Jock Itch The performance-enhancing dregs

If there is a winner in the latest Major League Baseball steroid scandal, it certainly isn’t Manny Ramirez. The Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder was the latest high-profile baseball player to test positive for performance-enhancing drugs—this time, a fertility drug known as hCG, which readjusts testosterone levels after steroid use. (There's a reason it's banned, and it’s not to keep out all the pregnant female baseball players who are trying to take over the sport.) The home-run-blasting knucklehead was banned for 50 games and denies any wrongdoing.

Manny's suspension will cast a negative light on baseball, which is already reeling from various ongoing steroid scandals, and the Dodgers lose one of the best hitters in the sport. (And let’s not forget the damage this does to my own fantasy baseball team, which was depending on Ramirez to wrest a virtual championship from 11 other nerds with nothing better to do with their time.)

But there is at least one clear beneficiary of the Manny Ramirez drug scandal: The Colorado Rockies. How so? By having Ramirez out of a Dodger lineup that was demolishing the rest of the competition in the National League West—the division in which the Rockies are currently ranked in last place. With no Ramirez, the inept and bumbling Rockies could climb out of that cellar just in time for him to return in July and bury them again.

But the Rockies also benefit in another way. Ramirez’s drug use brings up serious questions about his role in helping the Boston Red Sox win two World Series titles. Manny was an integral part of the team's winning rosters in 2004 and 2007, and the last victory was achieved by pounding the snot out of the Colorado Rockies. The Rockies didn’t have a prayer by the time they met the Sox in the Fall Classic in '07, but we might want to revisit that crucial set of games after the Ramirez revelations.

Unfortunately for the home team, the stats don’t necessarily bear this conspiracy theory out. The four hits and two RBIs Manny racked up in the '07 World Series would be a mammoth achievement in a game, but stretched over the Sox's four-game sweep of the Rox, it’s merely pedestrian. But Ramirez did help his team make it to the World Series in the first place, so you have to wonder if his alleged steroid-fueled hitting was a factor. Would the Rockies have fared better against another opponent? Thinking about such conspiracy theories is far more exciting than watching the Rockies. Imagining Denver will ever get close to even appearing in a World Series any time soon … now that’s fantasy baseball.