“That guy, he’s in his own world, on his own planet,” a teammate says of Ramirez. PHILIP BURKE

Manny Ramirez is a deeply frustrating employee, the kind whose talents are so prodigious that he gets away with skipping meetings, falling asleep on the job, and fraternizing with the competition. 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.

Ramirez, now entering his seventh season with the Boston Red Sox, is the best baseball player to come out of the New York City public-school system since Sandy Koufax, and by many accounts the greatest right-handed hitter of his generation, though attempts to locate him in time and space, as we shall see, inevitably miss the mark. He is perhaps the closest thing in contemporary professional sports to a folk hero, an unpredictable public figure about whom relatively little is actually known but whose exploits, on and off the field, are recounted endlessly, with each addition punctuated by a shrug and the observation that it’s just “Manny being Manny.” When I asked his teammate David Ortiz, himself a borderline folk hero, how he would describe Ramirez, he replied, “As a crazy motherfucker.” Then he pointed at my notebook and said, “You can write it down just like that: ‘David Ortiz says Manny is a crazy motherfucker.’ That guy, he’s in his own world, on his own planet. Totally different human being than everyone else.” Ortiz is not alone in emphasizing that Ramirez’s originality resonates at the level of species. Another teammate, Julian Tavarez, recently told a reporter from the Boston Herald, “There’s a bunch of humans out here, but to Manny, he’s the only human.”

Ramirez, who was born in Santo Domingo in 1972 and moved to the heavily Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights, in northern Manhattan, when he was thirteen, still spoke little English by the time he was drafted, and he remains a man of few words. Those words, however, have a way of sounding aphoristic: “All I need to see is the ball,” or “Do what makes you happy.” In 1999, after he’d established himself as a superstar with the Cleveland Indians, written messages began appearing on the backs of his cleats, like admonitions from a prophet: “There will be hell to pay”; “Justice will be served”; “Can’t we all get along?”; “Live and let die.” Greg Brown, a journeyman minor-league catcher who worked out with Ramirez last winter, said, “Sometimes I think it’s Manny’s world, and we all just exist in it.”

According to lore, Ramirez has, or had, two Social Security numbers and five active driver’s licenses—none of which he managed to present to the officer who pulled him over in 1997 for driving with illegally tinted windows and the stereo blasting at earsplitting volume. “The cop knew who he was,” as Sheldon Ocker, the Indians beat reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal, tells it. “He said, ‘Manny, I’m going to give you a ticket.’ Manny says, ‘I don’t need any tickets, I can give you tickets,’ and reaches for the glove compartment. Then he leaves the scene by making an illegal U-turn and he gets another ticket.”

Ramirez’s appearance—he styles his hair in dreadlocks, wears a uniform cut for a sumo wrestler, and smiles broadly and indiscriminately—hints at this extracurricular flakiness, and even gives off a whiff of pothead. (In 2002, he requested that the song “Good Times,” by Styles P, be played over the Fenway Park P.A. system before one of his at-bats, and unsuspecting fans were treated to lyrics such as “Every day I need a ounce and a half . . . take a blunt, just to ease the pain . . . I get high, high, high.”) During pitching changes at Fenway, he has been known to disappear behind a door in the left-field wall, and on one occasion he nearly missed the resumption of play—an averted transgression that he at one point blamed on his bladder.

In the outfield and on the base paths, Ramirez can seem oafish and clumsy, and many of the baseball-related incidents for which he is best known reflect a chronic absent-mindedness, but I prefer the most Roy Hobbsian anecdote, in which he hits a home run with a broken bat—it was broken before he swung, that is, and he used it anyway because he was fond of it—since it illustrates both his enthusiasm and his preternatural gift for hitting. He is an intensely serious batter who practices with greater determination than almost any other, but the magic in his swing—minimal stride, maximal weight shift—comes from somewhere within. He is thick but not big by today’s standards, about six feet and two hundred pounds, and without the sculpted Hulk Hogan physique that has become the norm, yet only Mark McGwire, Harmon Killebrew, and Babe Ruth hit four hundred and fifty home runs more quickly than Ramirez, and only Lou Gehrig, who, like Ramirez, spent his formative years practicing in Manhattan’s Highbridge Park, hit more grand slams.

In Boston, where the “knights of the keyboard,” in Ted Williams’s famous formulation, cover baseball the way affairs of state are covered in Washington, Ramirez remains a phenomenon more discussed than understood. They share sightings, transcribe every utterance, and speculate about the induction speech he’ll give in Cooperstown circa 2015. But for some reason I have not seen it remarked upon that Ramirez chose to name both of his first two sons Manny, Jr.

A running joke in Boston has it that none of Ramirez’s coaches know when he gets to the ballpark in the morning, because he’s always there (if sometimes napping) when they arrive. His punctuality does not extend into the off-season, however, the length of which varies depending on whether you ask the team or Ramirez. Few people affiliated with the Red Sox have a good idea about where he might be or what he’s up to in the winter months, other than that he tends to visit the Dominican Republic for about a week and always stays in shape. This year, it turned out, he had a 1967 Lincoln Continental convertible he wanted to sell.

“Manny Ramirez, you know, good guy,” Jay Silberman, one of the promoters of the Atlantic City Classic Cars Auction, said on the last weekend in February, while sitting in a makeshift office in the convention center on Miss America Way. “But Manny is a space ranger—flies by the seat of his own pants. When he called, I said, ‘Manny, is it my imagination or isn’t it spring-training time?’ ” The Red Sox had asked pitchers and catchers to report to the team training facility, in Fort Myers, on February 16th, with infielders and outfielders to follow on the 20th, but Ramirez, who had attended the car show once before, merely to browse, evidently thought it might be nice to be there on the auction stand in person. “He said, ‘Oh, yeah,’ ” Silberman went on. “He said, ‘No, I’ll just fly in, go back. I’ll get a private jet, come in, and leave.’ But, apparently, what I didn’t know was that he told the Red Sox that someone was ill.”