Manny

For those of you who don't follow baseball or the news, Manny Ramirez was today suspended by Major League Baseball fifty games for testing positive for a performance-enhancing drug. He cheated.

Manny Ramirez was, in many ways, one of the best stories in baseball. Perhaps the most talented hitter in the game, one of the hardest workers in baseball, a charismatic clubhouse leader, and fundamentally goofy and loveable, it was hard to dislike Manny. As a Red Sox fan, I was witness to some of his worst moments, where he let down the team because of his bad attitude and desire to play for another team. Somehow, he remained likeable enough that, even at his worst, I found myself able to forgive him; he seemed like some sort of man-child who you couldn't really get mad at. I looked a gallery of Manny pictures over the years today on the Sports Illustrated website, and in all of them he is either hugging Papi, emerging from hanging out in the scoreboard, listening to an MP3 player during a game, rocking his dreads, and just generally being cuddly and awesome. He certainly seems like that rarity in professional sports: a man who didn't take himself too seriously.

All that vanished today. He cheated. He claims he was just taking something his trainer gave him, didn't know it was banned. Others point out that the substance he tested positive for isn't a steroid, and has only been banned for a year. Still others speculate that he took the drug because of a problem in the bedroom. No matter. It is a responsibility of every modern sports player to know what substances can affect on-field play and are banned. Manny took a banned substance, and has to pay the consequences. He may have passed fifteen drug tests in the past five years, but he failed one, and that's enough to make his entry into the Hall of Fame unlikely.

I don't know. Why on earth do we keep looking up to sports stars? As a group, they've proven to be singularly incapable of the responsibility of being childhood heroes. And yet. Manny was on the Red Sox for eight years, and was a face of the team for most of them. And with one failed test, that all seems to poof away. Maybe I'm just in an emotional mood, what with all this last day of freshman year stuff going on, but I am truly saddened by Manny's fall from grace. Just seems tragic.