In one of the cooler stories you’ll read this year in the “Manny Ramirez- related guerrilla ad campaign” realm, ESPN ad agency Ground Zero celebrated Manny’s trade to the Dodgers last Thursday by littering “nearly every Laundromat in Los Angeles county“with lost red socks.

Now even if Manny gets hurt tomorrow, the trade was completely worth it for L.A.

From ADFREAK:

Boston Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers last Thursday. ESPN agency Ground Zero quickly sprang into action, and by lunchtime Friday, “nearly every Laundromat in Los Angeles county had at least one ‘Lost Red Sock.’ “

Thankfully, it seems like the interns who delivered the socks stayed away from putting them in dryers with customers’ whites; we would have known if they did from the riots.

This is the just the latest strange marketing campaign from the ubiquitous Ground Zero group, who’ve previously scared the hell out of us with ESPN-themed eyeballs, and, in one that hit particular close to home, based an ad campaign around the idea of “a grubby sports fan calling himself ‘The Rick’ [who] muses about his sports memorabilia collection and his addiction to sports.”

No word yet on if they plan on celebrating Jason Bay’s arrival in Boston by shipping off hundreds of actual Pirates to the greater Pittsburgh area.