The Return.

There's a jazz tune from New Orleans, that I'm quite fond of, called No, It Ain't My Fault. The lyric (at least the way I've heard it in the past) is pretty simple:

Nooooooooo, it ain't my fault.
Nooooooooo, it ain't my fault.
Nooooooooo, it ain't my fault.
My fault, my fault, it ain't my fault.

Depending on the severity of the situation, it may not be the most mature approach to resolving an issue, but who doesn't want to just pass the buck occasionally?

The answer is, apparently, Manny Ramirez. On his return visit to Boston this summer, Manny is rejecting the Let the good times roll (I'm not going to attempt the French spelling) attitude and instead issuing a mea culpa for the way he behaved in 2008.

The interesting thing might be (I'm not sure about this, I really do my best to avoid them) that for the first time since Manny came to Boston, the media might not have a vendetta against him. A fat lot of good it does him now. At least we'll likely be spared incredibly offensive, uncomfortable, jackass-ish, jokes from Tom Caron. When the Dodgers were in town, Caron repeatedly (two or three times in the same broadcast) joked along the lines of: You're Manny is so dumb, he doesn't even recognize that he's in Fenway. Ha ha ha! Wait. That's not funny. [Aside: Don't get me started on NESN and the crappy product they regularly put out--Seriously? You can't time a commercial break?--but Tom Caron genuinely pissed me off with those comments. I don't remember the last time I watched a pre/post game show.]

In the end, though, I don't think that it matters too much one way or the other; not because there's no actual apology there or because I doubt his sincerity. I just don't think that the crowd has much energy left to devote a lot of it to reacting to Manny. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe my irrelevant assessment from June was off-track but even as a die-hard Manny defender, his return gets a meh from me.