Ramirez only now realizes that the Dodgers didn’t give him number 69

LOS ANGELES, CA — Manny Ramirez looked at his uniform today and was stunned to realize that he’d been given the uniform number 99 instead of 69, which he had requested – and thought that he’d received – when he came over from Boston.

“I’m really pissed right now,” Ramirez said. “When I left Boston, I was mad at them, and mad at the league, so I requested 69, thinking that they’d really have to ’suck on it,’ if you know what I’m saying.

“Well, the folks here in L.A. told me that they would give me number 69, and then when they gave me the uniform, they said, ‘Here you go Manny, 69, just like you wanted.’ Well it turns out they’re liars too, just like the Red Sox and everyone else.”

The Dodgers confirmed that they did pull the simple ruse in order to avoid a major conflict with their new slugger.

“Listen, there was no way we were going to give him number 69,” said Dodgers GM Ned Colletti. “Joe Torre would never go for it. Bud Selig would never go for it. Our fans would never go for it. Even my wife would probably freak out over it, and she didn’t even watch our games until Manny got here. It just wasn’t going to happen. So we decided to just give him 99 and hope that he didn’t notice. You gotta admit, it worked for a pretty long time.”

Ramirez said that he’s felt pretty comfortable in his new duds, and that he is mentioning his frustration only so that everyone knows his initial desire was to have the number be 69 instead of 99.

“99 is an oddity, and that’s fine with me,” Ramirez said. “I would, of course, have preferred to have a thinly-veiled reference to mutual oral sex on my uniform, but I’ll take the number that’s merely an oddity just the same. I just don’t like being lied to, you know what I mean?”

Ramirez told SSNN that the thing that bothers him most is that he didn’t realize that the Dodgers had pulled a number switch on him until today.

“I mean, my head must really be in the clouds. How long have I been here for without realizing it? At least a week, right?”

It’s going to be tough for this sport to sweep any nations, but it’s still pretty frickin’ cool!