KISS MY FANNY, MANNY

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Baseball’s latest big thing has been suspended for 50 games as a result of testing positive for a banned substance. In this School For Scandal, the player is MANNY RAMIREZ of the Los Angeles Dodgers (formerly of the Boston Stinky Sox). Well, color me Surprised! And color the baseball club Black and Dodger Blue.

According to an Associated Press story:

The Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder was suspended by Major League Baseball for a drug violation, adding a further stamp to what will forever be known as the Steroids Era.

Ramirez said he did not take steroids and was given medication by a doctor that contained a banned substance. A person familiar with the details of the suspension said Ramirez used the female fertility drug HCG, or human chorionic gonadotropin. The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the banned substance wasn’t announced.

HCG is popular among steroid users because it can mitigate the side effects of ending a cycle of the drugs. The body may stop producing testosterone when users go off steroids, which can cause sperm counts to decrease and testicles to shrink.

Whoa! Too much information.

Naturally, the superstar slugger has an explanation. Any player worth his millions has an explanation. Un-manly Manny pleads physician error:

“Recently, I saw a physician for a personal health issue. He gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was OK to give me,” Ramirez said in a statement issued by the players’ union.

What “personal health issue” were you seeing the Doc about, Manny? Dryness of the vagina? Low egg count? You just couldn’t seem to develop a bun in the oven?

Hey there, Manny girl
There's another Manny deep inside

Manny wants to remind us of his supposedly clean past:

“I do want to say one other thing; I’ve taken and passed about 15 drug tests over the past five seasons.”

You know what that tells me, Manny? That tells me you simply got away with cheating for a minimum of five years. (Count your blessings and your millions and go away.) Besides that, you know you’ve been regularly using Human Growth Hormone (HGH) your entire career.

The smarter athletes (Manny isn’t in that category) will at least think twice about using steroids nowadays, but since there is no reliable testing method for HGH, all athletes can still use that performance enhancer with impunity. And I’d lay you 100 to 1 odds that nearly all of them do. I mean, what Serena Williams and that shehe on American Gladiators don’t gobble up, the rest of the sporting world does.

I generally prefer the American judicial approach of presuming innocence, but when it comes to today’s sports figures, you’ve got to be a real maroon not to assume that virtually all professional athletes are utilizing HGH (with the least ballsy of them still dabbling in steroids – the mother of all performance enhancers). Kurt Warner I trust. In my book, the rest are guilty until proven innocent. GUILTY! Thank you. That is all.

Barring any postponements, [Manny Ramirez] will be able to return to the Dodgers for the July 3 game at San Diego. Ramirez will lose $7,650,273 of his $25 million salary.

Oh, boo-hoo! Welcome to the economic recession, Manny.

Joe Torre, manager of the Los Angeles Scandal-Dodgers said:

“As tough as it is for us, it’s pretty tough for Manny, too,” Dodgers manager Joe Torre said. “I know he’s the one that did the wrong thing and nobody is trying to cover that up, but it’s still something that I know he’s sorry about.”

Oh, sure he is. He’s sorry he got caught. And I can hardly believe that Torre would utter even a single syllable in Manny’s defense. Say it ain’t so, Joe!

Joe Torre, I was never especially impressed with your managerial skills. I mean, seriously, who couldn’t have managed the New York Yankess, the Federal Reserve of Major League Baseball? One could have given a 16-year-old Hindu girl at the Academy For Wayward Youths in Dogbreath Falls, Minnesota, a pencil, a blank lineup card, and a Yankees player earnings list and she could have gotten the same good results managing the Pinstripes that you did. But I’ve always respected you as a person, Joe. Now, with these ill-advised words of support for your banned, chemically cheating cleanup hitter, my opinion of you, Joe, has dropped like the odds of the Dodgers winning the National League West division title.

To hell with sports! To hell with sports, I say!

“You can’t have arguably the greatest pitcher of our era, arguably the two greatest players of our era and now another very, very good player be under this cloud of suspicion and not feel like it has ruined it for everybody,” Atlanta star Chipper Jones said. “But what are you going to do? You can’t be born in a different era. It is the Steroid Era,” he said.

If that statement leads anyone to believe that Chipper Jones has always played clean, let me remind you that this is the same Chipper who cheated on his former wife and later married the Hooters chick he’d committed adultery with. Chipper couldn’t even keep his dipper clean, so I wouldn’t assume that a manchild who’d cheat on his wife wouldn’t also cheat on his sport. But there has not yet been produced any evidence nor even any allegation that Chipper’s a chemical cheat. So, in all fairness, we must assume that he is… GUILTY! Thank you. That is all.

But for the record, I will argue against Chipper when he implies that Roger Clemens was “arguaby the greatest pitcher of our era.” The greatest pitcher of the Steroid Era was Pedro Martinez, not Roger Clemens. Although Roger the Truth-Dodger is quite possibly the biggest jerk of the Steroid Era’s pitching mound.

For years I have said what I am about to write for the first time: What bothers me most about baseball’s Steroid Era is how the record book has been so completely corrupted. This is why baseball is no longer relevant. I despise the fact that a 12-year-old boy – we’ll call him Timmy – comparing the statistics of today’s chemical cheats with the numbers put up by baseball’s Old Schoolers would mistakenly come away with the perception that hitters like Reggie Jackson, Willie McCovey, and Harmon Killebrew were just OK. How is our imaginary little boy, Timmy, to comprehend the magnitude of artificial statistical difference between a Louisville Slugger and a Louisville Liar? Timmy, my boy, Mighty Casey was on steroids (and HGH).

How could any present or future Timmy look at Reggie Jackson’s measly 563 home runs (Barry Bonds has 199 more) and understand the quaking fear Stephen T. McCarthy experienced every time “The Straw That Stirs The Drink” stepped into the batter’s box against the L.A. Dodgers? I know you’ll never believe me now, Timmy, but because players cheated, the numbers lie! No opponent was more frightening with a bat in his hand than Reggie Jackson. It seemed that monster could hit a home run or three with every swing of the lumber. (The only other hitter who ever scared me as much was Darryl Strawberry, who I always watched with one eye closed and an expression of expected pain already written on my face.)

That’s what troubles me most about the Steroid Era: To future generations of baseball fans, the Old School Godzillas will statistically seem like they were pussycats.

Sometimes I like to speculate on what Ted Williams, the greatest hitter of all time, would have been like on steroids and/or HGH. Can you imagine that Sweet Swing juiced? Holy Peanuts and Cracker Jacks! Instead of being the last man who hit (or will ever again hit) .400 for a season, Williams would have been the first and only man to finish a year with an .809 average, and the only hitter to knock a baseball from Fenway Park to Tokyo.

Well, at least some of baseball’s many cheaters are finally being outted, but it’s too late to save my love for the professional game. Barry Bonds? Busted. Roger Clemens? Caught. Mark McGwire? Bashed. Hopefully Manny Ramirez will be remembered as nothing more than “that crybaby who played baseball in pajamas.” (Has anybody ever looked sloppier in a baseball uniform?)

Now if Major League Baseball could just develop a truly reliable HGH test and get the goods on Randy Johnson for using the banned substance Prima Donna, the sport might finally begin to heal.

Hank Aaron, he was the Real Deal, the true home run king, but these modern All-Star punky cheaters and those not yet outted have ruined the sport I loved most. When McGwire, Bonds, and Sammy Sosa (he of the steroids AND the corked bat) were putting every other pitch into the bleachers, I knew they were all juiced, so none of that mattered to me. They could even hit a home run against my team and I hardly cared. Fools were saying these King Kong home run hitters had saved the game, but in fact they were knocking the final nail into its coffin. And I was aware of that sad reality even as it was occurring. It’s time to bury the body.

With each year that passes, baseball’s all-time hit leader, Pete Weed, is smelling more and more like a rose. Someday, Major League Baseball may be forced to reinstate the excommunicated Pete Rose when he becomes the sport’s least ethically-challenged ambassador extant.

But with all this having been said, and now having arrived at the bottom of the 9th inning of this Blog Bit, I have just 4 and 5/7ths more words for Manny Ramirez:
“SCREW YOU, YOU LYING ASSHO..."

This song is for Manny; EVERYBODY sing:

Na - na - na – na!
Na - na - na – na!
Hey - hey-ey!
Goodbye!

~ Stephen T. McCarthy
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