[Photo: AP/James A. Finley]

[by Amy Bass]

I love Big Papi.  Let's just start there.  I love him for his ability to swing a bat with such power that I can feel it through the television, and I love him for his smile, which could easily be construed as “we're going to beat them senseless,” rather than “I'm just happy to be here.”  I love that my nine-year old nephew finally made the switch from the evil Yankee fan base to the Boston faithful after seeing Ortiz whack one out of Fenway.  And I love that every year for him is a career year.  But most of all I love him because of his place in the lineup right after Manny Ramirez, which means that most times that Ortiz does get that dinger, he sends someone else home as well.

Last season, smart Red Sox fans knew that if they were going to chant “MVP” every time that David Ortiz came to the plate, they should also be intoning it for Ramirez.  Last season, Manny became one of only two players in Red Sox history (the other, of course, was Yaz) to hit over 40 home runs in three seasons.  Think about it:  the man hit twelve homeruns in the month of September alone.  And while his 144 RBIs may be four fewer than Ortiz's 148, Papi knows all too well who to thank for a whole bunch of his.  In short?  Manny Ramirez has monster numbers, and monster numbers, at least in my book, mean you can be a little bit nutty now and again. 

There are those who study the baseball abstract and ruminate over the loss of the purity of the game to the quirky personalities and demands of big league players.  But then there are those of us who, well, don't.  We don't worry too much when Manny puts his condo in Boston on the market, and we don't care if he hates Boston, and if he wants to bitch about his hamstrings now and again, so be it. 

But none of this, of course, really gets at the issue that people are having with Manny:  the orange dreadlocks.  We know it's about the hair, people, let's just get it out there on the table and discuss it.  Yes, he looks more like Kevin Federline than Tab Hunter.  But is that really the issue?  The politics of hair have a long and distinguished history, whether it's America's confusion over Elvis Presley's rockabilly style, created with Royal Crown Pomade to imitate the black “process” of straightening (think of it:  poor white boy with what Sun Records' Sam Phillip's called “that Negro sound” combs his hair with the product used by black musicians to make their hair look less authentically black) or how the great John Wooden let then-Lew Alcindor wear his hair “natural” while other coaches squelched such aesthetic actions of pride and politics.  “Within racism's bipolar codification of human worth,” cultural critic Kobena Mercer has argued, “black people's hair has been historically devalued as the most visible stigmata of blackness, second only to skin.”   Yes, hair is that important.

Of course, in the clean shaven world of baseball, the style politics are far reaching and well known.  Randy Johnson lost his mullet in his deal with the Yankees, shedding whatever vestiges of Texas he still had, but not so much that he didn't try to knock out a photographer on his first day in town.  And Johnny Damon's off-season “haircut heard round the world” was front page news for the New York tabloids, making even clearer to many of us why we hate the Yankees so much in the first place.  (And in a side note to Johnny, to whom I remain grateful for world series services rendered:  Samson cut his hair too, my friend, and with it went his powers.  Now I'm not saying that Mr. Steinbrenner is your Delilah, but then again….)

So regardless of where you are sitting on the fence that Manny Ramirez brought with him to practice , let's just be happy that for now, he's in Boston, a town with a team with a less than pristine racial history, but one that lets its players wear orange dreadlocks, show up a bit late for training, and occasionally pull a phantom hamstring or two.  Hell, someday I hope to be so good at whatever it is I'm doing that regardless of my behavior, people still want me to do it. 

Because that's the deal with Manny:  he is one of the great at-bat players of his generation, an athlete so good at what he does that the rest of us need to just shut up and let him do it. Orange dreadlocks or not.

March 16, 2006

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