Manny is good enough and smart enough...and darn it, people like him
This entry was posted on 4/27/2008 10:14 AM and is filed under uncategorized.
Interesting anecdote listed below from current ESPN baseball analyst and former Mets General Manager Steve Phillips, who was a part of the Mets front office when Manny Ramirez was available for the MLB draft in 1991 and actually scouted Manny Being Manny. The Mets apparently had questions about Ramirez’s mental make-up – imagine that – and whether or not his self-confidence was high enough to handle the peaks and valleys associated with pro baseball.
Ramirez was taken by the Cleveland Indians and off the board by the time the Mets had their first draft choice, but perhaps other teams picking higher had the very same perception about Ramirez, and never foresaw him blooming into the pre-eminent right-handed hitter of his generation.
It’s pretty fun to look back at this chart, provided by www.thebaseballcube.com and imagine that former Sox bench jockey and NESN analyst David McCarty and a kid I went to high school with, Stoneham High’s Joe Vitiello, were both picked well ahead of Man-Ram.
Phillip’s story, heard during an interview on the the Mike Felger Show on 890 ESPN, is listed below the draft chart:
Did you ever have a guy that you either didn’t ask the right questions to and then drafted and he became a schmuck or somebody that you shied away from because of questions you had, and then they turned out to be a very good player?
SP: It’s interesting. What the Mets did prior to me being general manager when I was in the front office as an administrative assistant and a minor league farm director was put prospective players through a psychological test. A little bit different from what they go through at the NFL level, but it was kind of more of a sales-level executive leadership test. From this test, the person who designed it felt like they could tell who could be successful baseball players; who could deal with success and failure; and who had the mental toughness and the self-esteem to be able to handle things.
Now, I’ll never forget this because this was back when Manny Ramirez was still in high school. I went to watch a kid named Frankie Rodriguez, who actually became a member of the Red Sox, but I watched him play in the sandlots of New York and liked him as a player. But I came away from a game thinking that he was a good but, boy, there was a guy even better named Manny Ramirez. I had never seen a kid like this swinging the bat.
So when Manny was a senior in high school and available for the draft, the Mets organization gave him this test and the test came back saying he doesn’t have the most self-esteem and confidence in the world – and the concern of the guy giving the test was that when he goes into a slump he may have difficulty getting out of it because he doesn’t have the confidence or the belief that he’s going to be able to do it.
I said okay, but here’s the good news: I’ve seen this kid and he’s never going to go into a slump. He’s the best hitter I’ve ever seen, so disregard the rest. The logic was that you had a kid who was five years removed from the Dominican Republic, going to school in the United States, being given a test that’s really for sales executives in English with a No. 2 pencil in his hand.
You’re looking for tools to evaluate talent, but I remember telling this guy ‘look put yourself in the Dominican Republic for five years and then take a test in Spanish and let me know how much confidence you’d have in handling that test.’ It was sick, he was a ridiculous [hitter] in high school.
