Ramirez deserves a one-way ticket out of Mannywood

The best and brightest neighborhood in the Los Angeles sports landscape is a very different place today.

Mannywood has officially gone to hell.

The giddy streets are lined in shadows. The colorful houses are painted in lies. The friendly shops are stocked with juice.

The mayor is a drug cheat.

Manny Ramirez dropped a bomb on Mannywood today, leveling the Dodger spirit, stripping the Dodger psyche, and robbing the Dodger safe.

He has been suspended for 50 games after testing positive for a banned substance, but it could be 500 games for all I care.

The Dodgers need to get rid of this knucklehead. They need to get rid of him now.

They can't build their team on fakery. They can't win championships with a charlatan. They can't fall for his act again.

Surely there is a clause in his two-year contract that allows them to dump him for behaving immorally? Surely they can end a relationship with a guy whose betrayal cuts so deep, it deflates an entire team culture, from batting order to ballpark seating to billboards.

No, I won't say I told you so. In earlier columns I warned the Dodgers against giving Ramirez a long-term deal because of his potential for combustion, but I never thought he would be suspended for something like this.

Nobody whispered his name as a juicer, and everybody's name has been whispered. His body didn't look like it belonged to a juicer, and I'm always looking.

I never believed in his flirtations with teammates and media, but I always believed in his training regimen and baseball acumen.

I was worried about him dogging it, not drugging it.

No more.

Now I think about the amazement I felt in watching Ramirez hit .520 last postseason and think, well, of course, nobody is that good at age 36 without help.

Now I think about watching the ball jump off his bat while driving in 53 runs in 53 games with the Dodgers last summer and think, absolutely, his increased coordination and endurance screams of steroids.

No, he did not test positive for steroids. He tested positive for human chorionic gonadotropin, a female fertility drug commonly used by athletes to restore the body after steroid use.

He tested positive in the spring, meaning, logically, the hCG could have been taken after a winter of steroid use.