Hold on. Maybe we’re all missing something. Maybe Manny Ramirez wanted to get pregnant.

Either that or he was the rarest of creatures — a male with a viable reason for taking a female fertility drug. Or, just maybe, crazy thought here, he’s another baseball cheat.

Yeah, that’s probably it.

Like Roger Clemens and five of the dozen sluggers on the all-time home run list, Ramirez has wandered into the zero-tolerance, zero-trust zone. The 50-game suspension Major League Baseball handed him Thursday means another great won’t have to worry about writing his Hall of Fame induction speech.

On the one hand, Ramirez claims his suspension is the result of his taking a prescription a doctor gave him “for a personal health issue,” not a steroid or other PED designed to help him hit home runs. On the other, he says he will accept “responsibility” for making a mistake.

Come on. All signs point to Ramirez being just as guilty of trying to beat MLB’s drug policy in 2009 as Alex Rodriguez was in 2003, when he was one of 104 players who tested positive in supposedly anonymous testing.

Unless Ramirez steps up today and provides a credible story — a development no one expects — he’s not going to find many folks willing to believe his story about mistakenly violating the policy — and that includes the folks who sit in the “Mannywood” section of bleachers at Dodger Stadium.

Few believed Rafael Palmeiro when he blamed his positive test in 2005 on a B-12 injection. Few buy into Rodriguez’s claim he only used steroids while with the Texas Rangers.

Unless Ramirez can find a viable reason for taking the drug human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) or discredit ESPN’s reporting that this was the drug in his system when MLB tested during spring training, he’s joining Palmeiro, Rodriguez, Clemens, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds, among others, on baseball’s list of fallen stars.

ESPN quoted sources who said documentation showed that HCG was the reason a urine sample showed Ramirez to have an elevated testosterone level. The drug is on the banned list because steroid users use it to restart their body’s natural testosterone production as they come off a steroid cycle.

ESPN reports it is similar to Clomid, the drug Bonds, Jason Giambi and others used as clients of BALCO.

Boston Red Sox fans will tell you Ramirez lost his credibility a long time ago, thanks to his erratic behavior and inconsistent effort. Yet he did lead the Red Sox to two championships in his seven seasons there and had accumulated his .315 career average, 533 home runs and 1,745 RBIs without being linked to the steroid scandal.

Oops.

The 50-game suspension is going to cost Ramirez almost $8 million, and probably also his ticket into the Hall of Fame. He isn’t going to get his reputation back without a better story than the one he offered in a Thursday statement, issued after he decided not to appeal MLB’s decision.

Ramirez won’t be back until July 3. That may be enough time for the Giants and perhaps the Diamondbacks to make a run up the National League West standings, but having Ramirez in the second half of the season should be enough to allow the Dodgers to win the weak West again. The lasting damage here will be to Ramirez’s reputation, not the 2009 Dodgers.