On Manny Being Barry

MannyBeingManny has become MannyBeingBarry. As in Barry Bonds. The difference between Manny Ramirez and Barry Bonds was always that Manny was loveable while Barry you only loved to hate. Now? Well...let's just look at some of the reactions: 

-John Kruk and Eric Young from Baseball Tonight says he cheated the Dodgers and baseball's past

-ESPN's Buster Olney says he should be banned from baseball

-Red Sox fan Bill Simmons says he's confronting his worst nightmare

-ESPN's Howard Bryant says now there are no excuses left

-ESPN's Eric Neel says that Dodgers fans were blindsided

-The Boston Herald's Gerry Callahan said that stupidity nabbed Manny

-Peter Gammons says that for better or worse, the Dodgers are stuck with Manny

-Deadspin tells the story of Manny not being Manny

-Also from Deadspin, describing Los Angeles as suffering a "devastating cockpunch"

-The New York Post laments another big name tainted

-Rob Neyer thinks this is just another time where "MannyLand" is going to take some time off from his team

-As I wrote in my last post, his authorized biographer first thought was that he was caught smoking pot (a case of Manny being Ricky? As in Ricky Williams?)

-LoHud's Peter Abraham thinks this is good timing for A-Rod (he's not alone in writing this today)

-Newsday's Ken Davidoff says that this day is now the third greatest day in Mets' history because they didn't sign him (I think he's a little off)

-And, ESPN's Steve Phillips says that the Dodgers will improve without Manny (I think he's dead wrong)

 

Oh...and Red Sox Nation wants us to think that the 2004 and 2007 teams aren't tainted because of what Manny did? Really? Eric Avidon says from the Daily News Tribune, the local paper from my alma mater, Brandeis, that the taint is on Manny, not Sox. The Red Sox players came out and all said that Manny didn't taint their titles. Really?

Peter Gammons wrote back in April of 2004 (besides correctly predicting the entire AL playoffs results) that "one of the tenets of the Baseball Creed is that the game always overrides those who soil it". As Babe Ruth had done post The Black Sox Scandal and Cal Ripken's streak breaking/Joe Torre-Derek Jeter's Yankees/Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa homeruns post the 1994 strike, Gammons predicted that Curse breaking from the Cubs or Red Sox in 2004 would override the thought that steroids had soiled the years that preceded it. And some people believed that the gritty comeback from the Sox past the Yankees and their sweep in the World Series did just that.

But was Manny not the MVP of the Curse-breaking 2004 World Series? Were these not the same Red Sox fans who said that the Yankees should return the 2000 rings when word came out that Roger Clemens had done steroids? Now some delusional Red Sox fans have claimed to me that he couldn't possibly have been using since he didn't test positive. Yes, I'm sure that a guy who makes $20 million a season couldn't find a steroid that wouldn't be detected. The guy was suspended for taking HCG, which, according to Will Carroll at Baseball Prospectus, is "often used to 'kick start' the body's natural production of testosterone after a cycle of steroids." Hmmm...

So Red Sox fans, it's time to stop living in denial and realize that every team had users. Even Bill Simmons somewhat admitted that fact.

Why, as a Yankee fan do I care? Well, misery loves company. And it's miserable thinking that your team was cheating when it won. Will I start chanting 1918 again? Probably not. But it does tend to question the validity of those who claimed that the Red Sox did it the "right" way.

Am I happy about that? No. I love this game and I hate that we may never know if baseball is clean anymore. As I said before, no name would surprise me if you told me they did steroids. As a Yankee fan, I hold on to hope that Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera were clean during all those years. But if I was told they weren't, I wouldn't be shocked. And that's just sad.