Manny Ramirez flunked a drug test because of meds he got from a Florida doctor. Ramirez isn’t providing any more info, so we’re all free to speculate on the nature of his “personal health issue.”
I’m going to go ahead and rule out dandruff.
From what drug experts say about HCG, the banned drug Ramirez used, there’s a good chance Manny used the stuff to boost his flagging testosterone production and head off embarrassing side effects.
So it wasn’t Manny being Manny, it was Manny not wanting to be Franny.
Let’s take a wild swing and speculate that Ramirez took the HCG to deal with the negative side effects of steroids. If so, Manny will no longer be known as simply a great hitter and fun-loving clubhouse guy who, by the way, quit on his team and roughed up an elderly team employee.
He will be asterisked forever.
And he won’t be alone. As Ramirez sinks into the quagmire, he’ll have a lot of company. The slimelight will shine on Manny and many.
— The Red Sox and their fans. Boston fans are smug, in that Sox-fan way, because the man they grew to hate and resent is now singled out as a cheat, a plague to someone else’s house.
However, fans, don’t forget that Ramirez helped your little club win two world championships, so feel free to embroider big asterisks on the Red Sox 2004 and ‘07 World Series banners.
We have no idea when Ramirez started artificially boosting his performance, if that’s what he did, but we do know from the case of Alex Rodriguez that we shouldn’t limit our speculation.
In ‘04 the Red Sox pulled off one of the great postseason runs in history, sweeping the Yankees after being down 0-3 in the ALCS, then sweeping the Cardinals in the Series, Boston’s first World Series championship since 1918.
How did Manny contribute? He hit .412 in the Series and was the MVP.
The Red Sox won it all again in ‘07, over the Rockies. Ramirez batted only .250 in that Series, but in the seven-game ALCS battle against Cleveland, Manny hit a robust, juicy .409, with 10 RBI.
We can’t make the Red Sox give back those championships. Even if we could, it would be awkward forfeiting the Sox’s ‘04 ALCS victory and giving it to the Yankees, whose third baseman was Alex Rodriguez.
— If Cardinals fans cry foul, they can be reminded that the Cards once harbored and adored Mark McGwire, and that the club’s manager once won a World Series in another city (Oakland) with a big boost from a clubhouse full of steroids.
— Ramirez’s agent is the irrepressible Scott Boras, and let’s just say Boras has had a run of poor luck. Along with Ramirez, Boras’ client list, present and past, includes Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield, Rick Ankiel, Eric Gagne and Ivan Rodriguez.
For all the money Boras and his clients haul in, is there no room in the budget for some in-house client testing, maybe even some polygraph action? An agent can’t run a police state, but he should be aware that along with the big rewards, there are big responsibilities.
Or maybe things like integrity, character and role modeling for zillions of kids are overrated concepts.
— Bud Selig might try to convince us that Ramirez’s fall is proof of how well the testing system is working. But is it? A-Rod was busted not by baseball’s testing, but by a reporter. Ramirez, assuming he did steroids, wasn’t caught using steroids. For all we know he juiced for years, undetected.
Victor Conte of BALCO fame (or infamy), who now is working to drive steroids out of sports, calls baseball’s drug testing “a joke.”
Who comes out smelling good? The San Francisco Giants. Imagine if they had caved in to the pleading of key advisers like this writer to court and sign Ramirez this spring. On the heels of the Bonds debacle and all the BALCO stuff, Manny’s suspension would have sealed the case against the Giants. They would have been thrown out — or laughed out — of baseball.
The Dodgers are in good shape. They have a lead in the division, and when Ramirez comes back they will have 83 games left. If they win the West, legally the Dodgers get to keep all the hardware, but we’d better not hear any bragging from the fans down south, nor any chest-thumping from Dodgers players about the adversity they had to overcome because of Manny’s long time out.
In the end, nearly everyone’s a loser.
E-mail Scott Ostler at sostler@sfchronicle.com.
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