Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Obviously, I had to do a post about the big news of the day: David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez are reported to be on the list of 100-odd ballplayers who tested positive for performance enhancing drugs in 2003. Manny is, of course, old news, and I’ve pontificated on him not once but twice on this very blog.

Big Papi, though, now there is a juicy bit of news. (Pun intended, of course.) I’ve always had a special type of antipathy for David Ortiz. As you’re all well aware, I’m a bit of a Manny Ramirez fan (or at least I was; who knows what I think now). I never felt that fans up here in Boston truly appreciated how great a hitter Manny was, and how much he contributed to the team. When the pudgy guy from Minnesota came along and started beating the ball like it owed him money (58 home runs in six seasons with the Twins, 244 in seven with the Red Socks), he became one of the most beloved athletes this town has ever seen. I’d argue that Socks fans loved Papi more than Nomar, more than Pedro, more than Schilling, certainly more than Manny. He certainly earned that affection: the guy made the All Star Game in five seasons, led the league in home runs in 2006, and was a beast in the postseason.

And he killed the Yanks. But that’s neither here nor there.

What makes Ortiz’s fall from grace so precipitous and fill me to the gills with my favorite kind of freude is Papi’s world-class hypocrisy. Of all the blowhards railing against fellow players who use performance enhancing drugs, Ortiz was one of the most vociferous. ESPN’s Howard Bryant has a nice piece about it that I recommend you read in its entirety. But here are a few money quotes from Papi himself.

You’ve got the biggest guys in the game getting caught with this stuff, and that’s why they don’t think you can have mechanical problems or you can not have your mind in the wrong place or have injuries. It’s all steroids. That’s why I don’t talk about it. When I get turned around, people are going to say, ‘Oh, he’s back on it.’

Don’t come in once and test two or three guys. Test everybody, in season and out of season. And if you still use and you get caught, then you should be suspended for the whole year. I said that a long time ago, and nobody listened.

I know what it is for my son to have Big Papi as a father. There are a lot of people who do great things for him because he’s my son. His life is going to be easier because he’s the son of Big Papi.

And that is the biggest reason why I have never used steroids. Because then he would have to go to school and have to listen to all the kids say that his dad is dirty, a cheater, and everything for him would be taken away from him and he would be ruined. I make sure I don’t do those things, for him.

The Yankees have had a lot of guys who used PEDs. It sucks. Their success has been called into question, and rightly so. Of course, the most obnoxious of the sanctimonious high-horse sitter were Boston fans. (Remember when Manny got suspended earlier this season, and Socks fans tried to rationalize that he didn’t use the juice while he was with Boston? Does anybody else remember that?) Of course, there will be more rationalizations in the days to come; that’s to be expected. But it’s all going to be for naught, and I couldn’t be happier. Welcome to the mud, Boston. We’ve been waiting for you.

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!