Ted Green: It’s time to separate the legends from the juicers

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Mannywood? Of COURSE Manny would.

Barry and Rocket, the Dukes of Denial, plus A-Rod, Man-Ram and a cast of, what, hundreds?

Alleged, suspected, admitted, tested, subpoeaned, investigated...Mea culpa, Mia Farrow, my doctor gave it to me, I didn’t know it was on the list, I never looked at the list, I thought it was a Flintstones chewable, I didn’t do it, I swear! I mean, really, who can even keep up with it all anymore?

At this point in the exercise, is there any reason beyond blind faith and cockeyed optimism to believe most of the big hitters and power pitchers on all 30 teams haven’t done something with steroids, that a good portion of the entire roster of Major League Baseball hasn’t been on performance enhancers at one time or another...if they aren’t still?

It’s like an old episode of ‘To Tell the Truth:’ Will the two dozen clean guys in baseball, please stand up?

It seems to be the accepted way of life in our Grand Old Game. Player A gets big, Player B gets bigger. Pitcher A throws 98, Pitcher B hits 100. Coming soon: Pitcher C hits 105 and his arm actually falls off to a standing ovation as he and his detached limb are carted off the field on separate stretchers.

If you’ll pardon the expression, I believe this is called keeping up with your jones.

Citius, Altius, Fortius, Juicius.

The latest news that Manny Ramirez wasn’t on the female hormone HCG, as he claimed, and that Manny isn’t pregnant or on maternity leave, should surprise exactly no one who hasn’t been living below ground the last five years.

The bad news is they suspended Manny 50 games after finding that his levels of synthetic testosterone, apparently meaning some kind of steroid(s), were four times greater than the average human male of his age. The good news is, with that much stuff in his bloodstream and plenty of time to kill, Manny is now favored to win the Preakness.

Manny juiced? In other flabbergasting news sure to astonish those who commendably want to believe the best in everyone, it was hot in L.A., today is Friday and I’m Ted Green.

Now baseball wants us to know it has one of the toughest, strictest, most stringent drug policies in sports, and that they’re testing randomly and often. This is good. Identify the problem, then attack it. Admit the problem, then find the solution. But we also know the more they race to try to clean up the game, the faster the creative lab scientists working in a lucrative, if illegal, business produce designer steroids undetectable by all but the most sophisticated and costly of screening methods.

The effort to put the steroid genie back in the bottle is commendable, but I’m afraid this horse is out of the barn. Unofficially, Manny is also 6 to 1 in the Belmont.

At the end of the day, you pretty much go back to my original thesis on baseball’s ongoing p.r. nightmare, and it really is ever so simple:

Close the record book after the 1997 season. Call it Book One. Open a new book starting in 1998. Call it Book Two.There, was that so hard?

Book One will feature records for Ty and the Babe and Larrapin’ Lou, the Mick, Hammerin’ Hank and the Say Hey Kid. All the guys who drank beer and rocked the house. Book Two will list the accomplishments of Big Mac, Sammy, Mr. Potato Head in San Francisco, A-Rod, Rocket and Manny, plus Wolverine, Ironman, the Incredible Hulk and Arnold Schwarzenegger when he shot ‘Pumping Iron.’

Once we fans who adore the game are comfortable knowing the real record book has been preserved for posterity, unsullied and undirtied, we’ll happily plunk down our hard-earned cash to go to the yard. And if that’s how they want to roll, if the obvious long-term health dangers aren’t as important as those five- and six-figure monthly checks, then today’s players can juice themselves to the gills until guys go on the DL because their veins actually implode, for all I care. Hey, guys dig the long ball too.

-- Ted Green

Ted Green formerly covered sports for the L.A. Times. He is currently Senior Sports Producer for KTLA Prime News.