Say It Ain't So, Manny

Among all my era's great hitters, Manny Ramirez always seemed the least likely to be doping. I hate the vaguely racist "idiot savant" explanation of his feats, but what he does at the plate is so serendipitously natural, as though batting were goofy second-nature -- "I don't know how I do it. I just play" -- that I doubted he would ever be stained like so many others have.

Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. Perhaps the female fertility drug he took really was prescribed for medicinal reasons. He says his results have been clean in numerous other tests. But apparently this drug is used to help men naturally produce testosterone again as they come off a cycle of steroid use. The positive test is too hard to explain away. My heart sank when I heard the news. One of my friends, who's a gigantic Sawx fan, had this Facebook status update last Thursday: "is tearing up."

Once baseball players test positive for steroids, or are strongly assumed to have taken them, it's hard to place them within the game's historical context. Is Barry Bonds still a Hall-of-Famer? How about Roger Clemens? The central dilemma is, Once a player is confirmed or assumed beyond a reasonable doubt to have used performance-enhancing drugs, how much of his accomplishments can be ascribed to natural talent and how much to the drugs?

Perhaps Manny could even be placed at the top of the group of players including Jim Thome, Jeff Bagwell and Carlos Delgado, great hitters and weak fielders whose peak was circa 1996-2004, when all of baseball became dominated by offense and outsized numbers. These players might not belong in the Hall of Fame. Their career stats could be read as a product of their anomalous era, not proof of their status as one of their era's great position players. I just can't lump Manny with them, though. As lumbering a man as he could be, Manny's hitting was nimble and electric, loads of fun to watch.

One of my favorite memories of the past four years was sitting in a Cambridge bar for four long hours on a Friday night, watching the Sawx and Angels in Game 2 of the 2007 ALDS, perhaps one of the longest nine-inning games ever, when Manny hit one of the most electrifying home runs ever to win the game. It flew off his bat instanteously. A bar full of drowsy people leapt up. There was never any doubt where it would land. Everyone knew it, including Manny, and they basked it in. (As a disclaimer, I still don't like the Sawx. Only Manny.)

Now, Sawx fans and Boston sportswriters get to bask in the positive drug test as a confirmation of how Manny ignomiously left town last year. It only buttresses their arguments that he's a selfish, uncomplicated, unlikeable man. I hope they aren't correct, but they might be. Here's that home run, on wonderfully grainy hand-held video: