Manny Ramirez was suspended 50 games today for violating the drug policy of Major League Baseball.

Ramirez agreed to the suspension, choosing not to dispute the findings, but did say that his doctor recently gave him a medication that caused the positive test, noting that he’s “taken and passed about 15 drug tests over the past five seasons.”

Manny will lose about $8 million of his $25 million salary this year, and of course he’ll have this result dogging him for the rest of his career and life.

Now I have no idea if Ramirez is telling the truth, but it does seem a little odd that he’d fail a test this late into his career so I’m actually half inclined to believe him. Many drugs contain elements that would cause someone to fail a performance enhancing drug test. I’d like to think we could all focus on the game a little bit more than who’s doing what drug, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. At some point maybe we’ll just all admit that most of these guys are going to take whatever edge they can get and get over it (while trying to purge the sport as much as possible of course).