The last thing Major League Baseball needed when the 2009 season began was another superstar getting caught up in the Web of performance-enhancing drugs. Yet the integrity of the game took another hit when Manny Ramirez was hit with a 50-game suspension.

Now Commish Bud Selig and his cronies are facing another hit as Ramirez currently ranks fourth among National League outfielders in early All-Star voting.

There was little the league could do to prevent the 12-time All-Star from appearing on the ballot. After all, voting begins roughly two weeks into the season.

More amusing, in the long-term anyway, than Ramirez appearing on the ballot is Major League Baseball calling its mid-summer exhibition an All-Star game when it starts fan balloting before players have even worked out the kinks in their games. The timing of the voting just illustrates how this game is a popularity contest for the fans and not a contest featuring the league’s best players.

But that’s for another post.

That Ramirez is even eligible to play in the game is laughable. Sure, he was batting .348 with six homers before he got benched. But those numbers came in 27 games and 92 at-bats. By the time the All-Star game actually comes around on July 14, Manny will have been eligible to return for 11 days. After spending a week or so in the minors getting back in game shape, Ramirez might have played 30 games? Maybe 35? He does not belong in the All-Star game.

But Major League Baseball probably doesn’t care. It’s likely going to be more important for them to have the name and face that is Ramirez than to have its drug program actually stand for something. They’ll stand behind the fact that the rules don’t prevent Manny from playing. They’ve already started:

“Once the ballot is done it’s done,” said MLB spokesman Pat Courtney, to the New York Daily News. “We have paper ballots out there. We won’t be re-printing ballots.”

They won’t say what they really mean – no Manny means less interest in the game.

The ridiculous-ness has gotten to the level where Jason Rosenberg set up a satirical Web site asking fans to vote for Manny. He claims the site is “one part sarcasm, one part fun, one part grandiose hopes the game will somehow change to make sense.”

Snicker. Guffaw. Sorry Jason. I doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon.

The Manny Ramirez issue actually brings together a collection of issues surrounding the All Star game, which much like the sport itself in recent years, has really become a mockery of itself. A caller to the Dan Patrick Show this morning made an interesting point. Home-field advantage for the World Series is determined by who wins the All-Star game – so why wouldn’t National Leaguers want Ramirez in the game?

It’s a fantastic point. But it isn’t an argument for including Ramirez in the game. It’s another reason why determining home field in the Fall Classic by using an over hyped exhibition game – WHERE THE PLAYERS ARE SELECTED LARGELY BY THE FANS – was yet another ridiculous solution Selig to what was a one-time problem.

The Major League All-Star Game is a joke and with every World Series that gets decided in part by its result, with every .219 hitter elected by the fans, and now, especially during an era in which Selig is trying to convince the public that the game is clean and the league is serious about ridding itself of its drug issues, with every player that has been suspended for using performance drugs who gets named to the roster, it just becomes more so.

Ramirez should take the high road on this and just announce that he won’t play even if he’s voted in. I hope he doesn’t, though. That would take Selig off the hook. Failing that, Major League Baseball, in yet another face-saving mission, needs to change its rules to ensure that Ramirez and any other Major Leaguer suspended for using performance-enhancing drugs of any kind are prohibited from playing in the All-Star game either that season or during the following 12 months.

Otherwise it’s just one more way in which baseball will continue making a mockery of itself.