Silver Lining? MLB's Drug Policy Working

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.

A superstar is exposed as a cheat. We all react, usually sticking to our designated emotion on the subject (most of us have one now), even though we probably feel a little bit of everything. Life goes on, thanks mostly to the game's mystical ability to heal itself no matter what ails it, like a lizard regenerating a lost body part.

Ramirez – the greatest right-handed hitter of his generation, who followed the best all-around talent, the greatest pitcher, the all-time home run king and the two men that saved the game after the 1994 player strike – is now disgraced. How is this any different than A-Rod or Clemens or Bonds or McGwire or Sosa?

It's not in almost every way.

Except for this: It is 2009. That's a very good thing for baseball, as much as one of the sport's biggest stars being exposed as a likely doper can be a good thing.

It might not seem like it, mostly because it extends the steroid scandal that has plagued baseball since the beginning of the decade a few months further, giving it legs past Alex Rodriguez. (In reality, it is just a bridge – a connector – to the next big name revealed to us.)

Only unlike all those other scandals – save perhaps Rafael Palmeiro – Ramirez was unveiled as a cheat in 2009 for an infraction he apparently committed in the winter prior to this season. The implications of Ramirez's positive test and violation of MLB's drug program do not directly conjure up a time when steroid use was rampant and unchecked within the game. Or at least they should not.

It makes sense for us to go there immediately in our collective imaginations, to wonder when Manny started using, to dream up some shady trainer or steroid-fueled teammate briefing the mercurial slugger on the basics of cycling on and off different drugs, stacking them properly or even – gulp – injecting him in a clubhouse bathroom stall.

But we would be wise to also remember that Ramirez was outed now for something he did very recently. That much we know for certain. And the reason we know it is because of the drug policy Major League Baseball has in place.

There is testing. There is an investigative team searching for so-called "analytical positives" – documents that prove a player purchased performance-enhancing drugs as in the case of Braves center fielder Jordan Schafer. And there are strict punishments.

Manny Ramirez will sit for 50 games, his team will almost certainly suffer on the field and he is out almost $8 million.

Those are not consequences to be scoffed at, nor are the strides the sport has made to curb the use of PEDs and punish offenders to be ignored or shoved aside while we decry the latest big name to join the Hall of Shame.

The system was long (long, long) overdue, but, wouldn't you know it, it actually works.

In fact, by one admittedly crude method of comparison, baseball is considerably tougher on violators of its drug policy than, say, the National Football League. Ramirez will miss almost 31 percent of his team's games this season. A first-time offender in the NFL is slapped with a four-game suspension, 25 percent of the season, a figure which would go down if the league extended its schedule to 18 games. A third positive test for Ramirez would result in a lifetime ban. The NFL had no such penalty in place as of last season, the stiffest punishment for doping being a 12-month ban, also after three positive tests.

Of course, the NFL does not have the public relations problem baseball does because it did not allow PED use to go completely unaddressed and unchecked for so long. (Whether or not the steroid culture is as prevalent in football locker rooms as it was and is in baseball clubhouses is, of course, a separate issue entirely.)

Baseball has many scandals in its past to answer for, many skeletons in its closets to reckon with, but today – right now – it is just like any other American professional sport when it comes to doping.

If the lesson we learned from A-Rod is that in this day and age we should never anoint someone the Great Clean Hope, then perhaps one of the biggest lessons we should learn from Manny Ramirez is that baseball finally has its act together in the fight against performance-enhancing drugs.

In every other way, it is still the best game on the planet, scandal or not.