Is Manny a game-changer?

Shortly after Major League Baseball suspended Dodger Manny Ramirez for 50 games, team officials said they would welcome the dreadlocked slugger back with open arms once he’d served the penalty. “He took ownership of what transpired. That speaks to the man,” said General Manager Ned Colletti. Actually, Ramirez took ownership of only part of what transpired. He admitted taking a banned female fertility drug that a doctor prescribed for “a personal health issue,” but provided no credible public explanation as to why. And unless he does, the Dodgers’ attitude will look more like willful blindness than forgiveness.

Ramirez got caught during the annual spring-training drug test with human chorionic gonadotropin in his bloodstream, a source told The Times (among many other news outlets). Although it has medicinal uses, HCG is best known among male bodybuilders and athletes for resuming testosterone production following a cycle of anabolic steroids. Ramirez hasn’t admitted any steroid use; to the contrary, he noted that he’d “taken and passed about 15 drug tests in the past five seasons.” If he can’t explain why he was taking HCG, we’re left to conclude that baseball’s program of random but infrequent tests after spring training missed Ramirez when he was taking something worse.

The Dodgers don’t have much choice here; they have to take Ramirez back in midseason regardless of whether he spent the off-season bulking up on steroids. But they should use their considerable influence to persuade him to come clean, and here’s why: If Ramirez was using steroids, as he appears to have been doing, that means the league’s testing program isn’t enough of a deterrent. And why would it be? Ramirez was the first star at the top of his game to be caught by the league since it implemented its random testing regime in 2004. Does anybody believe that all of the other A-listers in the league are clean?

The most regrettable part of this story is the response it provoked. Baseball fans didn’t seem surprised that a top player was caught, just that it was Ramirez. And Colletti was hardly the only Dodger willing to shrug off Ramirez’s apparent use of performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals. Dodgers Manager Joe Torre told one interviewer that he felt “saddened,” as if being caught by the league’s tests was a personal tragedy for a player. No, it’s more like a miscalculation, a bet gone bad. Here’s hoping that the enormity of Ramirez’s penalty -- he’ll lose $7.7 million in salary, and the Dodgers will have to develop a new marketing plan for the next two months -- will change that calculation for players tempted by the allure of steroids, tipping the odds in favor of the league, the fans and the game.