FanHouse Manny Ramirez Peds

The Dodgers have gotten off to a fantastic start, winning 21 of their first 30 games, including each of their first 13 at home before last night's loss to the Nationals. With none of the other four teams in the NL West getting off to even remotely comparable starts, that leaves the Dodgers six games clear of the rest of the division, and a whopping nine ahead of the team most picked to finish second back in March, Arizona.

Los Angeles' big early lead, along with the fact that they pretty clearly look like the best team in the division, had led some to declare the race over, even before Mother's Day. Obviously, losing Manny Ramirez for the next 50 games changes that equation a bit. But how much?

Here we go again.

That had to be the first thought that crossed the mind of Bud Selig and the venerable Joe Torre along with every baseball fan and scribe in America Thursday morning when it was revealed that Manny Ramirez had tested positive for HCG, a women's fertility drug commonly taken by users of performance-enhancers to kickstart the body's production of testosterone after a more intense drug cycle.

Eventually – probably quickly – that sense of déjà vu morphed into outrage or disgust or annoyance or maybe even indifference, depending on the person. Whatever. But first, it had to be here we go again. Such is the state of baseball in 2009.

We have been down this road so many times already, observers of the national pastime have become roughly equivalent to caged animals, pacing in the same path day after day, week after week, year after year.

FanHouse is home to seven Hall of Fame voters, so rather than debate Manny Ramirez's legacy endlessly, we went straight to the source -- the people who will have a say, at least partly, in how he will go down in baseball history.

Join us after the jump as our voters discuss their feelings on the revelation that Ramirez violated Major League Baseball's drug policy and how it will impact his case for Cooperstown.

LOS ANGELES -- The Dodgers were enjoying a magical start to the season. Best record in baseball. Longest season-opening home winning streak of the modern era.

And then "it was like somebody punched a hole in the balloon," manager Joe Torre said.

In the hours between Wednesday night's victory and Thursday morning, word got around the Dodger organization that Manny Ramirez, who had defined the franchise since he was acquired last July, had been suspended for 50 games for violating baseball's drug policy.

Hundreds of media members converged on Dodger Stadium on Thursday, caring little about the team's hot start or its winning streak. They were there to see how the Dodgers were handling the stunning loss of Ramirez.

I've never felt more cheated, used, betrayed, gobsmacked. All my life, I've been watching baseball and gushing over the magnificent talents of legends -- Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez -- knowing each was distinguished among the all-time elite in his particular craft. Now, all have been shamed and ruined by steroids, damned steroids, and I wonder how we explain to future generations that so much sleaze and deceit could dominate such a pathetic period.

So another baseball hero got snared in the performance-enhancing web. Today, Manny Ramirez.

Tomorrow, Roger Clemens?

Oh yeah, never mind.

Alex Rodriguez? Sammy Sosa? Mark McGwire? Barry Bonds?

You really do need a scorecard to keep up with the falling stars. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of trying to remember who's on first and who's on Winstrol.

You're never going to get rid of the dirty people. The only way to clean up the game is to get rid of the rules that turn people into dirtbags.

NEW YORK – Charlie Manuel was Manny Ramirez's manager in 1993 in Triple-A, Ramirez's hitting coach with Cleveland in 1994-99 and Ramirez's manager again with the 2000 Indians.

And Manuel's reaction to Ramirez's 50-game suspension was neither shock nor outrage. Just sadness.

"I'm kind of sad for him, because he's a good player," Manuel, now manager of the Phillies, said Thursday.

"When I had him as a player and I managed him and I also had him as a hitter and I used to do a lot of work with him as a hitter. I know how good he was. And I think when something like that comes up, I probably think the same thing about him that I think about anybody else: That's too bad. That's sad."

Everything and everybody who has been in the same baseball universe with Manny Ramirez during the past 17 years deserves an asterisk. We're talking about a big one, nearly the size of his artificially-enhanced accolades. That's because Manny being Manny now translates into Manny being a fraud.

In case you haven't heard, Ramirez just became the latest supposedly great player to test positive under Major League Baseball's drug-testing program. He also joined the majority of such players by trying to lie about it. According to the Los Angeles Times, he said he was taking medication from his doctor for a personal medical issue, and he said he didn't know it contained anything banned by baseball.

Blah, blah, blah.

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Let's just get this out of the way right now. I don't like Jose Canseco. I don't respect how he went about trying to bring down baseball in some sort of personal vendetta/money-making scheme. He might try to sell us on the fact that he just wanted baseball clean, but I don't believe those were his original motives. He needed money and he was angry with baseball for allegedly black-balling him.

We can call Canseco any number of names -- rat, snitch, crybaby, cheater -- but one thing he's not is a liar. With the announcement that Manny Ramirez has been suspended 50 games for a drug violation, Canseco has been vindicated for what seems like the hundredth time.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Dodgers superstar Manny Ramirez is to be hit with a 50-game ban for a violation of MLB's drug policy, making him the biggest name yet caught and punished.

Ramirez used HCG -- human chorionic gonadotropin -- a women's fertility drug, according to a report on ESPN.com. Sources in the slugger's camp have indicated that he was prescribed the substance because of erectile dysfunction, according to Yahoo! Sports, however, erectile dysfunction is a potential side effect of steroid use and many dopers use HCG or other similar substances to kickstart the body's production of testosterone as they come off of a steroid cycle.

Ramirez's drug test raised huge red flags with Major League Baseball because his testosterone levels were so out of whack, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. His testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio was greater than 4 to 1. In most humans, the ratio is closer to 1 to 1. Testers also got a hold of documents that showed he was using HCG, meaning they had a drug test that indicated PED use and an analytical positive.