I was away from my computer when the Manny Ramirez news broke but have spent the past hour trying to get up to speed.

First reaction: Manny is a clown, but I love watching the guy play, so I was saddened to hear that he, too, has been implicated for performance enhancing drugs. He gets hit with a 50-game suspension and blames the doctor for prescribing a drug reported to be HCG, which is prescribed to stimulate female fertility and testosterone production in men.

I don’t blame people for being so sick of these PED stories in baseball. But these are pivotal moments in the game’s storied and at times, shameful, history.

For all his flaws, Ramirez has been a great character in the baseball theater. I know the stories from Boston about how he basically tanked it after contract talks broke down, and I was jaded when I watched those first awesome weeks he had with the Dodgers last season. But by October, I was back to just marveling at the guy as a hitter.

I enjoyed seeing Manny and agent Scott Boras get humbled through the free agency process, as the Dodgers never budged from their offer, and Manny basically had to go crawling back.

This season, I’ve found myself coming home from Twins games and watching the Dodgers again. I’d probably watch no matter who was playing, just to hear Vin Scully, but there’s something captivating to me about watching Ramirez hit. Yes, he looks like a cartoon character, but his plate coverage is extraordinary, and you feel like he’s in complete control, even when there’s two strikes.

Anyway, with all the clouds hanging over A-Rod, Clemens, Bonds, McGwire and Co., it’s just another sad day for baseball.

Interesting reading: On their “Circling the Bases” blog over at NBCSports.com, Craig Calcaterra and Aaron Gleeman had two interesting takes. Calcaterra explains why the Ramirez news is actually good for baseball:

Though I fully expect that we’ll see a week’s worth of over-the-top hyperbole about how the game is shamed and sullied and what have you, on one level this is a good thing, isn’t it? It’s a validation of the testing system. It represents something close to instant justice in that the suspension starts tonight, rather than be subject to litigation and appeals and high drama.

It’s proof that the new PED regime is not, as some have suggested, geared towards catching poor Dominican minor leaguers taking decidedly non-designer ‘roids. If Manny Ramirez, one of the biggest stars in the game, can be caught, anyone can. In light of this, doesn’t this news, in its own perverse way, give us greater confidence about the current state of drugs in baseball?

Meanwhile, Gleeman quantified the impact losing Ramirez could have on the red-hot Dodgers:

Ramirez has hit .380 with a .490 on-base percentage, .710 slugging percentage, 23 homers, and 73 RBIs in 80 games since joining the Dodgers last season. Obviously keeping up that type of torrid pace is extremely difficult, but if we assume for a moment that Ramirez would have continued to hit like that during the 50 games he’ll be suspended it would have been worth 25-30 runs more than a replacement-level hitter.

The “replacement-level hitter” tag is important, because Ramirez’s primary fill-in is expected to be Juan Pierre and his .291/.332/.345 line in 1,168 plate appearances since joining the Dodgers two years ago is almost exactly replacement level.

… Fortunately for the Dodgers they’ve already built up a 6.5-game lead over the Giants and an 8.5-game lead over the Diamondbacks, Rockies, and Padres in an NL West division filled with some very flawed teams.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Around MLB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.