You knew I had to do this.  The profile of Manny Ramirez, outfielder for the Boston Red Sox, in this week’s New Yorker, (hat tip Jeremiah) gives me another chance to point to Taoism in a modern context.  In the past I written about being a Taoist Yankee fan and the Taoist qualities of various players.  But Manny takes the cake.

     He is inarticulate and seemingly clumsy in the field.  Others have a hard time understanding him and he is impervious to conventional expectations of all sorts (punctuality, appearance, propriety…):

...He makes more money than everyone else at the company yet somehow
escapes the usual class resentment, and even commands more respect from
the wage slaves, who suspect he is secretly one of them, than from his
colleagues in business class. It’s not that he is anti-establishment,
exactly, but in his carefree way he’s just subversive enough—“affably
apathetic” is how one of his bosses put it recently—to create headaches
for any manager who worries about precedent. Despite his generous
compensation, he is sufficiently ungrateful to let it be known that he
would be happier working elsewhere. He is also, for a man of stature,
strangely sensitive, and although his brilliance is accompanied by
sloppiness, one criticizes him, as with a wayward teen-ager, at the
risk of losing him to bouts of brooding and inaccessibility.

     Sounds like the Tao Te Ching (20):

…People all have enough and more.
But I’m abandoned and destitute,
an absolute simpleton, this mind of mine so utterly
muddled and blank.

Others are bright and clear;
I’m dark and murky.
Others are confident and effective;
I’m pensive and withdrawn,
uneasy as boundless seas
or perennial mountain winds.

People all have a purpose in life,
but I’m inept, thoroughly useless and backward.
I’ll never be like other people….

 Of course, he’s not destitute, but one of the highest paid players in baseball.  And that is because in spite of, or maybe because of, his apparent muddledness and murkiness, he is one of the best hitters in the game.  A "pure " hitter, one with the Tao of hitting.  By giving up his self, or at least the socially constructed expectations of what his "self" as a star baseball player should be, he has become more of himself as a baseball player than he ever would have been.

      Brilliant.  I have always enjoyed Manny, and I hope someday he will play in the Bronx.  But with tonight’s game against the Red Sox commanding my attention, I will end with my usual cry:  Go Yankees!