Justice B. Hill

Is this what “Manny being Manny” means?

Saying Manny Ramirez’s use of a banned substance surprises me would be akin to saying Brent Favre’s waffling on his retirement surprises me. Steroids and similar banned substances have created headaches for Major League Baseball throughout this century.

Star after star has had his name tied to a substance that claims to enhance performances. The names of the accused users roll like the credits at the end of “The Natural” or “Field of Dreams”: McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, Clemens, A-Rod.

No ballplayer’s name is above the taint.

Now, it’s Manny’s name in the news.

In the face of evidence to the contrary, you daydream that it is surreal — a tall tale pulled from Stephen King’s imagination. But you awaken to a reality as stark and as hopeless as the U.S. economy.

Still, you thought after the ballyhooed Mitchell Report, after the Clemens ordeal, after book after book has chronicled the damage performance-enhancing drugs have wrought on baseball that nobody would be stupid enough to step into this minefield anew.

To think that, sadly, is to overestimate Manny and the men who play baseball for an oil minister’s wages. Look around you; their stupidity is everywhere you turn.

So is the blame.

I wish I knew with certainty what led Manny Ramirez down this road. Before he put on a Los Angeles Dodgers uniform last summer, he had forged a Hall-of-Fame career. He had long ago proved he was one of the game’s most colorful figures.

Video   Manny being Manny Videos: A compilation of the best Manny Ramirez soundbites from the past few years.

Aside from Manny and a few others, baseball lacks the quirky characters that mark its history. Today’s players are self-absorbed, temperamental and elitist.

Too many of them look at signing an autograph as beneath them, an obligation unworthy of their time.

For them, it’s about the dollars — the wads of Grants and Franklins carried in their $350 designer jeans. How to fatten that cache of cash is what seemed to fuel the “Steroids era.”

Greed, naked greed — nothing was too much to do if it brought more cash, more fame, more of the trappings of success. More, it’s always more.

More women. More cars. More cash.

That’s a ballplayer’s undoing: He can’t get enough. And that’s contributed to the undoing of baseball: The game’s inability to sate the appetites of the men who play it.

For with no stomach to reign in the excesses, the game finds itself here, dealing with yet-another fallen star. Its leaders are trying damage control on an issue too unwieldy to handle.

Video   Manny takes an asterisk May 7: Countdown’s Keith Olbermann talks with Houston Chronicle’s Richard Justice about allegations against L.A. Dodger Manny Ramirez using performance enhancing drugs.

They will trot out the pronouncements about how their testing policy works. They will talk in abstractions about how sad they are Manny ran afoul of policies. They will ask fans to forgive.

But fans are unlikely to forgive, because they have gone down this superhighway oenough to know it leads nowhere good. So they will find little humor in “Manny being Manny” when they know the phrase means sullying the game they love.

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