Disclaimer: I am a diehard Yankees fan. After the infamous Red Sox comeback during the 2004 ALCS, I refused to go to school for several days and struggled to keep down solid food. That series single-handedly ruined my childhood and left me more emotionally damaged than any dysfunctional relationship could have. To this day, if you say the name "Dave Roberts" around me, I will curl up into the fetal position and start shaking uncontrollably until someone slaps me in the face and reminds me that it's 2011. I'm not telling you all this so that whenever you see me on Grounds you will yell "Dave Roberts" at me and laugh when you see that I wasn't really exaggerating - please don't - but rather so that when you read this next sentence, you realize just how hard it is for me to say it.
It's a shame that Manny Ramirez will not enter the Hall of Fame one day.
Deep breath.
OK, that was hard for me to get off my chest. But I feel much better now. Kind of like the guy who has been cheating on his girlfriend for a year and finally mustered up the courage to tell her. It's really difficult to admit to at first, but after you've said it you can start fresh. Although in a dark, creepy room somewhere, Tiger Woods is vehemently shaking his head "no."
Well, this is me trying to wipe my conscience clean by coming out and saying that the Yankee-killing, steroid-taking, dreadlock-sporting goofball we affectionately have labeled "Manny being Manny" for all these years deserves the nod into the Hall. Yes, even after his second positive test for PEDs and subsequent retirement. And yes, even though he played left field worse than my grandma, who, bless her soul, has lost a step or two since passing away a year ago.
How can I possibly make such an outlandish claim? I don't know. I'm actually starting to second-guess myself already. But, like I imagine Tiger felt after courting his 10th stripper, I've come this far so I might as well keep going.
I love baseball and, yes, I hate what steroids did to the sport. It has turned us all into the over-protective girlfriend. The one who, after you tell her that you are going to office hours, will double-check to see if your professor actually has office hours at that time. In the baseball world, this translates into the completely jaded, hyper-suspicious fans we are today. Fans who, when Jose Bautista suddenly hits 54 home runs during a season, simultaneously search online to find out his previous career high - a suspiciously low 16, by the way, although the size of Bautista's cranium admittedly has remained relatively constant.
But how can you blame us given everything that has happened? Really - how many of the greatest players of our generation can you say, with full conviction, were completely clean? Honestly, if some Super-Mitchell Report somehow emerges, naming every single player who took performance-enhancing drugs, the vast majority of them would not surprise me. My I'd-be-completely-shocked-if-it-comes-out-that-they-were-juicing list is very short - just Jeter, Mariano, Griffey, Maddux, Glavine, Ichiro and Chipper Jones. Of course, these are among the greatest players of our generation - needless to say if David Eckstein were juicing I would be shocked as well.
So what does this mean for Manny? It means that we can't just judge the era using the black-and-white criteria of "Did he test positive, or did he not?" It's more complicated than that. Just like everything in life, there is a gray area, and until we accept that and learn to work with it, the "steroid era" will continue to suffocate the sport.
Baseball once was the only sport where numbers could tell the entire story about a player and dictate his Hall of Fame candidacy. 3,000 hits - you're in. 300 wins - also in. 500 home runs - lock it up. But now those milestones are tainted. Now, we need to start basing our opinions on what we actually saw on the baseball diamond rather than what we read in a lab report or on a stat sheet. In essence, we need to start treating baseball like we do all other sports.
In basketball or football there is no set number of points or yards that a player needs to surpass to enter the Hall of Fame. Instead, we use a combination of the players' stats and our own judgment. We make a decision based on what we watched that player do with our own eyes.
And my eyes will swear to the fact that Manny Ramirez was the best pure hitter they've ever seen. My eyes will tell you they saw Manny come through in the clutch, time and time again, like no other hitter of this generation. My eyes sadly will recall that they witnessed Manny's laid-back, cool-in-the-face-of-insurmountable-pressure demeanor lift the entire city of Boston to a place generations upon generations of tortured Bostonian souls only had dreamed about.
There is nothing you can possibly do to delete those images, that swing and those moments from my mind's eye. No number of reports telling me Manny was taking more fertility pills than a desperate couple trying to conceive a child will be able to erase the memory I have of being absolutely terrified whenever Manny came to bat during the ninth inning. Steroids won't help your nerves when you step up to the plate late in a postseason game. Just ask Alex Rodriguez. And while you're at it, ask him why he left Kate Hudson for Cameron Diaz. Come on, bro, it's not 1995 anymore.\nYes, Manny was taking steroids. Yes, he cheated. But really, who didn't? My bet would be that the vast majority of players during that era were taking something, and just because Manny was one of the few dumb or stubborn enough to get caught should not discount everything that he did on the field.
One day Manny Ramirez should have his place in the Hall of Fame. It should be right next to the most dominant player of our generation, Barry Bonds. And both of them should be right next to a giant asterisk that explains to future generations why they can't trust what the numbers tell us.
Only what our eyes do.
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