The Trolley Dodger

ESPN.com’s Jayson Stark has a bee in his bonnet. I use that cliché purposefully, as his latest column chastising Dodger fans for cheering Manny Ramirez sounds nothing so much as an old biddy waggling her finger at the children playing stickball too loud in the street.

“Paying Manny $100M would set a dangerous precedent”

Hey, we couldn’t be happier for those Los Angeles Dodgers, who are selling about 30,000 tickets a day now that they’ve moved their home games to Planet Manny. But we’d like to ask one little question of all those people in L.A. who are showering their man Manny Ramirez with so much love:

What the heck are you cheering for?

Mostly the balls flying over the outfield walls. Also the scoring more runs than the other teams. I like that part especially.

Just like the old biddy stereotype, Stark has a gaggle of gossips feeding him column-ready one liners — GMs and other league sources, all anonymous of course.

“It really bothers me,” one GM said this week of the Manny-mania lovefest that has unfolded in L.A….

(And here I’m seeing the GM throwing himself on a Victorian settee, casting an arm over his eyes and attempting not to faint in despair.)

…”What he did in Boston was criminal. Now he goes there, and everything’s OK? No, sir. It doesn’t change the fact that how he got there was criminal.”

Criminal? Really? Go read up on Darryl Strawberry or Michael Vick and get back to me on “criminal.”

Here’s the crime that Manny perpetuated on the Red Sox in July: .347/.473/.587/1.060. The nerve!

Look, everyone knows how much ESPN functions as the propaganda wing of the Boston sports establishment. Listening recently to the normally sedate Peter “Older Biddy” Gammons splutter anti-Manny invectives in between Red Sox talking points, it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out where his allegiances lie.

But even Gammons has moved on now. It’s been forever in ESPN Attention Span Time, and it’s only a little surreal seeing Manny in Dodger Blue. I know you’re feeling antsy what with the Angels and Devil Rays (insert Paradise Lost joke here) owning your Boston overlords’ butts this season, but let it go already. Don’t you have any Brett Favre dead horse residue to nudge fitfully with your toe?