you see things correctly, IMHO!

Manny was just being Manny and plenty of other players have done the same or much worse. Its really not the commish’s issue if a player quits on his team, its the teams issue.

really who is going to take on that challenge? Baseball has enough issues without now delving into presumed contract violations or supposed strong-arm tactics

Manny is not being suspended because you don’t even have probable cause for your accusations, much less substantive proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/8426884/Report:-MLB-investigating-Manny%27s-Red-Sox-exit

ESPN. I’m probably breaking some sort of copyright rule, but screw em. I’m a pirate. (though feel free to delete me if need be)

“The inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the Manny Ramirez trade is essentially over, probably after a few phone calls. It’s going nowhere, because it has no chance to go anywhere.

I haven’t spoken to one person in the game who isn’t appalled by how Ramirez handled his last days with Boston, and just about all of them understand why the Red Sox felt compelled to trade a Hall of Fame-caliber hitter.

But really, if there were going to be any serious conversation in the commissioner’s office about dealing with a player who was seemingly sabotaging his team, it needed to take place as the conflict occurred—on the Friday night he sat out of the lineup against the Yankees and came back from the hospital with clean MRIs on both of his knees. If, at that point, the commissioner had either flown to Boston or summoned Manny to New York to speak directly to him about the integrity of his actions, with the implicit threat of official action thick in the air, then this would have had a chance to impact the course of events. “It would have given the Red Sox some leverage in the situation,” said a high-ranking baseball executive.

These are observations made only with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, and not meant to be a criticism of Bud Selig. Nobody in baseball is conditioned to deal with the possibility that a player might willfully become a cancer on his team in pursuit of a contractual change. But privately, as the smoke has cleared, many folks within the game believe that what might have taken place with Ramirez represents a threat greater to the core tenet of baseball competition than any player ingesting steroids - “At least those guys were trying to get better for themselves and the team,” said one GM - and perhaps as great as the Pete Rose and Black Sox betting scandals.

The next time around, when a player conducts himself in a similar fashion, the reaction from central baseball will be more decisive, and it will come with more alacrity. But believing that Ramirez quit on his team with malicious intent and proving it to the point that you can convince an arbitrator are two different things (just as believing that there is collusion against Barry Bonds and proving it require two different standards). Ramirez’s agent, Scott Boras, has denied the Boston Globe report that an hour after the trade deadline, Boras called the Red Sox and asked to have the Ramirez trade killed. According to the Globe, Boras told that Red Sox that in return for contractual waivers, Ramirez would promise to not be a distraction, and this confirmed the suspicions of Red Sox officials that Ramirez had willfully quit on the team.

But unless a recording of that phone call exists, this information would be a complete non-starter in any formal investigation—and even if there were a recording, Ramirez is protected by a layer of deniability. He could just say he had no idea what Boras was talking about. He could just say he wanted peace. He could just say he was Manny being Manny.

Ramirez, too, was batting .299 at the time of his trade, and had six RBIs in his last five games with the Red Sox. No arbitrator in the world could see those numbers and determine definitively that Ramirez quit on the team.

No, chalk up the Ramirez Affair as a learning experience. As colleague Peter Gammons said Friday, all teams should consider the ramifications of giving Boras clients a contract option year. They should consider the possibility that if Ramirez isn’t happy about the contract he receives this winter - and Peter reported that he told teammates he wants four years and $100 million - he could lie down, perhaps determining that a $15 million annual salary is not worthy of his effort, as he seemed to feel about the $20 million salary he could have made with Boston in 2009 and 2010. Moving forward, the commissioner’s office will be in a better position to recognize the serious threat contained within a willful refusal to participate with basic integrity.”

The Red Sox LF is Jason Bay, and he’s pretty good. Let’s let Mannygones be Mannygones.