Papelbon: Manny Was A Cancer

From the AP: Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon compared former teammate Manny Ramirez to cancer, saying Boston made the right decision when it traded the slugging left fielder to the Los Angeles Dodgers last summer. "He was on a different train! And you saw what happened with that. We got rid of him, and we moved on without him," Papelbon was quoted in the April issue of Esquire. The story was posted on the magazine's Web site Thursday. "So Manny was tough for us," Papelbon added. "You have somebody like him, you know at any point in the ballgame, he can dictate the outcome of the game. And for him not to be on the same page as the rest of the team was a killer, man! It just takes one guy to bring an entire team down, and that's exactly what was happening." "Once we saw that, we weren't afraid to get rid of him. It's like cancer. That's what he was. Cancer. He had to go. It sucked, but that was the only scenario that was g...