He’s the Manny

BOSTON -- He once took a bathroom break inside Fenway Park’s left field scoreboard during a pitching change. Another time he inexplicably dived across the grass to cut off a throw from another outfielder who stood only a few feet away.

And he reportedly has sought more trades than a stockbroker working on commission.

Manny Ramirez has done so many bizarre, goofy things, the citizens of Red Sox Nation have adopted a slogan to define, if not explain, his behavior: It’s just Manny being Manny.

Ramirez’s teammates have a different meaning for that saying, however. To them, Manny being Manny describes how Ramirez arrives at the stadium more than nine hours before night games for the first of three daily workouts. It means performing two sets of daily vision-training exercises so difficult, no one else on the Red Sox will even try them. And it includes taking young players under his wing and inviting them to the batting cage to talk hitting for hours on end.

“Everybody thinks he’s this weird guy that is on his own program,” teammate Eric Hinske said. “But really he just comes in and works. That’s it. He’s a normal guy to me.”

Well, that might be stretching it a bit. Normal guys, after all, don’t hit 33 or more home runs in nine consecutive seasons. Or drive in at least 122 runs six times. Or make 11 All-Star teams, win a batting title and compile a .313 lifetime average.

“He was very difficult to pitch against,” said teammate Tim Wakefield, who faced Ramirez 26 times when the outfielder played for Cleveland. “You couldn’t make a mistake, obviously.”

Still, with his long, graying dreadlocks, wide variety of pregame head scarves and unpredictable on-field behavior, Ramirez comes across as something of an idiot savant. But Dave Page, the Red Sox’s strength and conditioning coach, knows better.

“He works extremely hard,” said Page, who worked with the Arizona Diamondbacks before joining the Red Sox. “I’ve had a lot of guys that worked hard. Randy [Johnson] and Brandon Webb and [Josh] Beckett. But he’s definitely the most consistent and the most comprehensive at what he does.”

Page had undoubtedly heard the stories about Ramirez taking his position with a bottle of water in his back pocket. Or while listening to an MP3 player. And how about the time he got pulled over by Cleveland police, received a ticket, then climbed back into his car and pulled an illegal U-turn right in front of the same officer?

But in his time in Boston, Page has seen nothing but single-minded focus. How else could Ramirez miss 24 games because of a strained oblique, then return to bat .389 in the season’s final six games and single in his first playoff at-bat?

“He’s . . . the most loyal-to-a-routine guy I’ve ever seen. Physically, his mental preparation. Vision training. It’s all laid out for him every day. It’s pretty impressive,” Page said.

Part of that preparation includes two exercises he added to his routine three years ago. In one, which Ramirez does a half-hour before every game, Page takes a ring with four colored balls attached and throws it toward Ramirez from about 15 feet away. When the ring is about halfway there, Page calls out the color of the ball he wants Ramirez to grab.

“He’ll hit 12 out of 12 right,” Page said. “It’s funny because the other guys will just shake their heads and walk away.”

In the other exercise, Page stands a short distance away and chucks small balls toward him at high speed as Ramirez swings his arm like a bat, catching the balls in his hand.

“It’s ridiculous,” Page says of Ramirez’s hand-eye coordination.

But then you could say the same thing about the time Ramirez and teammate Julian Tavarez, then with the Indians, approached a pair of sportswriters and asked if they could borrow $10,000. Each. Turns out they wanted to buy a couple of motorcycles.

Ramirez doesn’t talk to sportswriters anymore -- to borrow money or otherwise. And that, Page said, probably has a lot to do with the way he’s perceived. Not that any of that bothers him.

“I don’t think he reads the paper. I think he’s more concerned with what his teammates think of him,” Page said.

In that case, he has nothing to worry about.

“He’s obviously a very gifted player,” Hinske said. “But he works at it, that’s the thing. He gets here early, then he goes back home and lifts and then he comes back and hits again. It’s pretty neat to watch. He’ll hit in the cage forever. And he’s going to be a Hall of Famer for it.

“[But] he’s a great teammate too. He’s always telling you, if you’re not doing well, ‘Hey, don’t worry about it. You’ll turn it around.’ So he’s a good dude on top of it.”

kevin.baxter@latimes.com