He makes Manny's returns happy
CLEVELAND - He may be the gentlest soul in baseball, and to this day he remains a trusted friend of Manny Ramírez's. They will almost certainly embrace at some point before tonight's Game 3 of the American League Championship Series between the Red Sox and Indians, and it's not likely to be the only time they do so this week.
"He gives me a hug all the time, and we sit and talk about our families," Frank Mancini said yesterday. "He puts his wife on the phone, and I talk to her. He's a special man.
"He cares about human beings. Just because they don't make a lot of money or aren't famous, he still sees people as human beings."
It might strike some as an odd fellowship, this enduring connection forged between one of the game's biggest stars and a soft-spoken, modest clubhouse man for the Indians, who for one day was a central character in the drama of whether Ramírez elected to stay in Cleveland and play for the Indians or sign for unimagined riches with the Red Sox.
Jeff Moorad, Ramírez's agent at the time, thought it funny that Ramírez would ask that as a condition of signing with the Sox, the team bring Mancini with him to Boston.
But if you know Mancini, and understand what he meant to Manny, Ramírez's desire to keep the clubhouse man at his side was not the mocking matter that Moorad made it appear on an ESPN camera taping his negotiations with the Red Sox.
The Indians understood, which is why on the day Ramírez was to make his decision, a front office man named Chris Antonetti called Mancini at his offseason home in Winter Haven, Fla., and woke him up.
We need a favor real bad, Antonetti told Mancini. You have to try and explain to Manny how much we care about him, how much we want him to stay, how much happier he will be here even though we can't offer him the same money the Sox are. Manny is going to call you in a few minutes, Antonetti said. He's going to ask you to go with him. We hope he decides to stay.
Helping hand
Frank Mancini had reached out to Ramírez from the first day he arrived in the Indians clubhouse after signing with the team, greeting this shy, skinny Dominican-born teenager from New York City with a few words of Spanish to make him feel comfortable. When Ramírez made it to the big leagues a couple of years later, he noticed how Mancini took care of Albert Belle, the big man in the clubhouse at the time, a player held in awe by Ramírez.
Mancini would help Belle do his stretching. A couple of hours a day, he shaved the handles of Belle's bats so he could swing them whip-like, the way he did his golf clubs. Mancini would go into the batting cage with Belle, setting the pitching machine so it would only throw hard sliders, down and away, forcing Belle to learn how to take that pitch the other way without having to think about it. He would soft-toss to him in a little hitting area behind the Indians dugout before Belle's at-bats. It got to where Belle, who hit 50 home runs that season (1995), demanded the team allow Mancini to go on the road with him.
Soon, Ramírez was asking Mancini for help, too, especially after Belle signed with the White Sox and Mancini declined Belle's request to join him in Chicago, something Belle has never forgiven him for, ignoring him when he came back to Cleveland. "That hurt a lot," Mancini said.
Mancini took Ramírez into the cage, helped him master the same discipline of hitting sliders the other way. He threw him soft-toss. He made him berry-and-protein shakes, twice a day, Ramírez skipping the big postgame meal enjoyed by many of the other players. When Indians pitcher Mike Jackson asked Mancini if the clubby could start bringing sushi into the clubhouse, the way he had when Ken Griffey was in town as a visiting player, Mancini was soon bringing in enough to feed 20 Indians, including Ramírez, who cultivated a taste for the Japanese specialty that he maintains to this day.
And Mancini talked to him about other things, deeper matters.
"We talked about spiritual things," Mancini said. "I wanted him to find peace in his difficult job, to draw upon his faith to get him through tough times. As easy-going as he is, as happy-go-lucky as he is, when he struggles, it bothers him and he worries about that. He doesn't let other people see that, and when game time comes he tried to block it out.
"But he'd come to me. I'd tell him, 'Focus on the fact, Manny, you are in the major leagues. God gave you this amazing talent. God put you here for a reason. God will help you.' "
Tough decision
On that day, as Mancini awaited the phone call from Ramírez, he worried for his friend. He knew how comfortable he was in Cleveland, surrounded by friends such as Sandy Alomar Jr. in the clubhouse. He remembered what other Indians, like David Justice and Marquis Grissom, had told him, about how tough Boston could be on a minority ballplayer, how Justice and Grissom had told him they had language in their contracts that would not allow them to be traded to Boston. Mancini loved Boston, but he remembered how tough the town had been on Mo Vaughn when he had a bad series against the Indians in the '95 playoffs. He worried for his friend.
"I explained to Manny that money's not everything," Mancini said. "I told him Boston can be a tough place to play. I told him I couldn't make the decision for him, and that he should talk to other people, too. I told him, 'I love you like a brother, but I can't go with you. I hope you understand. But whatever you decide, I still care about you and will help you any way I can.' "
When the conversation ended, Ramírez told him, "You know what, Frank, I think I'm going to stay in Cleveland."
But by the end of that day, the Red Sox upped the financial ante considerably. Mancini believes Ramírez was under great pressure from Moorad and the players' union to sign.
"That's just my opinion," he said yesterday, "but the union tells these guys, if you don't sign for top dollar, you're not only hurting yourself, you're hurting the guys below you, too.
"Manny is a sensitive person. He doesn't want to hurt anybody. He wants everybody to like him. That's crucial to him. He greets people walking down the hall with big hugs. He wants everyone to like him. He doesn't want to let people down. I'm sure he felt that pressure from the union, his agent. That's my opinion. That was a terrifying decision."
Can't buy happiness
That seems so long ago now. Ramírez has played seven seasons in Boston. He has won a World Series, and was named World Series MVP in 2004. He will next season hit his 500th home run, probably with the Sox, and of course, he has made a boatload of money.
But is he happy? Mancini paused.
"So-so," he says. "He lives in a hotel. He misses his privacy. He gets no privacy, and that bothers him, that people won't allow him to be the way he was. Wherever he goes, people follow him. That bothers him.
"He doesn't have the same close relationship with players on the team that he did here. It's a different environment. There you had Pedro Martínez, who also is Dominican, but no offense to Pedro, Pedro was into being Pedro. He seems to have a healthy relationship with [David] Ortiz, he's a nice man, Mr. Ortiz. He has Julian [Tavarez] to help him out.
"But here, he was so at peace. I don't think he's all that happy. It makes me kind of sad."
But now, even if it is just as a visitor, Ramírez is back, and Frank Mancini couldn't be happier. Unlike Belle, Ramírez didn't turn his back on him when Mancini said he had to stay in Cleveland, to remain close to his family, to continue to work for the team he grew up rooting for and for whom he has worked the last 18 years.
The first time Mancini saw Ramírez after he'd gone to Boston, he said the player told him, "Frank, you made the right decision."
Mancini smiles.
"There's a boy inside that man," he said. "He's a man - don't ever doubt that he's a man - but there's still a big little boy in there, which enables him to deal with pressure around him and allows him to be so relaxed and easygoing and not worry about things.
"To this day, he still misses it here. And when he's here, he rakes, which makes me worried for our team."
Gordon Edes can be reached at edes@globe.com.
