Simmons on Ramirez

On ESPN.com, Bill Simmons writes a very long piece--more of a bro-mage, really--on baseball-hitting idiot savant Manny Ramirez, and (perhaps unwittingly) uses enough footnotes (39) to make it almost a tribute to the late David Foster Wallace (the novelist who, even though he favored tennis a bit much for my liking, was also one of the best non-fiction writers around, and who gave it up to write fiction; here's his brilliant cruise ship piece from Harper's in 1996).



Back to "The Only Human": Here are some bits from another good piece, albeit a more clinical one courtesy of Thee New Yorker, about Mr. Manny.

Simmons' piece is basically a long thought to himself, the kind you have when you are driving from Omaha to Rapid City. It's not his best stuff, and there's a lot that's been covered before, but it's pretty amusing:

Sadly, I missed David Ortiz pulling out an AmEx card in Daniel's limo, waving it with his signature gap-toothed smile and announcing happily, "I got Manny's credit card tonight!" Everyone cheered like they'd just won the pennant. With Manny riding in the other limo, they started telling "Manny Being Manny" stories, like how Manny routinely stuffed uncashed paychecks in the top shelf of his locker. Seems he rarely got around to cashing them. The checks were for $978,000 every two weeks during the season. (Big Papi knew the exact number because he made a team employee show him one.)