And the Manny-hate World Series tickets go to . . .

You’ll recall that last week the Los Angeles’ Times’ Steve Lopez offered up his World Series tickets to the person who wrote what he felt to be the best 50-word anti-Manny Ramirez statement. Well, he has a winner, and his name is Richard MacPhee, and he’s a firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service. His entry:

“Dear Manny. I am a firefighter for the USFS, I make $16 an hour. It’s hot, dirty, dangerous, with long hours. My body hurts all the time. It takes four years to make $170,000. My bonus, somebody telling me ‘Thanks for the hard work.’ You should try it some time.”

I take no issue with Mr. MacPhee getting the World Series tickets. And I certainly don’t disagree with the notion that he works his ass off, that he risks his life, that his job is hard, and that his body is tired and sore after spending his days protecting the lives and limbs of people who think it’s a good idea to build luxury houses in places that have suffered from raging forest fires for the past several hundred thousand years. It’s often thankless work that 99.9% of us could never and would never do, because we don’t have the friggin’ stones to drop from helicopters into the closest thing to Hell on Earth. Indeed, given that a World Series is not assured for L.A., I’d hope that Lopez would give Mr. MacPhee his NLCS tickets too, and if the Dodgers do make it past the Phillies, that someone would chip in to give him and other firefighters tickets to more than just Game 4.

That said, I have to agree with the Times’ Dodgers blogger Jon Weisman, who had this to say to Lopez via Twitter regarding his little contest: “I’m a fan of yours but you’re giving Manny too much power. He’s not bigger than the game but you’ve chosen to act like he is.”

One thing I left out in my little pro-con exercise below is the fact that the national media is almost certain to make a Dodgers’ World Series all about Manny. Which is a shame, because the Dodgers are a pretty balanced team with way more interesting stories than the overplayed Ramirez angle. If Lopez truly can’t stand Manny, you’d think he’d just ignore him rather than to play into that overhype even more.

But it’s too late for that. And while I don’t have any rooting interest in the NLCS, I’m tempted to pull for the Dodgers now so that Richard MacPhee can go to a game, even if I think the contest he won was rather misguided.