It's time to get loud Giants vs. Dodgers Ramirez deserves every boo Bonds received in L.A.

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When Barry Bonds was on the verge of breaking baseball's career home run record, a record now recognized by 29.3 percent of all fans and experts, he and the Giants visited Dodger Stadium.

The fans booed Bonds, of course, although they did it with a certain L.A. mellowness.

The guess here is that San Francisco fans will be less kind to Dodgers outfielder Manny Ramirez when the teams meet at Third and King in a three-game series starting tonight.

For fans here, it's payback time to the world. The Giants harbored Bonds, baseball's first true steroid villain, took untold grief for it, but hello!, now we're finding out that every team had guys up to their armpits in muscle drugs.

In serenading Ramirez, Giants fans will be sending the following message to the world: "Back at you, self-righteous twits."

That's merely one of the subplots to the series, which is very big to both teams, but it's an important subplot. Ramirez served a 50-game suspension, and since his return, Manny has been hitting like Popeye on cauliflower.

The Dodgers flourished when Ramirez was away, and since he returned, they have come back to the pack.

Now it seems as if their fate is in Manny's hands. Ramirez is the Dodgers' designated time bomb. If he continues along his current .270-ish groove, with so-so power, the Dodgers simply aren't going to run away with the division. If he recaptures last season's magic, when he came to the Dodgers and over the last two months, hit .396 with 17 homers and 53 RBIs, it becomes a different ballgame.

"Manny doesn't have the same swing he had," said someone close to the Dodgers. "He's out of whack a little. He was out 50 games, and he got hit on the hand when he came back. They say (the hand) isn't a factor, but he's not close to what he was last year."

To envision the impact Ramirez could have on the postseason race if he rediscovers his swing, think back to when the mighty Bonds was in his golden groove, when every plate appearance was a home run or an intentional walk with the bases loaded. The Giants rode him like kiddies ride a merry-go-round.

The reason the Dodgers need the "Before" Manny is that the team has some holes. Their confidence is down and there is concern in Dodgers camp that the team caught some really nice breaks the first half of the season and now the scales are tipping back.

The Dodgers' pitching is thinning like a 'roid user's hair. They made a run at Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee and came up empty. They're getting little power production from catcher (Russell Martin, three homers) and first base (James Loney, seven homers).

If the Dodgers were fat and confident in the first half, and that's how they looked from afar, they now wear a lean and hungry look.

The Dodgers probably don't know what to make of the Giants. Who does? Who figured the Giants would be a factor in August, with two-fifths of a solid starting rotation and the offense powered since the All-Star break by an unknown wisp nicknamed Pharaoh.

If MLB knew Eugenio Velez was going to catch fire like he has, it would have spiced up the All-Star festivities with a contest among broadcasters to see who could most creatively mangle the pronunciation of "Eugenio."

Against the Dodgers, the Giants will need more of Eugenio being Eugenio, because they have been inept on the road and they are desperate to squirrel away home wins.

The fans will have to summon up the same type of spirit and spunk they showed in an incident near the end of the 2006 season, when the Dodgers clinched a playoff berth with a win in San Francisco.

After the game, a Dodgers fan climbed the Willie Mays statue and used Willie as a urinal. Giants fans responded, touching off a half-hour free-for-all in Willie Mays Plaza, broken up by cops in riot gear.

"It made me proud to be a Giants fan," says John Epperheimer, general manager of the Acme Chop House, who witnessed the festivities.

He added, "You just do not pee on Willie."

That phrase, in Latin, should be inscribed on the Giants' team flag.

And that spirit, if it's in evidence in this series, might be the boost the Giants need.