Manny Being Manny: Has Red Sox Nation Grown Tired Of Manny Ramirez?

About a year ago, I forced myself to stop listening to local sports talk radio.

For those of you who’ve never lived in Boston, it’s almost impossible to escape WEEI.  It’s playing on every car radio, in every corner store, and in every backyard that’s close enough to Boston to receive its signal.

The problem with WEEI is that the vast majority of the callers are over-opinionated, sky-is-always-falling types.

You want to know where Boston fans got their negative reputation from? Just do what Rick Pitino did and listen to WEEI.

Listen to WEEI long enough and you’ll discover that everyone in Boston thinks Terry Francona is a terrible manager, David Ortiz is washed up, Manny Ramirez is the most hated baseball player in Boston, and J.D. Drew is the antichrist. 

I found the constant negativity was starting to affect my own thinking, so I stopped listening. 

I switched to Sirius and started listening to national shows, mostly ESPN.  I’ve since discovered that national radio not only helps inform me of the world that exists outside the Boston sports bubble, but it’s also far less negative.  So for me, it was a positive change. 

Sports are supposed to be fun, after all.  I’m sure there are those of you out there who love spending all of your time complaining about the athletes you root for, but it’s just not for me. 

I’m a glass is half-full guy—or at least a glass-isn’t-completely-empty guy.

Anyway, point is, the opinions Boston Sports Fans yell and scream on their local sports talk radio often doesn’t jive with the way they actually feel in real life.

Take Manny Ramirez.  A few years ago the Red Sox and Manny Ramirez had a falling out—of sorts.  Manny apparently demanded a trade, and the Red Sox decided to look into what they could get for him.

The sports talk radio crowd was looking forward to seeing Manny in Baltimore, Texas, or where ever he would have ended up.  One rumor had the Red Sox replacing Manny’s bat with Aubrey Huff. 

The fact that this ridiculous thought wasn’t rejected out of hand only proved how far out of touch with reality the talk radio crowd was.

When you walked from bar to bar around Boston and talked to real Red Sox fans, you found a group of people who were surprisingly in Manny’s corner. 

In Boston, Manny being Manny is okay with us—so long as he continues to hit home-runs and drive runners in.  Baseball purists may not like some of the things Manny does on the field, but then again, we don’t like baseball purists.

So what if Manny doesn’t run after hitting a mammoth home-run off of K-Rod?  He made it home before the ball landed, so what the heck was everyone complaining about?

Most of the fans in Boston have been behind Manny since the 2004 World Series—we’ve even grown to love "Manny being Manny."

But recently, I’ve sensed a change in the tune of some of the Red Sox fans I hang out with.

The dugout fight with Kevin Youkilis happened and most fans either sided with Manny or just wrote it off as an anomaly. 

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