In end, he's not worth it

What should you get for $20 million a year?

Every player represents a package. The package consists of the player's skills and what I will call his extras. Some players are smarter than others. Some players have leadership qualities. Some players bring life and zest to the locker room, and that does add to their value, especially in baseball, where, alone among all the four major (North) American team sports, it truly is an everyday game. The entire package is what you're paying for.

Due to the vagaries of the marketplace, some players are also worth what they get at that time and at that time only. A year on either side, the market perhaps glutted with players at their position, or with different teams bidding for them, they may be worth many millions less.

But once the price tag is there, it is always there, and people cannot forget it. History tells us so. Back in the teens, a lefthander named Rube Marquard was nicknamed "the $11,000 Lemon," because he was deemed not worthy of his purchase price from the minors. He would go on to win a season-record 19 games in a row, but the nickname resonates among baseball historians to this day. Money never whispers in our society. It always bellows.

Forever and ever, Manny Ramirez will be the $160 million man. Judged by that standard, he will always be a failure. There are very few players who possess the range of skill and personality to merit anything close to that salary in the contemporary game, and Manny Ramirez is not one of them.

Whose fault is that? Not Manny's; that's for sure. The villain in this scenario -- assuming anyone being given that much money merits one millisecond of sympathy -- is his agent, Jeff Moorad, a man who, had he a little less ego and a lot more common sense, would have done his client a monumental favor by making sure he kept him right where he was until such time as he could find a way to relocate him in New York, where Manny now thinks he'd like to play. By accepting $25 million less over eight years, Manny could have remained a Cleveland Indian. Perhaps you agree that Manny could have scraped by on a shade less than $17 million a year. The $20 million a year figure was a triumph for Moorad, his way of keeping score in his little side competition with all the other agents.

If Manny were making a nice, comfortable, market-reality salary of $10 million or $12 million a year, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. But that's a guess. The Red Sox (i.e. John W. Henry, Larry Lucchino, and/or Theo Epstein) have never indicated just where the cutoff line is. It may even be substantially lower. It may be that Henry, a strong-willed man, no longer wants Ramirez on his team at any price.

Someday, I am sure, he will tell us. He can't do it now, because after the events of the past few days the Red Sox must find a way to make Manny an ex-Red Sox as quickly as possible, and talking him down publicly may not be a good negotiating strategy.

Leaving his personality aside for a moment, just how good is Manny Ramirez? What would an evaluation of him entail?

Manny can swing a bat. Barring the unforeseen, you can write in at least a .300, at least a 30-home run, and at least a 100-RBI season for 2004 right now, regardless of which uniform he'll be wearing.

But by Manny standards, he did not have a stellar 2003. Knocking in 104 runs in one of the great run-producing eras the game has ever known is not a very big deal for a hitter of his supposed caliber, especially when he was performing in the middle of the best top-to-bottom lineup in baseball. The flip side is that his league-leading .427 on-base percentage enabled him to score 117 runs, a figure he has exceeded only once in his career (131 in his almost-fictional 1999 campaign, when he also drove in a you've-gotta-be-kidding-me 165 runs). It would be ridiculous to say he had a bad year. Managers and pitchers still feared him enough to give him 28 intentional walks, which is entering Ted Williams territory.

Yet anyone who watched this team carefully this year could tell that he just wasn't the same consistent threat he'd been in the past. At his best, Manny is a hitter with superb balance who could never be made to look bad on a pitch. The 2003 Manny was capable of looking very bad at times, so much so that it would cause someone to wonder about his concentration level on any given at-bat.

The people being paid to watch the team on a daily basis were unanimous in the opinion that he was far down the list of key players on this particular Red Sox team. There was endless discussion in the month of September about just who was this team's MVP. People floated the names of Bill Mueller, Nomar Garciaparra (until mid-September, anyway), David Ortiz, Jason Varitek, and even Trot Nixon, but no Manny. You could wait for one hour or 10 hours and you would not hear the name Manny Ramirez brought up. It was simply a given that Manny was an addendum. Manny fans may say that these people are all full of it, but I'm here to report the fact that those who watched the team with the keenest eyes were in total agreement that with the 2003 Manny, less was less.

Manny backers are already pointing to his Elias free agent ratings, which make him the top-ranked position player in baseball. All anyone need know about the Elias ratings is that Byung Hyun Kim was the American League's second-ranked closer. To borrow an age-old local phrase, "Nuf ced."

As far as those extras referred to earlier, get serious. In what was as collegiate an atmosphere as I've seen in more than 30 years of covering the Red Sox, Manny was oblivious, lending new meaning to the term "indifference." If the Red Sox jerseys had inscriptions of any kind, Manny's would be "Doesn't Get It."

He will be 32 on May 30. Does anyone honestly think he's going to get better? The past season could have been your standard "off year" or it could have been the beginning of a decline. At any rate, I think we can safely state that the 1999-2000 days of driving in more than a run a game are gone. If he could promise a string of 165-ribbie seasons, the Red Sox might be willing to grin and pay the $20 million. Failing that, they would prefer to take that money and invest it in a pitcher, with some money left over for an outfielder who can drive in 90-100 without giving his manager a migraine.

Hey, the Red Sox tried. They took a shot. If Manny is still here on Opening Day, so be it. It's not like he could care any less.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com.