He may not be heading back to Boston, where he enjoyed the heyday of his career, but Manny Ramirez is headed to a Sox team. Reports are he’ll be joining the Chicago White Sox for the remainder of the season in a hired gun role, it’s just too bad that the Sox are on the verge on falling out of the playoff race just like the Dodgers are.

It’s actually kind of sad that Ramirez, one of the greatest sluggers of his time, is now being passed around like a champagne bottle on New Year’s Eve. He has been on the DL three times this season and it’s clear that he has lost most of his power game. He has hit only eight home runs this season in 66 games. In comparison, two seasons ago, he hit 17 HRs in 53 games after his move to L.A.

You could blame his rash of injuries this season and the disappointing numbers on the fact he was busted for PEDs last year, but there’s no way we can say that for sure.

If anything, it will be interesting to see how Manny Ramirez and Ozzie Guillen get along. Now, that would be worth the $4 million he’s being paid for the remainder of the year.

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You have to feel bad for the Washington Nationals. The land a prized phenom of a pitcher, pay him some big dough, handle him with kid gloves, he electrifies the fan base and now he’s hurt.

Yes, it is “probable” that Stephen Strasburg is going to need Tommy John ligament replacement surgery. He reportedly has a significant tear in his ulnar collateral ligament, not just a strained forearm tendon like originally thought.

Could this have happened at a worse time for the Nationals? They’re finally beginning to turn their team around based on their youth. They drafted another phenom, the amazing Bryce Harper, and have a solid core coming together. They were even sitting around .500 for the longest I can remember since their move from Montreal.

So now, it looks like it’ll be another year before Strasburg is back on the hill. I hope for the sanity of Nationals fans, this team doesn’t fall apart in the off-season and undo all the good they’ve built.

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Are you worried about a guy you want to draft in your fantasy league, but his team has looked like garbage so far? Don’t. I can’t state it any simpler. There’s just no reason to look at the pre-season as any sort of measure of how a team or player will do when the games start meaning something.

Look at the perennially great Colts. So far they’re 0-2 this pre-season. In the past four pre-seasons, they’ve gone a total of 4-13. In the regular season, they’ve gone 51-13 in that span. And that total includes the games they routinely take off in the last two weeks.

Want a better example of why the pre-season should never be used to judge real performances? Remember in 2008 when the Detroit Lions made infamous history by going 0-16? Well, in the 2008 pre-season, they were 4-0 and allowed only 32 points. In the regular season, they allowed a league-high 517.

It’s very easy to forget that coaches and coordinators are never going to use fresh substitution packages, new playbooks, trick plays and dynamic ideas in the pre-season. Defences will always throw out vanilla schemes and simple blitz packages. Why waste your hard work on the other side’s scout team?

So, when you see Matt Leinart stink or Brett Favre get battered around, don’t look too much into as a sign of things to come. And remember that those supposed studs that put up huge numbers are doing so against the scout team and are likely to end up on their squad’s scout team as well.

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