Now Dodger fans will have to go to the Bonds treatment that Giants fans perfected, where they blindly act as if their guy has been unduly persecuted. Dodger fans will now have to suspend their morality because Ramirez happens to wear their favorite team's uniform.

For the time being, Ramirez will disappear, suspended until early July for that failed drug test. He leaves at a moment when the Dodgers were Secretariat at the Belmont, opening up on the NL West field. So the Dodgers are clearly quick losers in this as Joe Torre will see if he can hold a mostly young team together while Ramirez is gone. He did manage Jason Giambi, Roger Clemens, Gary Sheffield and A-Rod, so he is hardly a virgin when it comes to this kind of explosion.

Major League Baseball also receives another black eye as yet another member — No. 7 by my count — of the 500-homer club is tied to illegal performance enhancers. This is no longer an exclusive, glorious group. Now it has all the glamour of a perp walk.

A-Rod is a member of this club, yet along with the rest of the fading NL West he actually might be one of the few winners in Manny's mess. Not only because Ramirez's public humiliation might lessen the glare when he returns this weekend in Baltimore. But also because this is another symbol about the extent of the cheating.

A-Rod was far from the only talented player who succumbed. He just happens to be the richest and, probably, the most easy to dislike, non-Barry Bonds division.

Manny has long come across as more goofy than unlikeable. But in the past year, he was insubordinate in forcing his way out of Boston and dirty in L.A. There is nothing goofy about any of that.

He now just is another cheat, another McGwire or Sosa, Palmeiro or Clemens. He is A-Rod with dreadlocks. His cover story is ridiculous, and now everything in his career is dubious.

Oakland Athletics News News » Fertile territory for doubt
Fertile territory for doubt
Imagine that this excuse came from Alex Rodriguez. Imagine that his alibi was this lame: That he described having a vague "personal medical issue." More from the New York Post