Manny Ramirez

Manny Ramirez walked away from baseball this week, electing to retire rather than face a 100-game suspension following his reported positive test for performance-enhancing drugs.

It's the perfectly fitting cap to a career that saw the best of both worlds: it featured arguably one of the greatest power hitting right handed hitters of all time and ends with speculation of how much of Ramirez's statistics were accumulated with natural power.

Buster Olney of ESPN.com wrote a great article about Manny. He says that Manny gets the last laugh because people will argue back and forth about his Hall of Fame worthiness or how great of a player he truly was, but Manny never cared.

How can one argue about his statistics when, at the end of the day, he just did not care? As Olney puts it, "He won. He's like the guy who robbed a bank of millions and was sentenced to 10 hours of community service."

I personally feel foolish for caring or even feeling hurt by the issue, but the game of baseball that I grew up knowing and loving and following is completed tainted. Ramirez is just one more link on the chain of supposedly "great" baseball players that have played the public for a fool.

It's not an issue of race, either. Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro are two prominent white baseball players who took PEDs. Manny Ramirez joins Barry Bonds and others as players of color who are suspected of taking these supplements.

In the end, baseball will move on and be better off for gutting itself of the steroid era and all performance-enhancing drug users. However, it's going to take some time and more steps to explain to fans like myself how players like Ramirez got away with this for so long. This wasn't "Manny being Manny" this was "Manny being a jackass who thought he could get away with anything" and it finally caught up with him.