Manny Ramirez was always the player you pointed to as proof that baseball players weren’t all dirty.That’s why the news yesterday that he is being suspended for 50 games for testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs is so stunning. He’d have been the last person I would have suspected.I guess this puts me in the Hall of Fame of naiveté.But the question I’m left with today is, if Manny is juicing, then who’s next? When is the next bombshell going to drop?Any athlete who fails a drug test in this era is truly stupid. The spotlight has shone so brightly on drug-enhanced performances in the last five years that you almost wonder sometimes whether we’ve reached a tipping point ? and that we’ve morphed into a McCarthy Era atmosphere where, instead of being proven guilty, you’re required to prove yourself not guilty.Into this maelstrom of suspicion walks what has to be the dumbest person in professional sports today – Manny Ramirez. Even if he’s telling the truth, and that his banned substance was prescribed, he has to know that athletes are responsible for making sure their meds meet Major League Baseball standards.Manny Ramirez was 24/7 high-maintenance during his time in Boston. Even if you liked him (and I did), you had to concede that he didn’t always hustle, quit on the team, caused too many distractions, and acted childishly and immaturely more often than not.But then he’d come back and get a clutch base hit to win a game, or hit a late-inning homer, and your disgust with him would recede into the background. Manny being Manny didn’t just mean being a goof. Manny being Manny meant being clutch, too. And he was.Which is why this is doubly disturbing. Whatever cachet he had in Boston, it began and ended with his bat. He was no goodwill ambassador, the way Tim Wakefield is. He didn’t have a magnetic presence that made you want to hug him even if he was practically 0-for-April, like David Ortiz.Some people called him an idiot savant ? clueless about which socks to put on which feet, but an expert at studying pitchers and enticing them into throwing mistakes that he could hit out of the park.Apparently the “idiot” part of “idiot savant” applies more. Without his prodigious statistics, Manny Ramirez is Pete Rose in dreadlocks ? an “all-about-me” spoiled athlete whose very name makes me groan in disgust. And if those stats are bogus?We’ve had some bitter reinforcement of life’s lessons in the past two days, haven’t we? Wednesday we found out that Sox color analyst Jerry Remy, after a lifetime of smoking cigarettes, developed cancer; and Thursday, we watched one more icon get toppled over. As if we needed to be, we were reminded that sooner or later, your transgressions betray you, and that sometimes it’s merely a matter of time.Now, Manny Ramirez takes his place next to Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez, two wildly unpopular players who tried to either rush fame, or preserve it, artificially. He is, quite literally, the “Curly” in this trio of Three Stooges.