The High-Priced Slugger Who Actually Slugged (and May Be Our Best-Ever FA Signing)

Watching Juan Soto have a truck filled with cash dumped all over him reminded of that time — December 13, 2000 to be precise — the Red Sox cranked up the money-printing machine to sign the best free agent bat on the market that winter: Manny Ramirez.

I remember the night we signed him. I flipped on boston.com and the headline read, “Sox Sign Ramirez.” And I did what I typically did when Red Sox news hit the wires. I called Dad.

“This’ll be a killer line-up,” I remember saying. “Bichette, Trot, Everett, and now Manny? Who will stop us?”

Well, Murderer’s Row they weren’t; Manny was the only guy on the team to bat over .300 during the 2001 season. But I was there for his first Fenway at-bat. The Sox were already down by three when he stepped up with two men on and promptly deposited the first pitch he saw into the screens above the Monster. Finally, we thought, a free agent signing who’s doing exactly what we paid him for! Shit went nuts, and just like that, the Manny Era was upon us.

Do we owe the Yankees a bit of thanks for Manny? Maybe. Mussina was the most highly-prized free agent on the market that winter, and with quality starters often rarer than three-dollar bills, it’s not surprising the Red Sox were in the mix. When the Yankees eventually got him, with the sting of that 1999 ALCS loss to New York still hanging in the air, Sox ownership seemed determined to land Manny as their counter-punch (and had to fend off Cleveland to do it). It’s sometimes creepy to think that if the Sox had been successful in their pursuit of Mussina, we might have never signed Manny. So we’d have postgame quotes like, “Did you know I went to Stanford?” and “If Daubach had gotten down on that ball, I would have had a no-hitter,” and, “Sure, I know the square root of 74,653,986,294, but I’m not telling your withered ass,” instead of witnessing the unstoppable awesomeness that is Manny taking bat in hand to emasculate whoever is unfortunate enough to be on the mound.

Since then, he went on to be one of the most productive players of this century. After a string of players with “a swing MADE for Fenway” (including Jack Clark, Andre Dawson, Rob Deer, Nick Esasky, Dante Bichette, et al) Manny was a legitimate menace — the type of batter who could change the course of mighty rivers with one swat of the bat.

Yes, for folks like me who enjoy players with character, there were those “Manny Being Manny” moments in which his behavior ran from curious to baffling. But the production spoke volumes. We paid the man to hit the crap out of the ball and he did, belting 274 home runs and 1232 hits in his seven-and-a-half seasons with us and playing a critical role in two World Series championships — something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime.

Pound for pound, he’s one of the great examples of a high-priced, high-profile free agent signing that actually gave us everything we wanted.

Not bad for a guy who was our plan B after missing out on Mike Mussina.

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