Manny Gets (meta)Physical ~ 23 April 2008
To start this baseball season Manny Ramirez traveled with the Boston Red Sox to Tokyo, Japan to initiate America’s National Pastime in the land of the rising sun. Immediately the announcers of the broadcasts that reached America’s shores at an obscene hour of the day went on and on about Manny and how good he looks and how crisp his play seems relative to other years. Now Manny normally receives heaps of attention for his abnormal tendencies. He’s off beat. His hair is strange and he’s inclined to take a walk about while in the outfield. His ability to hear his own internal drum with impeccable clarity and devotion to its cadence stems from the Mars in Cancer - Jupiter in Capricorn opposition. Venus also figures into this equation but the independence and disregard for following rules best fits that horoscopic pattern. An astrologer would not normally expect such behavior from a Mercury conjunction with a very tight Sun-Saturn conjunction. You’d think he’d be disciplined, rule following and devoted.
Actually he is disciplined, devoted and rule following. This year, despite and anger outburst and ejection from a game for arguing balls and strikes (referring back to the chart of the first games of the season, the Mars-Sun square perfectly plops onto Manny’s Venus-Mars-Jupiter and possibly Moon pattern), he’s had quite a start - the result of discipline and devotion to a spiritual practice. Leading the major leagues with 20 RBI’s at the time of writing, Manny’s 25 hits account for more than ten percent of the hits hammered by the league leading Boston Red Sox. His six home runs rank in the top echelon of baseball. With seven doubles and a triple, fourteen of his twenty-five hits have been for extra bases. By all standards, he’s off to a block buster start.
So what is it that inspired Manny to star this year with such fervor, warranting the glowing reviews of allegedly neutral network commentators? It would be too easy to note that Manny enjoyed a Jupiter return back in January a bit more than a month before the start of Spring Training. Astrologers would be quick to point out the opportunity cycle and that Jupiterian influences often inspire a refresh of belief systems. What really counts is what a person does with those transits. The discipline that Manny applied in the off season that became his Saturn-Sun foundation was a combination of yoga, a solid workout routine and absorption of the book, The Secret. Yes indeed, this ball player went outside the traditional box and made a huge adjustment of style and belief as one might expect with Jupiter quincunx Saturn-Sun.
While commentators fought laughter, one countered with the definitive proclamation that anything that’s positive and inspiring is exactly what an athlete requires. Finally a guy who didn’t have to snicker about a guy getting metaphysical and blowing it off as Manny just being Manny.
Interestingly, Jupiter symbolically reflects the process of stretching, expanding and reaching out. Saturn rules the bones. Is it time with Jupiter in Capricorn for ball players to publically acknowledge yoga and even the riskier self help concepts they apply? Why not? It’s about winning, right? If you can win with it, you can inspire others to engage in beneficial practices as well. You go, Manny. Show us all how to use Jupiter in a good way.