So Long, Manny

Manny Ramirez has officially retired from baseball today amid some mysterious trouble involving MLB's drug policy. There's no specifics as to what drug is at issue here but I think we can all safely say that it's steroids. Or, looking at Manny, maybe weed too.

And so ends the tumultuous career of Manny Ramirez. I'll leave it to some other more accomplished writers to recap his entire career, but it definitely was crazy. From a normal looking, athletic power hitter in Cleveland, to freakish looking lovable goofball power hitting freak in Boston, to not so lovable goofball who basically quit on his team in Boston, to a one-dimensional side show in L.A., to steroid user to whatever he's been the past couple seasons, Manny has had a career probably unlike any other baseball player before him. Being a Yankee fan, I've hated him for most of that career, but mostly because I hated seeing him at bat. Plus, I hated his stupid hair and that point he used to do but if he was on my team I'd probably deal with it. "Manny being Manny" became probably the most popular catch phrase in Boston next to "Yankees Suck" and he was indeed a weirdo/jerkoff who could hit his ass off.

This will go down, however, as another ugly end to a baseball player's career. We can debate the relevance of the stats and whether or not they should count, or if we should even care if he was juicing instead of focusing on his achievements on their own. It's a nuisance that no other sport has to deal with, the questioning of its' best players, and it gets boring and annoying after a while. Manny was suspended from the Dodgers for 50 games after testing positive for steroids, and that's what did him in in Tampa too. And with that, let's just shut up about him, starting now.