Manny Ramírez is hoping to return to baseball in a coaching capacity.
“He wants to bring his greatness to teach the young guys,” his agent, Hector Zepeda, told Jon Heyman of the New York Post, who added that the former slugger has reached out to all 30 MLB teams about becoming a hitting coach.
That mirrors comments Ramírez made in late September during an appearance on Foul Territory.
“I just need the opportunity. To be honest, I spoke to Boston last year,” he said at the time. “We were talking a little bit and I know they hired a guy from Driveline Baseball. We were talking, but then we never got back to, like, getting serious about it. So, they never got back to me. So I never went back to them to see if it was really an opportunity.”
His credentials as a hitter are impressive: A .312 career batting average with 555 home runs, 1,831 RBI and a .996 OPS. While some of those numbers were perhaps inflated by PED use, there’s no doubt that Ramírez was born to hit.
Hitting and teaching hitting are not the same, of course. Plenty of amazing athletes aren’t great coaches for that very reason. Having innate gifts doesn’t always translate into understanding the underlying mechanics behind them, not to mention being able to communicate that understanding in a digestible way. But Ramírez is hoping to give it a shot.
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