In Manny’s defense BY SAM PFEIFLE

It’s the end of the 1928 season and you’re Colonel Jacob Ruppert. Assessing your team’s standing going into the 1929 season, you find yourself with a decision on your hands: Do you, or do you not, trade away Babe Ruth?

Ludicrous, right? Who in their right mind would get rid of a player who had led the league in home runs and runs batted in for the last three seasons, who just swatted 54 dingers and drove in 142 runs? Yet, that scenario is quite simply not very much different from the one being presented to Red Sox Nation this coming fall. Repeatedly, we’re told (by media, mostly) that Manny Ramirez is likely gone from the Red Sox at the end of this year. He’s too expensive, we’re told. He loses focus. He doesn’t run out ground balls sometimes.

Are these people serious? He doesn’t run out ground balls? Does anyone really think that Babe Ruth hustled down the line on every grounder to short?

Before anyone gets crazy on me, though, I’ll readily admit that Manny Ramirez is not Babe Ruth, nor even the Babe Ruth of our era. For better or worse, it’s pretty clear that Alex Rodriguez is the Babe Ruth of our era. However, when you pair Manny with David Ortiz, it’s not much of a stretch to say that the two are pretty close to being the Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth of our era, and that it follows that trading Manny after this season would be very close to trading Babe Ruth following 1928, his third full season hitting in front of Lou Gehrig.

Look at the numbers. For the three years, 1926-1928, Gehrig and Ruth combined for 251 home runs and 1023 runs batted in. I know. Holy crap. But look at Manny and Ortiz. For the three years, 2003-2005, the two will combine for 236 home runs and 760 runs batted in (using projected numbers for the current year; they’ve already become the first pair of Red Sox ever to both hit 30 homers and drive in 100 runs in three straight years). That the home-run numbers are that close is amazing considering that the span for Ruth and Gehrig contains Ruth’s 60-dinger/164-RBI season, a season that seemed unapproachable until the era of steroids, and Ortiz and Ramirez missed a total of 74 games between them in 2003. In fact, 1927 (the ultimate Bronx Bombers season) saw the two Yankees combine for an eye-popping 339 runs batted in. Three hundred and thirty nine! And the eras actually compare pretty well. American League ERA in 1927 was 4.94, while it was 5.01 in 2004.

What’s even more instructive is how the numbers relate to those of their contemporaries. Throwing out 1926 and 2003 respectively to get their best two years together, if you assign a number value to the place in which each player ranked in home runs and runs batted in at the end of each year (first in homers=1, second=2, etc.), then Ruth and Gehrig total 12, while Ramirez and Ortiz total just 18 (using their ranks as of September 1). Both, unsurprisingly, led their teams to World Series victories in their second season together (the Yanks lost game seven of the Series to St. Louis in 1926; the Red Sox lost game seven of the ALCS to the Yanks in 2003).

I don’t think I need to remind baseball fans of what Gehrig and Ruth went on to do over their next five years together, an unbelievable period of excellence that only ended when Ruth, not noted for his fitness, basically ran out of gas after the 1933 season at the age of 38 (Gehrig had at least 100 runs batted in for another five years after that!). It included two more World Series titles.

Manny will be 38 in 2010, five years from now. Do we really want to trade away those five years?

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@phx.com