Manny Ramirez: A Major League Phony

The Baseball Gods must be turning over in their graves.

Ruth. Gehrig. DiMaggio. Williams. Mantle.

All of them.

Baseball reached its lowest point yesterday, and we all should have seen it coming.

Call it the PED Tsunami—and it is coming to a stadium near you.

Now, Manny Ramirez marches to the beat of his own drum. We've known that for as long as we've known Manny Ramirez. But the picture became just a bit more clear yesterday.

Ramirez is disappointed that he let down the fans of Los Angeles, that "Mannywood" won't be coming around for a while. Not until July, at least.

Please allow me to translate that for you—Ramirez is disappointed that he got caught.

Ramirez has been babied ever since he starred at George Washington High School in Washington Heights, a rough-and-tumble neighborhood in the Bronx. According to numerous accounts, he has never given a dime back to the neighborhood that prepared him for the stardom he was to achieve over the next 17 years of his life.

By all published accounts, Ramirez has artificial testosterone in his blood. He also tested positive for HCG, which is a fertility drug. In fact, it's the same dope that noted juicer Jose Canseco got busted for trying to smuggle it into the United States from Mexico because he was trying to get his mojo back.

Now I'm not a doctor, but perhaps Manny's "personal issue" had to do with a set of empty testicles and a nonexistent sex drive, which could be attributed to previous use of steroids.

Again, this is all hearsay—but I'll chalk it up to a semi-educated guess.

And I will bring this point up again—Ramirez made it clear that he passed at least 15 drug tests in the last five years. That was his Rafael Palmeiro "finger-waving" moment.

But what about six years ago, which would put us in the year 2003?

The year that Alex Rodriguez and 103 other major league baseball players failed a drug test.

I suspect that there's a lot more to this story than meets the eye.