Manny Ramirez: Why Oakland A's, Major League Baseball Needs Him Back

Manny Ramirez is currently in talks with the Baltimore Orioles, the Oakland A's, and other undisclosed MLB organizations, but what fans may fail to realize is that baseball needs Manny Ramirez as much as Manny Ramirez needs baseball.

The most exciting time in my life to be a baseball fan in Los Angeles was in the late summer of 2008, when the Los Angeles Dodgers traded for the Boston Red Sox superstar slugger after his falling-out with their organization. Immediately, Ramirez brought life to an organization in a major media market and gave fans from across the city a genuine reason to become excited and talk about their favorite team. If a similar spark can become ignited in baseball this year, that can only be seen as a good thing for a sport slowly falling out of mainstream favor. My pitch is simple: Get people to start talking about baseball again.

According to Sports Illustrated, Ramirez has worked out with the Orioles, A’s, and Blue Jays as potential suitors for a home to finish out the course of his career. If one of those teams does decide to sign him, Ramirez would have to serve a 50-game suspension to begin the season because of his positive test for PEDs. When he returns in May, he would turn 40 years old. Regardless, both Baltimore and Oakland have made public statements to express interest.

Oakland A’s owner Lew Wolff acknowledged a sentiment that particularly resonates within my own opinion, stating Ramirez “should be viewed on the basis of his talent.”

Wolff told The Associated Press that he thought “it would be fun. I hear he’s in great shape. I don’t know if we’re in the running for him, but it wouldn’t bother me to have him on the team. In fact, just the opposite.”

“My theory in life,” Wolfe continued, “which may not apply to baseball, is that we all make mistakes, and if we serve a penalty, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have the opportunity to do the right thing after that.”

Wolff is onto an assertion that I would fundamentally ideally agree with. Ramirez made a mistake, but that hardly means that he should never be allowed to play baseball again. The rule was that he would be forced to miss 50 games. After that, his decision to reinstate his contract and undo his retirement is entirely his own accord.

David Forst, assistant general manager for the Oakland A’s, has stated that the organization is “open to it” as a baseball related decision.

If I’m the Oakland A’s, I think that I would be more than just “open to it”. I would jump all over this and sign Manny Ramirez, for cheap, and soon. My theory is as follows: If Manny Ramirez is signed by the Oakland A’s, the team regains a sense of relevance that would help make it a more marketable team in an increasingly less interesting sport.

The Oakland Athletics aren’t entirely far removed from being relevant. At the beginning of the century, the A’s were the frontrunners of the AL West. From 1999 until 2006, the A’s either finished first or second in the division. That includes five playoff appearances, two seasons with more than 100 victories (2001, 2002) and one berth in the ALCS (2006) when the club lost to the Detroit Tigers.

Since 2006, however, the A’s have not finished above .500 and last season, the A’s finished at 74-88. From 2006 to 2007, the club fell from 93 wins to 76 wins in one season after losing stars Barry Zito (San Francisco, $126 million for seven years) and Frank Thomas (Toronto, $18 million for two years).

In 2011, the Oakland A’s were a team that represented irrelevance. At 18,232 fans per game, their attendance was the significantly worst in the MLB. Over the course of the season, the A’s generated only 1.47 million fans in attendance. Compare that to the Phillies (3.68 million), Yankees (3.65 million) or even their cross-town rival San Francisco Giants (3.39 million) and you realize that the A’s are currently setting themselves up for a recipe of disaster.

On average, their park was only 52% full for a home game. I don’t care how the concept of Moneyball works; if fans aren’t attending your games, you’re simply not going to make revenue.

However, back the concept of Moneyball, there is hope yet for the A’s. The movie itself, which celebrated the team for its smart baseball decision-making as well as its small-market success, generated $75.6 million in gross revenue. The cast included Brad Pitt (as the Oakland A’s general manager), Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Jonah Hill. The star-studded cast manufactured a new interest in the club, and the film is now up for six Academy Awards—including best picture and best actor.

The Oakland A’s also have an inherent advantage: They have a surplus of people to begin talking about their team. The San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose market is the sixth-largest television market in the country, and that gives the A’s a base market larger than that of Boston (seventh), Atlanta (eighth), Detroit (11th) and the home of the World Series champion, St. Louis (21st).

Across the town, the San Francisco Giants have generated lots of buzz under the hype of stars such as Tim Lincecum.  

If signing Ramirez is nothing but a media PR stunt for the Oakland A’s, then so be it. There is no way to predict his future on the field, as we haven’t seen him at full health in multiple seasons (in 2011, he had a total of 17 at-bats for the Tampa Bay Rays). It would ensure notable interest in the club, and if it works out, the team would look like heroes in a division that has recently secured Albert Pujols and Yu Darvish.

Sign him for cheap, and if it doesn’t work out, let him walk.

Adding Ramirez to a roster for a minimal salary comes with little risk: He either plays well, or he doesn’t make the team. It’s that simple. If Ramirez works, it’s fantastic. It’d be reminiscent of the sensation in Los Angeles that I once witnessed: the constant Facebook statuses devoted to the slugger's home run count, the dreadlocked kids on the Dodger Stadium jumbotron, the idea of Mannywood as a “happening place” in Los Angeles.

The ever-quotable Ramirez may have played his last successful season in MLB, but baseball needs someone like Ramirez. The game is getting less media attention than ever before, and its slow pace is making it fall out of favor in the sports world for a younger generation of viewers.

Baseball might not want the 40-year old PED user, but baseball certainly needs something similar. Perhaps it’s the idea of Manny: a player who was once able to both hit a home run on the field and in his quirky off-field antics at any given moment.

Writers like having things to talk about. Manny Ramirez, my friends, is someone that writers love to talk about. So what does it all mean?

It means that we ought to take the advice handed out by the Oakland A’s owner. We all make mistakes, and we all deserve the opportunity to reconcile these decisions and ultimately do the right thing.

For baseball, that right thing is getting the compelling nature of Manny Ramirez living and breathing, back into the sport that I know and love.

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