were under cannon attack. In the third game, he was at bat in the sixth inning, looking to help Los Indios orchestrate a sweep of the previously streaking Yankees, and he could feel the vibrations and the cheers from the grandstand. The Thursday night parted and turned to day, and he began to see the men of Kikeya running through the old Capital with no stores and borrachos, and the burly-armed man appeared from behind the runner at second base, anxious to have Manny look around and see that his prediction had come true.
"We are now past the horizon."
The pitch came and it instantly became an opposite-field double that knifed through the late-summer night like a switchblade in a street fight. The Yankees were swept, and stunned. Stunned by Manny Ramirez and a home crowd that adorned themselves with the DIOS, PATRIA, LIBERTAD, and celebrated the every triumph of an opposing player. While he was outside signing autographs, he heard a man argue that the Yankees needed a strategy to stop him, and when he turned, a man in a purple jacket replied, "To think, a strategy to stop a twenty-one year-old!"
In the Dominican Republic, night in the Capital was split in half also, and the Viejos stood from their hammock and rocking chair baseball conversations on their porches about Licey and the winter to see the thin ray of light rising from the Ramirez household. It had seemed, as an aunt told the Viejos, that as relatives were telling them each by phone exactly what Manny did in each at-bat, the glass figurines in Manny’s room illuminated and the light shot through the ceiling, through the roof, and into the sky to be seen from miles away. When the family and neighbors gathered around the source of the light, their voices still hoarse from three nights of screaming and reporting base-hits and home runs, they saw that the players on the drawn-out baseball field had been reformed. When Manny’s mother had first gone to Miledys’ store to melt the glass potes into figurines of baseball players, the figurines were of an equal size, but on that September night everyone put the telephones down and quieted their voices so that they could take note of the fact that in addition to the blinding light rising from the board, the center fielder was lanky and poised to catch a ball, the leftfielder’s arms were inflated like fat chicken wings, and the right fielder was warm to the touch and at times for the next few days, that particular figurine could not be picked up to be shined. The board shined that way until the morning sounds of roosters and orange salesmen returned, and the headaches and bad dreams of the people who had viewed the scene of the night before were gone as quickly as they came.


Los Indios built their team around every attribute needed to win baseball games. The Baseball-drunk Grandmothers could always be heard in the Heights calling Los Indios “Equipo Sancocho,” because they were a perfect medley soup of speed, power, pitching and defense, and Manny Ramirez, as they put it, was the hottest pepper the cook could find, and that even if one liked spicy food, this was a soup not worth the consequences. In their new stadium they became one of baseball’s elite teams, they won five consecutive division titles, and went to two World Series. Manny, although playing exceptionally and preparing his swing even more exceptionally for every game, walked away from the plate confused many times. There was so much time dedicated to his swing, and driving pitches, and driving them to the opposite field and meaning to do that, that he did not know what do to when those pitches he wanted no longer came.


But six years later, on the clearest and brightest American Memorial Day ever in New York City, a day when all that were present to see the Yankees host Los Indios saw the game through sunglasses, Manny became frighteningly aware of the game’s cerebral and telepathic qualities. In the first inning, Kenny Lofton and Omar Vizquel made outs, then Roberto Alomar hit a ball foul into the upper deck that made the crowd of forty-five thousand and nearly thirty-five thousand Dominicans and Dominican flags and musical instruments erupt with anger and joy and terrible noise. Alomar walked on a pitched that El Cubano, Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez bounced in front of Jorge Posada. The crowd cheered and waved their flags as Manny Ramirez was introduced and fans with home town protests were simply muted by the wild noise.


Alomar stole second base on the first pitch, which was a ball. The crowd became louder. The next pitch was low-and-outside and men with heavy accents were telling each other that El Duque did not want to pitch to Manny. The next pitch was in the same spot, only Manny took a terrible swing at it that made it seem as if he had been expecting a gift from a pitcher who did not give gifts, a swing that caused cheers by the few fans of the home team that were present that day. El Duque looked at Manny with wide eyes, showing a discovery that Manny Ramirez’ anxieties could be manipulated, and when he met eyes with Manny, and it was known throughout Manny’s body that he would throw the same pitch and force him to swing at a bad pitch again in front of every Dominican in New York City who could buy a ticket. The pitch came and when it was three inches from the ground Manny hit it into a white streak that nearly knocked off El Duque’s hat, soared a straight line through the day to center field, and met the black seats in centerfield on its way up.


It was the most amazing thing that anyone had ever seen. The confusion created multiple fistfights. No one actually knew what to say about the event, only some liked it, and some did not, and it created a growing and widely-felt pandemonium. Security ran wild about the place, escorting men out. Joe Torre ran out of the Yankee dugout to have Manny’s bat checked for cork, and the umpires found no signs. In the Capital, the Viejos were enjoying a rainy afternoon on their hammocks and rocking chairs when the light once again erupted from the board of figurines, this time though, only the right fielder shined brightly, and even after the set had to be brought to America because of the bitter family wars it caused, every time Manny Ramirez hit a home run since that American Memorial Day the right field figurine has bled pure platinum or gold, depending on his present team. Manny circled the bases that day knowing that he had a clear understanding that he could even control a pitcher’s mind, and when Alomar scored and he scored, Manny Ramirez had his sixty-third run batted in of the season-on Memorial Day.



The actual story of Manny Ramirez is that he has become one of the best right-handed hitters in the history of baseball, achieving numerous milestones and accomplishments, and continuing to be a source of pride to those in and from his native Dominican Republic.