Finally, someone who was part of the 2004 anything-is-possible Boston Red Sox championship team has been caught by the MLB and handed a drug suspension. It was a big name too: Manny Ramirez.
Poor Manny. If it wasn’t bad enough that he was caught using a PED, he was caught using a female fertility drug, hCG, that boosts your testosterone. I have no idea how chemistry works, but shouldn’t male fertility drugs be the ones giving you the testosterone?
He predictably denied taking any performance enhancer, since that’s the thing to do now-a-days. So despite having whatever chemical in his blood, he has to deny it to try to maintain reputation.
Even poorer Manny, because of his miss-step, he will now lose over $7.6 million in salary this season. My big question about that is where the hell does it go? Do the Dodgers keep it? Does the league take the entire multi-million dollar figure? If so, will it be dispersed in profit sharing? When the kids in AA ball get suspended, they amount the poor guys lose pales severely in comparison to that of Manny’s. So who’s getting the big bonus?
Now, the first thing I thought about as soon as I saw the news plastered across the front page of ESPN.com at roughly 12 p.m. was, ‘How long will it take Bill Simmons to get a column done.'” It’s true — ask the Intern — that was exactly what I said. The answer, as it turns out, is that it takes Simmons about four and a half hours to pen a column about how confused he is now about his man love for Man-Ram.
I had every intention of getting into what implication this “outing” of Manny will have on how we perceive the Red Sox and their championship team(s) now, but Simmons, I think, did a better job than I could. Although, his writing makes his kid sound like he’ll be the smartest and most coherent kid, sports-wise, ever. I might have gone a tad heavy on that.
Besides, I would have proclaimed the floodgates were open a bit more aggressively. But, seriously, have you seen Big Papi’s numbers recently? It’s like he’s a corpse out there. How can we really believe he wasn’t on anything after going from 11 HRs to 40+ and now back to nothing in such a short period of time? It looks like Boston might finally have been outed, like the rest of the league was a while ago.
On the bright side, the day that I lost Manny Ramirez from my fantasy baseball team’s roster for the next near two-month period, I learned that A-Rod would be back in the Yankees (and my) lineup tonight. So, at least my hitting numbers won’t slump too much.