Well, it was something like: "Mmmm, this warm water feels wonderful and it will be good to go out and have a nice dinner tonight and . . . hey, what's all the yelling about? And now why is it so quiet?"
Yes, Manny Ramirez, that inspirational leader of men, didn't really get a good look at the hit that put Los Angeles in a three-games-to-one hole in the National League Championship Series. He might not have seen it yet. Not that it mattered much to Manny. Nothing he could have done about it, after all.
"I was out of the game, and I went in and showered," Ramirez said. "When I came out, they were coming in and turning off the TVs."
I'm sure they were. The rest of the Dodgers might have thought it was a filthy way for the game to end, but Manny was squeaky clean and unperturbed.
"What can you do? It's baseball," he said. "A team gets the right hit at the right time. What can you do?"
Charlie Manuel, the Phillies' manager, said it took him quite a while to get to sleep after he got home and tried to unwind from the game. Not so much for Manny, though.
"I slept like a baby," Ramirez said yesterday.
One more loss - it could arrive as soon as this evening - and all the Dodgers can get as much sleep as they like. For Manny, though, it's all the same. You leave the game, you get a shower. October is the same as April to him.
"He's always done that, so . . . last night wasn't going to be any different," Los Angeles manager Joe Torre said. "As we say, Manny is Manny. He's a cool customer. But he certainly doesn't have any lack of respect because of that. I think the way it turned out, it probably doesn't look good. But it's nothing different than he had done before."
Good for him, one supposes, and maybe if the rest of the Dodgers adopted his attitude, it wouldn't hurt as much if the Phillies bounced them out tonight or in any of the final three games.
