{"id":13532,"date":"2011-04-11T10:46:36","date_gmt":"2011-04-11T17:46:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.seamheads.com\/?p=13532"},"modified":"2011-04-11T10:47:52","modified_gmt":"2011-04-11T17:47:52","slug":"manny-turns-in-his-hall-of-fame-ticket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/11\/manny-turns-in-his-hall-of-fame-ticket\/","title":{"rendered":"Manny turns in his Hall of Fame ticket"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mannyphoto \u00c2\u00a9 2008 Keith Allison<\/a> | more info <\/a><\/span>(via: Wylio<\/a>)<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The recent retirement of Manny Ramirez was more than just a pre-emptive strike on his behalf against having to serve a 100-game sentence for testing positive for steroids a second time.<\/p>\n

The action all but eliminated him from any future consideration for the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s all simple logic, straight from recent HOF voting results.<\/p>\n

Rafael Palmeiro might still be on the ballot, but the 11% turnout on his first year of eligibility is much closer to the museum’s outhouse than any sort of consensus steering in his favor. From a numbers standpoint, you can’t argue that Manny would be much more deserving for enshrinement than Raffy’s 569 bombs and 3,020 hits. And Raffy tested positive for steroids just once to Manny’s twice.<\/p>\n

Throw in the aloofness factor and things look so bad for Manny’s candidacy, he just might become the first Steroid Era giant with obvious HOF numbers to fall short of the Hall’s minimum 5% threshold needed to stay on the ballot. He could be one and out, relegating his otherwise prestigious career down to the level of the Lonnie Smiths and Danny Tartabulls of the baseball world.<\/p>\n

Major league drug testing first flagged Ramirez in May of 2009 when he tested positive for a female fertility drug commonly associated with steroid cycle treatments. After several weeks and about 10,000 estrogen jokes, Manny returned from his 50-game suspension only to have his name leaked (along with David Ortiz) as being on the infamous list of “anonymous” positive steroid tests of 2003, as reported by the New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That brings us to 2011 and Manny’s second official<\/em> infraction of baseball’s drug policy. If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re keeping score at home, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s three steroid strikes against Ramirez. With a little mental extrapolation, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quite reasonable to think that Ramirez could have used steroids his entire career. Remember, ‘Roids use was running rampant throughout major league clubhouses as early as\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwell, just around Manny’s rookie season in 1994. It would be another decade before baseball started taking steroid testing seriously. Does anyone have a logical explanation why Manny would juice throughout the ’00s while testing was in place, but not in the ’90s when steroids weren’t yet banned, or even acknowledged, by major league baseball?<\/p>\n

This is by far the most severe strike against any steroid-linked superstar this side of the self-proclaimed godfather of steroids, Jose Canseco. And if this doesn’t influence your judgment in applying some level of skepticism to the integrity of the numbers Manny Ramirez has produced the past two decades as he became known as one of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153greatest right-handed hitters of all time,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d there are a few internet spammers who would love to have your email address.<\/p>\n

Yet, many a baseball writer and blogger will continue to echo the same sentiments for Manny that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been uttering for other over-glorified steroid-juiced superstars by telling us<\/a> that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ignore the numbers.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get it. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand why these baseball analysts have so much trouble connecting the dots of performance and steroid use. These two entities go together like Bonnie and Clyde. There is no other real reason for a player to take steroids aside from enhancing performance, which in turn fattens the numbers. With what we know now, why would anyone continue to fall to their knees in reverence of what Manny accomplished? To do so sounds a little like praising Bernie Madoff as a brilliant investor before mentioning two paragraphs later about how he scammed millions of innocent victims of their retirement money.<\/p>\n

I’ve been there with Manny. I had my fingers on the DVR buttons, watching in amazement frame-by-frame as a 97-mph fastball made its way toward him, noticing how he somehow was able to wait until the ball was but ten feet away before he even started his swing, then clotheslining the ball to a lucky fan somewhere in home-run land 430 feet away. The freaky hand-eye response times; the phenomenal bat speed; the legendary offensive numbers. Do ya think, just maybe, there might be a connection?<\/p>\n

Sportswriter Mike Lupica, George Costanza\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s favorite author, said on ESPN\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s recent edition of The Sports Reporters<\/em> that one of the biggest mysteries of the Steroid Era is why players as hugely talented as Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, and Barry Bonds felt the need to tap the chemical world to complement their amazing skills.<\/p>\n

To me, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more of a mystery why sportswriters keep asking this question.<\/p>\n

Adios, Manny.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u201d John Cappello<\/p>\n

To see more of John\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s baseball research and postings, go to <\/em>www.baseballengineer.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

photo \u00c2\u00a9 2008 Keith Allison | more info (via: Wylio) The recent retirement of Manny Ramirez was more than just a pre-emptive strike on his behalf against having to serve a 100-game sentence for testing positive for steroids a second time. The action all but eliminated him from any future consideration for the Baseball Hall […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":693,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4235],"tags":[1485,3126,3134],"class_list":["post-13532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-top-stories","tag-manny-ramirez","tag-rafael-palmeiro","tag-steroids"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/693"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}