BREAKING NEWS: MANNY SUSPENDED

No kidding, this is serious stuff:

Manny Ramirez will be suspended 50 games for positive drug test

Manny Ramirez has tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs and will be suspended 50 games starting today, The Times has learned.
[...]
Ramirez is expected to attribute the test results to medication received from a doctor for a personal medical issue, according to a source familiar with matter but not authorized to speak publicly.
[...]
Ramirez would become the biggest star suspended under an oft-criticized major league testing program that started in 2003. He had been a model citizen since arriving in Los Angeles last August, following a stormy tenure with the Boston Red Sox.

This is the second drug scandal to rock baseball within four months. In a year in which baseball officials hoped their greatest concern would be the slumping economy, the two highest-paid players in the game have been revealed to have failed a drug test.

Other reports coming out that it's not steroid-related. Just ignorance. PLENTY more to come!

From Verducci:

The source said the substance was not classified as a steroid but was clearly defined as a banned performance enhancer according to the drug agreement between baseball and its players association. Banned substances can only be taken with prior knowledge and medical clearance from baseball's drug-program administrators. Such exceptions are known as Therapeutic Use Exemptions, or TUEs. The suspension is an indication Ramirez did not have a TUE for the substance.

Ramirez said in a statement released by the MLBPA:

"Recently I saw a physician for a personal health issue. He gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was OK to give me. Unfortunately, the medication was banned under our drug policy. Under the policy that mistake is now my responsibility. I have been advised not to say anything more for now. I do want to say one other thing; I've taken and passed about 15 drug tests over the past five seasons."

Somewhere near Tampa, ARod is giggling his tail off. Maybe he's flying up to NY right now to get into the line-up as a huge surprise... riding under the Manny fog.

Jay at FackYouk has some thoughts on the subject and asks 'Why couldn't it have been Papi?':

In addition, the Sox organization has been largely spared the of embarassment of this going down with him still on the team. The graphics on SportsCenter and the MLB Network and ESPN.com will carry the Dodger's logo. He won't have to answer questions at Fenway about it. All those clips of him mashing in a West Coast, National League uniform really deflect the stigma away from their two World Series titles and Manny's WS MVP. That's what I care about: the Championships.

Craig (aka Shysterball), over at his fancy-pants NBC gig, got serious:

Hey, how about that Mitchell Report!
Between Manny and Alex "boy, I couldn't be happier about this news" Rodriguez, can we now finally all admit to ourselves that the Mitchell Report was a sham? A public relations piece that failed to do anything other than convince the weak-minded that it approached comprehensiveness or represented finality, when it clearly did not? Alex Rodriguez's name wasn't in it, and based on even his own admitted timeline it should have been. Likewise, unless you believe that Manny Ramirez only came to performance enhancing drugs last Tuesday, there's a good chance his name should have been in it too. That is, if the thing was worth a damn, which it wasn't.

Any other thoughts, smart guy?
Just this, which echoes what I had to say back in February when A-Rod was busted: though I think it's inevitable, I hope that everyone who is about to come out of the woodwork to demonize Manny Ramirez and baseball stops to realize that each time a new player -- especially a superstar -- is pushed out of the PED closet, it means that the era in which we've been living is, ironically, less illegitimate than we previously believed. Why? Because the more players who are found to have used PEDs, the less accurate it is to say that anyone truly had an unfair advantage. Sure, on a matchup-by-matchup basis there were users facing non-users, but the caricature of a small group of cheaters ruining it for everyone else in the game grows more ridiculous as each new name surfaces. Many, many ballplayers have used PEDs in recent years. So many, I'd guess, that a blanket of soft presumption of PED use should be in order for the players of our age. Instead of judging these guys as harshly as we have been, perhaps we should simply grade their characters and accomplishment on a curve just like we do from players in the pre-integration age and pitchers from the deadball era. Different, lamentable, but not illegitimate or evil.