TOKUSHIMA – Former major league superstar Manny Ramirez hit his first home run for the Kochi Fighting Dogs on Wednesday in his team’s 3-2 defeat to the Tokushima Indigo Socks in the independent Shikoku Island League.
Ramirez batted cleanup as the designated hitter and hit a solo shot at his first at-bat in the second inning, going deep for the first time in 11 games for Kochi.
In the majors, Ramirez was a 12-time all-star. He led the American League in RBIs in 1999, in batting average in 2002 and home runs in 2004. But he also played to the beat of a different drummer and his idiosyncrasies earned their own name, “Manny being Manny.”
He also received a 100-game suspension for using performance enhancing drugs, although that length was later cut in half by Major League Baseball and has been served.
His last major league affiliation was with the Chicago Cubs, who named him as a hitting consultant in 2015.
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