Manny Being Manny [Wednesday Morning Quarterback]

It’s time for Wednesday Morning Quarterback, your weekly sports round-up.

What a real bummer…

The biggest news since last week, if you hadn’t heard already, was the drug test that Manny Ramirez managed to fail.

This is now the biggest baseball star to fail a drug test and win himself a 50-game suspension along with a black mark on his hall of fame chances.

It goes like this:

Manny Ramirez saw some physician in Florida who gave him a banned substance according to MLB rules. The substance, whose name I don’t totally remember and am too depressed to look up, is a female fertility drug that is also used to mask drops in testosterone following a steroid treatment cycle. Seems pretty clear cut.

It’s also the most disappointing news I’ll receive this year. Alex Rodriguez’s situation didn’t really bum me out. He’s kind of a jerk and I wasn’t too surprised to hear that he was a cheater too. Manny was just so goofy and charismatic and I hate that it’s true.

Who can we trust from the steroid era now? The only name that I’m able to unequivocally trust nowadays seems to be Ken Griffey, Jr. It’s a real shame. I hope that the new drug tests will keep catching new cheaters so that baseball can be clean from here on out.

The NO PED Zone

Ryan Zimmerman has got himself a 30-game hitting streak. The record is, of course, 56, but seeing him approach it is super exciting, especially for a Washington team that has otherwise not been doing very well at all.

Evan Longoria is on an AL MVP pace with his production this year. Man do I love this guy. Keep it up.

The Rays are 7.5 (!) games out of first place in the AL East, only half a game up on the last place Orioles. We’ll see what will happen once the Blue Jays start playing teams in the East. Hopefully the Rays will start to catch up in the standings.

Meanwhile, the Marlins are a much more respectable 1.5 games back from the first place Mets, half a game behind the Phillies, and a game up on the Braves. The Nationals are…7.5 games out of first place. Wow, that makes me worry way more about the Rays, although the Rays do at least have a win percentage a full 0.100 higher than the Nats.