SCOTT JACOBS

Throughout it all, the hitting streaks, the timely doubles, the infectious smile, and the dreads, Manny Ramirez was in every sense of the word, a memorable character.  As eccentric as they come.  So with his career clearly on the decline, his prestige nothing more than a name, “Manny,” and a team in the Rays clearly going nowhere it made sense that this year would probably be his swan song.

Call it a disturbing tune.

Manny Ramirez abruptly retired today, after reports began to leak that he tested positive for performance enhancing drugs in Spring Training, an automatic 100 game suspension for the slugger who was once larger than Fenway’s Green Monster.

Now he’s another sham: a bum who tried to hold on way too long, another black eye to the P.E.D. era that just won’t quite go away.

His numbers are Hall of Fame worthy, and his whacky unexplainable personality is the stuff of legends, to be told to generations of baseball fans to come. To leave in such a distasteful manner is rather fitting for the slugger, who didn’t do anything by the book.  Rather than let another suspension zap anything left of the credibility he had as a ballplayer, he buried his head between his legs and left the sport on a whim, an embarrassing escape from the sport for one of baseball’s all time feared swingers.

“I can’t put my finger on you. You’re unpredictable. Kind of mysterious,”  Allison says to Carl in the movie Yes Man.  The same could have been said of Manny.

No player was harder to explain.

Manny played in 2302 games, scored 1544 runs, recorded 2754 hits, 547 doubles, and smacked 555 home runs out of the yard.  He knocked in 1831 RBIs and walked 1329 times in an 18 year career unlike any other.

Yet none of it seems to matter anymore.

His numbers however gaudy are clearly marred by his now 2 positive drug tests (and however many before they started seriously testing for this stuff).  Another indictment to a sport littered with great players gone P.E.D. stale.  No sport has watched it’s heroes and titans fall faster than baseball.  First it was Rafael Palmeiro, then Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and now Manny.

I know we’re supposed to allow our players to be innocent before proven guilty, but this disturbing trends of stars fading right as they exit the game is a problem that greatly haunts the best players of today.  Once again all our stars are on a close watch, and how can anyone take what they do seriously?

In Harvey Frommer’s Remembering Fenway, a book of iconic Fenway Park pictures, the back cover features Manny stepping out of the giant Green Monster scoreboard, with a look that just sort of sums his career up.  That look?  Confusion, mystery, an aura of bizarre that exceeded anything beyond rationalization.

But that was Manny.  He developed into an elite power hitter in Cleveland, than got a fat payday from the Red Sox in 2000 ($160 million for 8 years) — a contract that brought incredible success to the Red Sox (including that long awaited World Series title in 2004 and 2007).  When things soured in Boston he became the savior in Los Angeles, reviving a dead in the water Dodgers team during an incredible summer of love tour in LA. Dodger Stadium quickly turned into MannyWood, and Ramirez was treated like a god once more.  But his numbers began to fade, and then the big blow — his first failed drug test for performance enhancing drugs cost him 50 games.

From there he became a sideshow, getting dealt from the Dodgers to the White Sox last season, and doing nothing to revive Chicago’s playoff hopes.

He garnered little interest in the free agency market this past offseason, until the Rays scooped him up in a desperate P.R. ploy to sabotage their poor fan base into thinking they still cared.

“I’m here, like I said, because I love the game, I love to compete,” said Ramirez at his press conference introducing him and Johnny Damon to the Rays. “It doesn’t matter how much money you make.  If you love the game, it doesn’t matter. What you want is a chance to prove to people that you still can do it. So for me, it was not about the money, I could have gone someplace else.”

Apparently he didn’t love the game enough to respect it and he certainly didn’t prove to people that he still could do it.

And in the end he did go somewhere else.  He hit the showers.  Permanently.

Photo: Getty

Oh man, wouldn’t everyone want to be Buehrle’s shoes? EVERYONE wants to be in this dear man’s shoes. I mean just look at this guy. He has a gorgeous wife, won a World Series not too long ago, and hell, he threw a no-hitter in 2007.

But he just did something that topped them all (expect maybe the wife part), throwing a perfect game on this very date of July 23rd, and in the year of 2009.

He was the 18th pitcher to do such a feat, and nobody expected it. There are so many big names to do this, but it seems a guy named Mark Buehrle does not belong in that list. No doubt, Buehrle has to be the most underrated pitcher, if not player, in Major League Baseball.

You know, I think the Philadelphia Phillies would rather trade for Buehrle than Roy Halladay, am I right? Maybe not.

Buehrle also joins another group of members that have six people, a player who has thrown a no-hitter and a perfect game. He joins a valued group of players like Sandy Koufax, Cy Young, and Randy Johnson, as ESPN reported.

So, how do you feel about this Mark?

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “I never thought I’d throw a no-hitter.”

Neither did many of us baseball fans. Nobody expected you to do any of this, coming from this observer. Also, look, Buehrle was guy selected in like the 40th round of the MLB amateur draft way back in 1998. Being drafted in like the 40th round, hell, nobody expects anyone to accomplish so many feats like Buehrle did.

But it wasn’t all Buehrle during that game. You have to give the props to Dewayne Wise, who unbelievably made an amazing catch that prevented a home run, and most importantly, perfection for Buehrle. Wise will always have taken a big part there.

Hell, if it weren’t for him, nobody will be talking about this perfect game.

Gabe Kapler was the man who almost ended Buehrle’s run. The 105th pitch of the game will always be remembered by true baseball fans. And true baseball fans will always remember the play Dewayne Wise made, to give Buehrle the perfect game.

So that makes it two for Wise. I bet he’ll be telling his kids that he saved Buehrle’s game. And what I meant by “that makes it two for Wise,” I meant that Wise has been a part of two perfect games.

Remember the perfect game The Big Unit had back  in 2004? Wise was part of that, but on the other end of the deal as he was the opponent. But it’s great to be on the same team as a pitcher for a perfect game.

Let’s see what the perfect-game hero said:

“I was with the Braves in ‘04 and I was there when Arizona’s Randy Johnson pitched a perfect game. So I’ve been on both sides of it,” he said. “It was probably the best catch I’ve ever made because of the circumstances.

“It was kind of crazy, man, because when I jumped, the ball hit my glove at the same time I was hitting the wall. So I didn’t realize I had caught it until I fell down and the ball was coming out of my glove, so I reached out and grabbed it.”

Also, props to Ozzie Guillen for switching in Wise.

“I guess that’s our job,” Guillen said.

Barrack Obama is a White Sox fan, who congratulated Buehrle as well. He said that many people will remember this forever. We all know Barrack will.

A big congrats to Mark Buehrle. Sometimes perfection can be bad, but when it comes to baseball and especially Mark Buehrle…sometimes baseball can actually be good.

Quotes were provided by ESPN.com

SCOTT JACOBS

Roy Halladay may be the best, but today Mark Buerhle was perfect.

Add that to a World Series ring, and a no hitter, and the fact that it was against the 2008 AL Champion Rays, and well, not bad Mark, not bad at all.

Just a few weeks removed from Johnathan Sanchez’s no hitter (though I would argue it should have been a perfect game), Buerhle went out and stifled a dangerous Rays lineup to the tune of a lights out performance for the ages.  Might we add it came in an important pennant chase with the Sox trailing the Tigers.

But that’s neither here nor there.  Buerhle’s stat line for the game: 116 pitches, 76 for strikes, and he only needed 6 strikeouts.  But don’t let the strikeouts fool you: Buerhle was the one fooling hitters all day, and this wasn’t the depleted Padres lineup that the previously unheralded Sanchez disposed of.  This was a dynamic Rays offense, a team 10 games above .500.

Jason Bartlett, one of a number of Rays all stars, grounded out to short, and cemented the perfect game, but it was the catch from Dewayne Wise, robbing Gabe Kapler of a sure home run, that will be immortalized for years to come.  You will see that catch over, and over, and over.  Wise ran up the wall in complete stride, and reached out to record the first out in the ninth, and from there, you just knew it was Buerhle’s day.

With the win, correct that– perfection, Buerhle improved to 11-3.  With the perfect game, the first since Randy Johnson’s stellar game against the Braves in 2004, Buerhle established himself as one of the game’s most underappreciated stars.  Seriously, he’s now gone two games in his career while retiring the minimum of 27 batters.  One being the no hitter, and today’s perfect game.

So congrats Buerhle.  For one day at least Roy Halladay is not the top story.

On June 29, Tyson Homosexual (otherwise known as Tyson Gay) won the 100 meter Olympic qualifier, and a bunch of Christian news sites referred to him as Tyson Homosexual and ran headlines like “Homosexual Runs Win-Aided 9.86.” (Here’s a link of all the censored headlines if you haven’t already heard about this.)

We at Juiced Sports also feel very much that media has gotten out of control and wish to fight back against the smut in our own way.

I know present to you a clean version of the Chicago ChiSox history:

The Chicago Caucasian Sox are a Major League Baseball team based in Chicago, Illinois. The Caucasian Sox are a member of the Central Division of the American League. From 1991 to the present, the Caucasian Sox have played in the new park, completed at a cost of $167 million, also opened with the Comiskey Park name, but became U.S. Cellular Field in 2003 after U.S. Cellular bought the naming rights at $68 million over 20 years.

They are most prominently nicknamed “the South Siders”, differentiating from the North Side dwelling Chicago Cubs; “the Pale Hose”; and sometimes by the national media as “the ChiSox”, a combination of “Chicago” and “Sox” (as opposed to the BoSox). Other nicknames include “the Go-Go Sox, a reference to 1959 AL Champions, who got that nickname; “the Good Guys”, a reference to the team’s one time motto “Good guys wear African-American”, coined by Ken “Hawk” Harrelson; and “the African-American Sox”, the name attributed to the scandal-tainted 1919 team. Most fans refer to the team as simply “the Sox”. The Spanish language media sometimes refer to the team as Medias Blancas for “Caucasian Stockings”.

One of the American League’s eight charter franchises, the club was founded in Chicago in 1901. Then the Chicago Caucasian Stockings, after the original Caucasian Stockings vacated the name to become the Cubs. At this time, the team inhabited South Side Park. In 1910, the team moved into historic Comiskey Park, which they would inhabit for more than eight decades. It was there that, in 1919, the infamous African-American Sox Scandal occurred.