On Tuesday, SI.com reported that Ramirez, for at least the third time in four seasons, had asked to be traded. The report said he told club officials he was unhappy in Boston, especially with an off-field lack of privacy. The Red Sox will explore trading him before Sunday's deadline, but that will be tough, Lucchino said. "Because of the size of his contract, obviously, it's hard," he said. "There aren't a lot of clubs that are going to be interested, but it depends how little you're willing to take in return with respect to trades. I'm not talking about Manny specifically, although it certainly applies to him." A club might want to make a deal if it asks the Red Sox to pay 95 percent of Ramirez's salary, "but that's not a particularly intelligent thing for us to do," Lucchino said.

It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has "manipulate[d]" and "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war -- and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller's credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an "unnamed government official"). Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.