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.

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

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.”

That someone was Ramirez’s mother, Onelcida, who is sixty, and with whom Ramirez remains extremely close. (He attributed a rare batting slump in 2005 to her health, saying, “My mom’s been real sick. I’ve been thinking a lot about that.”) Ramirez told this not to the Red Sox front office—which spent the winter trying, at his request, to trade him—but to the pitcher Julian Tavarez, about a week before the car show, in the course of explaining, by the bye, that he wouldn’t be joining the squad until March 1st. Tavarez, who was already in Fort Myers, mentioned it to a newscaster, and thus in a roundabout way the team’s manager, Terry Francona, came to understand that he’d be starting the Grapefruit League season without his cleanup batter. (Francona is not without a sense of humor—he said on ESPN, “If Manny has to urinate in the scoreboard every once in a while, we can live with that”—and he now refers to Tavarez as Ramirez’s publicist.) Then came word of radio commercials up north that were promising Ramirez’s personal appearance at a classic-cars event in Atlantic City (“TAKING SOX FOR A RIDE?” asked the Herald), and the Red Sox were put in the position of needing to confirm that their enigmatic star would be staying home with Mom.

Ramirez has bailed on commitments before. Near the end of his stint with the Cleveland Indians, in 2000, team officials stopped asking him to make public appearances altogether, since he predictably failed to turn up. (“I would have to stand around the clubhouse and wait, to make sure he didn’t duck out on me,” Abraham Allende, the team’s former director of community relations, says.) He was the M.V.P. of the 2004 World Series, which Boston won for the first time in eighty-six years, yet he neglected to accompany the team to Washington for the customary Presidential handshake.

I went to Atlantic City, just in case. The auction, billed as “America’s largest indoor collectible car event,” occupied twenty acres of floor space, or a little more than twice the area of Fenway Park, with a grandstand at one end and beer and popcorn venders lining the perimeter. In addition to the usual ’Cudas and Studebakers and DeVilles, the offerings included a limousine belonging to Donald Trump and the Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson’s 1987 Buick Grand National, with “Reggie 44” plates. (Reggie himself was on the premises, meeting and greeting.) A small crowd had gathered around a pin-striped Rolls-Royce signed by a hundred and fifty current and former New York Yankees. Vinny Caraccio, the Rolls owner, had brought “Red Sox Suck” and “Yankees Suck” T-shirts with him, in anticipation of Ramirez’s appearance. “I was dying for him to come here,” he said. “I wanted to take pictures with Manny—drape the shirts in front of us. I was going to ask him to drive it up. I hear he’s a character.”

Ramirez’s Lincoln—enormous, flat like a boat, painted Neptune blue and upholstered in ostrich—was parked directly across from the Rolls, unattended. “It’s received so many compliments,” Silberman, the promoter, said. “You might not even like that kind of car, but you can still admire what he did to it. He totally customized it. He’s got TVs in it. He’s got a computer in it. It’s just a tricked-out car.”

Ramirez paid ten thousand dollars for the Lincoln and, in 2004, took it to the shop of a hot-rod specialist whom he’d seen on the Discovery Channel. “This is a car you’re going to keep for the rest of your life—you’re not going to sell it,” he said at the time, adding that he intended to give the car to his father, Aristides, who is now sixty-nine, as a birthday gift. Now Ramirez was hoping to get two hundred thousand for it, and selling duty, in his absence, fell to a New Jersey-based Cadillac dealer named Tony Averso, who wore a Red Sox cap, a yellow oxford shirt, and jeans, and sucked on an unlit cigar.

Bidding on the car began—fierce at first, and then tapering off to a final offer of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, considerably short of Ramirez’s goal. No sale. Averso took a seat at his dealership’s booth, in the corner, and, despite the no-show, in effect wondered why the Red Sox and their fans find Ramirez so elusive. “This guy calls me up at least five times a week just to say hello,” he said. “He calls me up for Thanksgiving. Knows my wife’s Jewish—he called her up for Hanukkah. Around Christmas, I said, ‘You gain any weight?’ He says, ‘Yeah, a few pounds. Why don’t you come and run with me?’ He wants me to go down to his mother’s house and eat dinner when I go down to Florida. I mean, that’s the kind of guy he is. Manny would love just to come here and sit. He’d hang out with my group.”

“They say, ‘Manny being Manny,’ but we used to say, ‘That’s Manny,’ ” Steve Mandl, the baseball coach at George Washington High School, on Audubon Avenue at 193rd Street, said recently, as he stood sentry by the locker-room door before a midmorning gym class. “It wasn’t crazy stuff—it’s just that he didn’t really care about anything other than playing. Even team pictures—it wasn’t important to him. You had to drag him by the hair. But if you said we had a game at three o’clock he’d, like, want to sit out there at seven o’clock in the morning, waiting.” Mandl has been coaching at George Washington for twenty-four years, and his team has won its division title in each of the past twenty-three. While he talked, a properly officious-looking school administrator with a mustache accosted one of the current George Washington players in the hall and shouted threats about the consequences of cutting class. Mandl rolled his eyes; he was familiar with such displays. Ramirez was suspended periodically as a freshman for truancy, and did not graduate, although he attended enough classes to get through three seasons of varsity baseball as a center fielder and third baseman. (He later got his G.E.D.) His picture hangs only in Coach Mandl’s office, but he is at least as good a model of success as the alumni—Harry Belafonte, Alan Green-span, Henry Kissinger—whose framed portraits grace the entrance hall.

Onelcida Ramirez worked as a seamstress in a dress factory; Aristides drove a livery cab and fixed electronics. Manny and his three older sisters, Rosa, Evelyn, and Clara, lived in a sixth-floor walkup on 168th Street. They had no telephone. The neighborhood at the time was one of the city’s worst—only East New York, in Brooklyn, had more homicides in 1990. Every morning at five-thirty, Manny left the apartment to run up Snake Hill, behind the high school, with a rope tied around his waist attached to a spare tire that dragged on the pavement behind him. “He was the hardest worker I ever had,” Mandl said.

The baseball field at George Washington is oddly shaped, long in left and center fields, and short—about two hundred and eighty feet—in right, which is constrained by the downward slope of the Harlem River Valley. For Ramirez, who already displayed instinctive patience at the plate, this provided an added incentive to wait on pitches, see them longer, and drive them the opposite way, a rare habit among pros, let alone teen-agers. In his final year, the Hitman, as he came to be called, batted .643.

Ramirez was extremely shy, and never asked his family to come watch him play. His first year away from home, in the minors, he borrowed a phone card belonging to Mel Zitter, who had coached him in the summer and on weekends in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and ran up an eight-hundred-dollar tab in a month. (Now, as a millionaire, he worries about the cost of talking on the phone for longer than a minute at a time.) He didn’t fully grasp that he had a future as a professional baseball player until 1993, when he reached class AA, in Canton, Ohio. That year, he also met his future publicist Tavarez, a fellow-Dominican who, as it happened, shared his love for the internal-combustion engine. As big-league rookies, they asked the newspaper reporter Sheldon Ocker if they could borrow sixty thousand dollars. “We were in Kansas City,” Ocker recalls. “I reached into my pocket, and I’m, like, ‘I don’t have that much.’ Manny says, ‘How about thirty thousand?’ Each of them wanted to buy a Harley.” Abraham Allende, who at the time went by the Anglicized name Allen Davis, was put in charge of tutoring the two pals in English. Tavarez became a dedicated student; Ramirez played hooky. Allende referred to them as his good son and his bad son. They referred to each other as Rambo. For years afterward, Ramirez raided his teammates’ lockers, borrowing their bats and clothes—even their underwear—for luck. The baggy-uniform look, now popular across the league, can be traced to his swiping the pants of Dan Williams, a bullpen catcher in Cleveland, who outweighed him by at least fifty pounds.