Evan Help Us

Less than 12 hours after Major League Baseball suspended Manny Ramirez 50 games for using a banned substance, a startling revelation that shocked a league and fan base still reeling from Aex Rodriguez's earlier forced confession of using performance-enhancing drugs while playing for the Texas Rangers, Evan Longoria, the centerpiece of an impressive and dangerous Tampa Rays team, took Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte deep into the left field bleachers. Six innings later, after Carl Crawford turned on a Mariano Rivera cutter, Longoria launched a second Rivera pitch about 450 feet, becoming the first person ever to hit a back-to-back home run against the previously untouchable Rivera. Longoria's homer was his 10th of the still-young season, an impressive number that becomes even more so when you add in Longoria's sterling .368 batting average and league-leading 38 RBI. 

If there were any doubt, Longoria, still only 23, is now the face of baseball. And not a moment too soon. I don't want to put too fine a point on this, but baseball needs Longoria right now, perhaps even more than the league needed Cal Ripken in 1995, after the infamous players strike, which ate up the conclusion of an exciting 1994 season-- and the World Series-- alienated baseball fans everywhere. In between then and now, though, we know now that the league, following the example of Commissioner Bud Selig, ignored unmistakable signs that the game's best players were juicing in the interest of the gate and unprecedented marketing opportunities. McGwire. Sosa. Bonds. Clemens. Giambi. Tejada. Rodriguez. Manny. Turns out they were all dirty; every other player of that time, like it or not, came of age in a highly dubious era, which gives me pause to say definitively if any player in the past decade was, in the strictest terms, ever clean.

Longoria is different, though. Since breaking into the league last year, three years into the baseball's punitive testing policy, Longoria has put up super-star numbers as cleanly and as free of doubt as humanly possible. Like the Milwaukee's Ryan Braun and, to a lesser extent, Boston's Dustin Pedroria and Kevin Youkilis, Longoria is helping us get beyond baseball's disreputable recent history with legitimate, eye-popping numbers. Here's how Longoria measures up to the so-called greatest talents of baseball's steroid era, courtesy of SI's Tom Verducci:

Impressive, to say the least. Good enough, even, to restore, at last, the integrity of the league.