In an interview for the April edition of Esquire magazine, Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon said that Manny Ramirez was a “cancer” in Boston.

“… So Manny was tough for us. You have somebody like him, you know at any point in the ball game, he can dictate the outcome of the game,” Papelbon is quoted as saying in the interview with Esquire’s Chris Jones. “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 going to work. That was it for us. And after, you could feel it in the air in the clubhouse. We got Jason Bay — Johnny Ballgame, plays the game right, plays through broken knees, runs out every ground ball — and it was like a breath of fresh air, man! Awesome! No question.”

Papelbon said the team got rid of Ramirez when they realized he was becoming a distraction for the team.

“The beautiful thing about our team is, we don’t let anybody get above the team. He wasn’t on the same train as the rest of us,” Papelbon said in the article. “He was on a different train! And you saw what happened with that. We got rid of him, and we moved on without him. That comes from the manager, and it comes from guys like Jason Varitek and Tim Wakefield and David Ortiz. Nobody is ever going to be allowed to do that. Even a guy like me, just heading into my fourth year in the big leagues — if David Ortiz gets a little, you know — I’ll tell him what’s up! I’m not afraid to do that. I’m not afraid to put him in his place, because I think everybody needs that. And if somebody does it to me, I understand that. I most certainly understand that. Varitek tells me all the time, ‘Just shut up. Do what you’re supposed to do.’”

This shouldn’t surprise anyone – Papelbon is just saying what fans and the media already believed about Manny in the first place.

But let me play devil’s advocate for a second. If you’re Papelbon, why even say anything? I thought one of the unwritten rules in baseball is that whatever happens in the clubhouse, stays in the clubhouse? I know some players allow a little insight from time to time, but Papelbon comes off sounding like a showoff in this instance. The situation is done with – Manny is in L.A., so why dig up past issues? Papelbon is preaching that the Red Sox got rid of a major distraction, yet he just became one himself by shedding light on a subject that has been dead since Boston traded Ramirez.

Not that they will disagree with him, but I’d have to believe that some BoSox players will be less than thrilled to hear about Papelbon’s comments.