On the Occasion of Manny Ramirez’ Retirement
By
Zeldink
Posted at 12:23 pm
Apparently, when I was watching the Cincinnati Reds destroying the competition early this season, Major League Baseball’s drug policy was destroying Manny Ramirez’ attempts at cheating.
“Major League Baseball recently notified Manny Ramirez of an issue under Major League Baseball’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program,” MLB said in a statement.
“Rather than continue with the process under the program, Ramirez has informed MLB that he is retiring as an active player. If Ramirez seeks reinstatement in the future, the process under the Drug Program will be completed. MLB will not have any further comment on this matter.”
The upshot is that Ramirez faces a 100-game suspension for his second positive drug test should he ever want to return to baseball.
But that’s not what my post is about. That’s just the back story. What this post is about is one of the greatest Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references I’ve ever seen in a sports story. That link takes you to a post by Craig Calceterra talking about some ridiculous comments made by another writer, who essentially blamed Ramirez’ cheating on getting manager Bob Melvin fired from first the Seattle Mariners and then the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Those are both teams that Ramirez never played for, so how does that argument work? Because Melvin’s team didn’t make the playoffs because Ramirez cheated to get his teams to the playoffs. And that, as Calceterra quips, makes Mevin “Agrajag to Manny’s Arthur Dent, continually reincarnated as the next Casey freakin’ Stengel, only to be subsequently killed by Manny, except unlike Arthur Dent, Ramirez did it with malice aforethought.”
Just beautiful. Now, does anyone have some spare time? I’d love to have some to devote to some re-reading of Douglas Adams between Reds games.
So he is saying that Manny Ramirez is Zaphod Beeblebrox. Zaphod was president of the universe and happened to steal Arthur Dent’s babe while passing thru an Earth party … Dent is the unluckiest man in the universe who seems to get singled out in freakish coincidents.. which sorta makes sense because Zaphod jacked the most powerful Starship the Heart of Gold which was powered by the infinite improbability drive, is based on a particular perception of quantum theory: a subatomic particle is most likely to be in a particular place, such as near the nucleus of an atom, but there is also a small probability of it being found very far from its point of origin (for example close to a distant star). Thus, a body could travel from place to place without passing through the intervening space (or hyperspace, for that matter), if you had sufficient control of probability.[1] According to the Guide, in this way the drive “passes through every conceivable point in every conceivable universe almost simultaneously,” meaning the traveller is “never sure where they’ll end up or even what species they’ll be when they get there,” therefore it’s important to dress accordingly.