Here's Fox Sports Ken Rosenthal during his weekly phone convo with WEEI's Dale and Holley program, with Rosenthal dousing some more water on any possible trade scenarios involving Manny Ramirez given the short time frame and the need to replace Manny's bat in the Sox lineup.

There's a good chance that Ramirez will be wearing different laundry next season, but Manny Being Manny should have at least a few more months left in a baseball theater near you.

What are the Red Sox going to do with Manny Ramirez?
KR: Ultimately, they keep him. I don’t see a taker. I don’t see how they can make this work and – as we’ve seen the last two nights – he remains a very valuable part of the lineup. You can talk about the Mets, the Phillies and the Diamondbacks all you want, but I haven’t even gotten a hint of enthusiasm about a Manny trade. So they can say they tried, but barring something unforeseen a trade isn’t likely.

One interesting thing that comes into play with this is Manny’s reputation. We’ve always thought rather cynically that if you can hit the baseball, well then reputation doesn’t matter does it?
KR: It matters enough that the Red Sox are looking to trade him in the middle of a pennant race, so I think the answer is yes. I think in certain circumstances you could see how they could say ‘okay, if Manny’s price for waiving his no-trade clause is getting rid of the team options’, then you would get a highly motivated player for two months.

But even if you meet the Red Sox price, they’re still going to want quality in return for what amounts to a rental. It’s a difficult scenario. While it’s not impossible for a team to look at this and say this is going to work, it’s going to be challenge.

I don’t ever want to lock myself in on these things because we all know at baseball trade deadline time that crazy stuff happens all the time. But based on what I’m hearing and based on everything else, it sure doesn’t seem like it.

You shot down the Miguel Tejada on foxsports.com and it also seems that the Pittsburgh Post Gazette is linking Jack Wilson to Boston. It seems that Boston is in the market for a shortstop, but could be there be a possibility that a team like Baltimore could be in the market for a shortstop in exchange for a pitcher like George Sherrill?
KR: They certainly would like at that. One of the things that the Orioles might look at, and if this sounds weird it’s because it is weird, is trading within the division. George Sherrill would be on the Red Sox for the next three years, but if you believed that Jed Lowrie was your next shortstop and you believed that Jed Lowrie was better than anything that you had – and there are a lot of people around baseball that don’t think Jed Lowrie is going to be a starting everyday shortstop – they’d be obligated to looking at it. But they’ve got so much money already committed to that position that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to go after a guy making relatively big money at shortstop like Jack Wilson.

And the Miguel Tejada thing is just absurd.

Obviously over the next 48 hours you’re going to hear a lot of bad stuff out there and I hope I’m not going to be writing much of it. But [the Tejada] one I just don’t see.

You mentioned trading Manny Ramirez in a pennant race. How sincere have the Sox efforts been to trade him, because you would think if you were trying to trade a player for three or four years that they would have found somebody to deal with.
KR: At times it’s been more sincere and at times it’s been less sincere. This time it is sincere. I think they’ve all had it.

Obviously I was up there this weekend and I really got a sense of it because there is exasperation with Manny and his difficulties in every corner of that organization. They would like to do it, but the question of whether they can do it is the story.

And whether they can do it and still become the same type of team they want to be in the short term is really problematic. You can make the argument that if Manny banging out on you every third week or whatever, and you can find someone that is lesser but someone you can out on. I understand that, but I still see this as being a really difficult call.

There are different levels of exasperation, but are the Red Sox at the point where they would say ‘just give us anything for Manny Ramirez because we want him gone.’?
KR: No because the Red Sox are smart, they want value for their player and they’re not going to give him away. That’s not the way they operate. You don’t always make the smart decision because this is baseball and you’re going to make mistakes, but they’re not going to go into an irrational mode.

So I’m sure the wheels are spinning and there is the one scenario I mentioned yesterday which is far-fetched and most likely not going to happen, but I guarantee it’s something that they’ve thought about: you send Manny somewhere, get Mark Teixeira and you move Youk out to left and you have a lesser team. So there are ways to do it, but that would be making two blockbusters in the span of two days and it would involve a difficult position change for Youkilis. That’s a lot to ask.

Will Theo Epstein and the Red Sox make some sort of move?
KR: They’re certainly trying and they’ve trying to get a veteran reliever for some time now. It doesn’t really matter whether they’re right-handed or left-handed at this point, and there are guys out there.

At the same time they’re mindful of what happened last year with Gagne, and maybe they’re a little too mindful in some ways. Because you’ve got to keep throwing things out there to make your team as good as possible. That experience definitely formed their way of thinking, which is to not pay too much for a reliever because those kinds of guys are just too volatile and not always worth the investment. At the same time, you look at the bullpen and they need some help.

I want to talk about a guy that the Red Sox will probably never be interested in trading: Jon Lester. His record is 20-5 and he’s already beaten cancer. Has he very quietly and under the radar become one of the best left-handers in baseball?
KR: Yes. I don’t think there’s any question about that. I was talking to a scout yesterday and his feeling was that Jon Lester is a legitimate No. 2 starter. And we’ve seen that really evolve over the season, and it makes their rotation all the more impressive when you have Beckett, Matsuzaka and Jon Lester as three very formidable starting pitchers to go with Wakefield and now Clay Buchholz.

So, everything we’re seeing from Jon Lester is positive and he is a guy that is growing and evolving and coming into the pitcher that he is going to be. The one thing that we talked about going into this season with Jon Lester was him becoming more of a presence on the mound and gaining confidence. John Farrell talked a lot about that and it really seems to be coming together. It’s poise that allows the young guy to come into his own, and that’s a part of baseball that to me is really exciting.

Is there any catching help out there that the Red Sox could get to help ease pressure off Jason Varitek?
KR: To find a guy that would help you in the short term that’s difficult. Gerald Laird is out there, but it would probably cost you a young pitcher like Michael Bowden and I doubt the Red Sox would want to do that.
But young catching is something in general that they’ve been looking into for quite some time, but the problem is that in the minor leagues right now there aren’t a lot of good catchers. In fact the Cleveland Indians just got one in the Casey Blake trade, but they had to pay for him.

They sent the Dodgers all of the money remaining on Blake’s salary – about $2 million – but they got this catcher from A ball [Carlos Santana] that’s very highly regarded.

So, yeah, they’ve been looking but I don’t think it’s been a very fruitful search. But it’s something they would like to address, but they claim that some of their own guys in the minor leagues are better than people think.