In Part 1 of ESPN The Magazine's March 5 cover story, writer Dan Le Batard explains Manny Ramirez -- a much simpler task than you might imagine. Contrary to Cleveland GM John Hart's contention, he's not about the money. Click here for Part 2.

The $160 million child still lives in a $700-a-month apartment. Still drives a 1996 Impala. Still flies coach. Even now, Manny Ramirez shops for the lowest price when buying car rims, airplane tickets, even flowers for his mother, because he remembers what it was like to grow up sharing a single bed with three siblings.

Baseball has forever extracted the $160 million child from the poverty, but it can't ever extract the poverty from the $160 million child, and that's why the enormous, sparkling rock now embedded in Ramirez's left earlobe is such a spectacularly cheap fake.

"Bought it in a mall," Ramirez says, without a trace of shame. "Forty dollars."

Baseball may be about to shatter like Mike Piazza's bat, sawed off by outrageous contracts offered to players who can help them by owners who can't help themselves. And Ramirez's contract is a prime example. Cleveland initially offered him $75 million, then inflated its offer in less than one year to $160 million, and it still wasn't enough to keep his bat from going to Boston for the kind of dollars Ramirez didn't really need, can't ever spend and certainly doesn't understand.

Days before signing one of the most colossal contracts in sports history, Ramirez went shopping for a home, perused a $2 million model and asked his agent in all seriousness, "Can I afford this?" His agent replied, in all seriousness, that Ramirez could afford the whole damn neighborhood.

In many ways, from his careless innocence to his shy humility, Ramirez remains that poor child who grew up in the Dominican Republic. The child who was breast-fed until he was almost 4 because milk in his neighborhood was either harmful or nonexistent. The child whose fatigued father thought about jumping to his death while delirious from fixing roofs in summer heat. The child whose mother, after moving to New York's Washington Heights, worked for $200 a week in a sewing factory.

Ramirez, 28, describes himself as "a child, not an adult," and weaves absentmindedly along life's roads the same way he used to drive around the streets near Jacobs Field, where he was once cited for driving without a license, without proper plates, with illegally tinted windows and with the stereo turned up too loud ... whereupon the police officer discovered Ramirez had two Florida driver's licenses and two Social Security numbers. Then, after releasing him, the cop stopped and ticketed him again for immediately making an illegal U-turn.

So $160 million later, Ramirez doesn't need change. He has no maid, no valet, no gardener, no driver and no money-soaked ego, either. Asked to go shopping in South Florida's ritzy Bal Harbour, Ramirez laughs and declines, saying, "I'm not first-class. I'm not Alex Rodriguez."

Asked the best compliment he has ever received, Ramirez bypasses all of baseball's accolades and says he is forever flattered when someone is surprised by his humility. Ramirez vows never to buy even a million-dollar home, because he doesn't want to throw his wealth in anybody's face, and, besides, why live on an exclusive island with Gloria Estefan and Julio Iglesias if guards will just make family visits more difficult?

You know how Ramirez celebrated his monster contract? By vacationing in the Bahamas ... because the hotel-sponsored trip was free. He didn't gamble so much as a cent. "I'm a simple man," Ramirez says in Spanish, "of simple tastes."

Ramirez is ... what are the words the writers have used? Enigmatic? Moody? Confused? Albert Belle? No. No. No. No. Those are all so very wrong. Can that much really be lost in the translation from Spanish to English? Insecure about his accent and afraid to sound stupid in English, Ramirez didn't do many interviews during his eight years in Cleveland. This didn't make him moody. What it made him was silent. And scared. And as anonymous as one of the game's top five hitters can ever be. Cleveland's Plain Dealer wrote that "reading Ramirez is like trying to read tea leaves," and Sports Illustrated wrote he is "tougher to read than Sanskrit." Well, yeah, he's tough to read, but only if you are not literate in the language he uses to tell his story. Otherwise, from the X-Men tattoo on his right arm to the Crayola hair dye to the way he responds "I love you more" when his mother says "I love you," Ramirez is no more difficult to read than a children's book.

"I'm the invisible man," Ramirez says in Spanish. "Not moody, just shy. If I go to a club, I hide in the corner. I don't need to be a VIP with Dom Perignon. I don't want people to treat me a certain way for who I am. I want people to treat me a certain way for how I am."

The word Ramirez chooses to describe himself is "simple," and it's as accurate as any. He's as happy watching one of his Spanish soap operas as he is in the batter's box. One of Ramirez's four sisters, Clara, describes him as "timid, quiet and closed" until he gets to know someone -- just like the rest of the family. Sure, Ramirez can be as oblivious in the real world as he sometimes is on those basepaths, staggering from station to station looking so wide-eyed and dizzy that the Indians once tested him for attention deficit disorder. But he is every bit as genuine as his $40 earring is counterfeit, and his unadorned, uncomplicated view of the world makes you wonder if he's the one with life's road map in his hands while the rest of us are stumbling around lost.

Ramirez doesn't study pitchers. He doesn't even know most of their names. He doesn't listen to scouting reports or ask teammates what somebody is throwing or pay attention in the on-deck circle. He figures pitchers should worry about him, not the other way around.

Is he concerned about Boston's history of losing? Ramirez says he knows nothing of Boston's history, period. Yaz? What's that? Ask him how many home runs he had three years ago (45) or how many RBI he had two years ago (165), and he says he has no idea, adding he doesn't play for numbers. Ramirez's approach to the game is one baseball people refer to as no-brain/no-headaches. Both his swing and his attitude are free of tension. Ramirez didn't pick up a bat this off-season, not even once.

"I don't like too many things in my head," he says. "I don't care who is pitching. All I need to see is the ball. My mind is always clean. Empty, empty, empty." About being tested for ADD, Ramirez says, "If I was distracted, how did I put up these numbers? Better to stay distracted if I'm going to put up these numbers."

None of this is to suggest Ramirez doesn't work hard. In high school, six days a week, he would run with a tire tied to his waist at 5 a.m. through Washington Heights, a neighborhood his coach described as murderous and crack-addled. This winter, at 6 a.m. every day, Ramirez ran on the beach for miles, then up and down six flights of stairs with a friend on his heels screaming, calling him names and imploring, "¡Vamos! ¡Vamos!" Then he would begin his real workout.

Ramirez routinely shows up six hours early for games, even after spending the morning lifting weights. He reported to spring training early, with pitchers and catchers, and will live throughout the spring with the minor leaguers to reduce expenses and distractions. One of Ramirez's sisters handles his finances, everything from paying his bills to signing his checks, which allows him to remove the clutter from his life and compress his world so much that it becomes scarcely bigger than that baseball.

Asked if he is worried about guaranteeing so much money to a player who spends so little time thinking, Boston GM Dan Duquette says, "He's one of the 10 most productive hitters in history. His best years are ahead of him. Combine slugging and on-base percentage, and only names like Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Lou Gehrig are ahead of him. He's ahead of Mark McGwire and Mike Piazza. He's the most patient hitter in the league and the top RBI man in the business ... "

Yeah, Dan, but isn't it dangerous giving $160 million to someone so childlike ...

"He's as smart as anyone in the game when he's in the batter's box," Duquette says. "You know what Manny knows? He knows what he can hit. He knows to lay off everything else. He knows himself."

Yeah, Dan, but ...

"Let me ask you something: You think Babe Ruth would have passed those mental tests?"

Click here for Part 2, in which Manny explains why he left the Tribe in a world of hurt.

This article appears in the March 5 issue of ESPN The Magazine.