Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun are familiar with my, I guess ambivalence is the right word, toward Manny Ramirez. He recently returned to Major League Baseball from a 50-game suspension for testing positive for a banned substance. I think he’s hit a home run already, he had a couple RBIs last night, got kicked out of the game for making a petulant display after a strikeout. Same old, same old. The news stories about the games he’s played in since returning seem to want to play up all of the boos directed Manny’s way, but the veracity of these claims is, shall we say, questionable.

Obviously, we can’t be surprised if the baseball purity scolds massage the reality of Manny’s return to fit the “God-Fearing, Apple-Pie-Eating, Baseball-Loving Americans Think PED-Users Are Villains” motif. Those sanctimonious columns lambasting steroid-users as history’s greatest monsters more or less write themselves. Meanwhile, in the real world, Manny’s return in particular, and the (God-willing) winding down of the steroids era in general, is being met with a collective “meh.” I’m sure Dodgers fans are thrilled to have their best hitter back; I’m sure fans of other NL West teams will boo Manny vociferously. Me? Yawn. He paid his debt, he’s back. Let’s play ball.

In this spirit, I was elated to read this column on Slate from Charles Pierce, subtitled “Manny Ramirez reveals our true attitude about baseball’s drug war.” In it, Pierce reiterates my thesis of Manny Ramirez as big-kid, as jester who holds up to our faces the mirror of our own hypocrisy. To wit:

At his best—not as a hitter but as a public person—Manny Ramirez always has been most valuable in his ability to be a walking (if an occasionally completely unwitting) satire on baseball’s pretensions, which sorely need to be mocked on a very regular basis.

In the end, it’s going to be up to the individual baseball fan to reconcile themselves with the baseball era we’ve recently been living through. I have friends that will still crucify anyone that fails a drug test; that’s fine. I know other people who groan disappointedly, but eventually just shrug. Or, as Mr. Pierce says,

Ramirez’s weird pilgrimage to the bushes served as a living reminder that the great steroid hunt is almost solely an intramural problem between baseball and its various acolytes. The overwhelming number of baseball fans—who, given the economic problems of the moment, are filling ballparks in reasonably overwhelming numbers—have quite obviously made peace with what happened in the game over the past 20 years. Manny Ramirez was treated as though he’d pulled a hamstring or tweaked a tendon. Now, he’s back. That’s the way things are going to be from now on.

Preach!

Tags: baseball, Manny Ramirez, steroids

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.