Hall of Fame?: Through the Fog of Baseball's Steroid Era

I'm delinquent on some Bengals posts AND it's time to start getting into draft news, but today I'm going to skew out of the NFL to a topic that has been driving me insane lately...

The Roger Clemens verdict was announced and the debate rekindled. The same thing happened when Barry bonds was acquitted. The same thing will happen every year when the hall of fame voting is announced from now until the obituary is written for the last player from the steroid era.  Should players from the steroid era be allowed in baseball's Hall of fame? It is another one of these intricate sports debates that looks black and white on the surface but turns into a twisted mess when you dig down a few feet.  From where I sit it has polarized into two main sides. First, you have the pens.  The self-appointed guardians of their sport, the pens have taken a firm stance.  Cheaters do not belong in the Hall of Fame.  If Mark McGuire were skinny without even a whispered connection to PED’s, he’d be voted in faster than you can say androstenedione.  I’m not sure McGuire is allowed in the state of New York, let alone anywhere near Cooperstown.  If the pens think you did it, you’re out. On the other side you have the voices.  This group tends to be people a little closer to athletes and former athletes. Broadcasters, TV analysts, radio personalities.  They don’t carry as much weight with the Hall of Fame voting as the newspaper crowd, but they tend to be more vocal.  It’s not really a unified stance.  There’s a strong contingent that want to lump the whole infamous saga together as an era and treat all players in that time frame equally.  There’s an offshoot of that group who isn’t willing to condone PED’s but still sees the Hall of Fame as a matter of history and isn’t willing to freeze anyone out. There’s the Bonds was a Hall of Famer before he used so he should get in crowd.  There’s the let them all in or keep them all out crowd.   It is a disjointed mess, but the common thread tends to be opposition to the pens’ vendetta methodology of voting based on hunch.

What do I think?  Unfortunately nobody asked me.  It’s hard to know what fans think really.  The majority of them either don’t platform their opinion or they don’t have the time or wherewithal to wade through all of the sludge.  With all due respect to the drool-laced rants from the one percenters that call in to radio shows (Roger’s innocent! No way He did it.  He never once tested positive!), I took a crack at sorting through the noise and laying out what I consider to be a fan’s take.

First of all, let’s address the elephant in the room.  What these guys did is criminal.  Why isn’t anyone talking about this?  I’m willing to totally ignore the illegal drug use part of the equation and the whole thing still stinks.  I’ll confess my understanding of U.S. law (or any law) doesn’t amount to much past don’t steal, don’t hurt people, don’t smoke crack, and don’t go more than 10 mph over the speed limit.  I’m not going to pretend to truly know what fraud is or isn’t, but if this wasn’t illegal Bernie Madoff, Martha Stewart, Enron, Tim Donaghy, they’re all innocent too.  Players used illegal drugs (again go ahead, leave illegal off the front of that.  I don’t care.  I only invoke that part of the argument when you come at me with “well HGH wasn’t technically against the rules.”  Really?  That’s like saying “well you told me not to stab anyone.  You didn’t say don’t stab anyone with a pitchfork.  Are you really trying to say every time a new PED comes out it’s fair game until someone puts it on a list?) to secure big money contracts.  You can’t tell me someone like Jason Giambi would have grossed the same amount of money with and without drugs.  Even Barry Bonds,  the poster boy for the “they were already good before using“ camp, secured a record setting $90+ million contract at the age of 38 and a $15 million contract at 43 years old.  Even if you manage to convince me Bonds would have had a prayer of playing past 38 without HGH, you can’t tell me he would have made any more than $30 million.  Quick math sports fans. The guy stole over $70 million dollars. There’s no doubt most of the steroid era Hall of Fame candidates would have still made buckets of money without drugs, but performance enhancing isn’t called performance enhancing for nothing.  Front offices weren’t used to 50-home-run hitters growing on trees.  Then all of a sudden they were everywhere and the market stretched like a medium sized sweater on a fat man.  And who do you think footed the bill?  It’s not like the owners dipped into their own pockets.   All of a sudden hot dogs costs $5, ticket prices are through the roof, and you can’t get basic cable for less than $40.  If artificially inflating your market value to rake in cash isn’t against the law, I don’t know what is.

So why doesn’t anyone seem to care?  The Hall of Fame is all that really gets talked about.  I’m all for letting the law handle the legal and letting sports handle sports (COUGHPenn. State), but I’m not sure you separate the two out in this case.  Money, fame, power, they’re all brothers and they’re at the root of 90% of our problems.  This is no exception.  The argument here is over the consequences of what happened.  How do you weigh that without digging to the root?  Maybe journalists just don’t see the connection.  Maybe they’re too close to it.  Maybe they feel guilty doling out punishment for something that happened on their watch.  It wasn’t just players that made money on this.  The power boom single handedly sucked the entire baseball industry out of the post-strike malaise of the 90’s.  Now all of a sudden no one is comfortable talking money.  Meanwhile, the losers in the whole deal are mesmerized by the dangling ball of yarn in the corner bobbing our heads around like a giant freaking heard of cats.  But look at all the enjoyment we got out of the home run chase.  Now all we’re left with are a bunch of hollow memories and a semi-toxic feeling in the back of our stomachs like we just ate some bad barbeque.  So what should happen?  Players that signed contracts based on PED-laced numbers deserve to go to jail.  Deserve.  Should they actually get locked up?  No, that would just cost more money.  If I were all knowing and all powerful, I would rule players have to pay back every penny.  The money could go into some kind of fund for building schools or something else useful.  Players that don’t have the money can keep the equivalent of minimum wage out of whatever money they make until they pay off their debt. The last time I checked my mailbox, there was no package waiting for me with a gavel and an exhaustive list of offenders. Aside from a couple of ill-fated perjury cases there has not been and there will not be any litigation.  That brings us to Cooperstown.

Like a pile of dirt on a dead body, there actually is sports side of the story on top of all this.  How do we handle the legacy of the steroids era and why?  The pens have mostly the right idea, but they oversimplify the issue and leave themselves vulnerable to the hordes of voices prodding at their position.  “Cheaters do not belong in the Hall of Fame." 

"What do you mean cheaters don’t belong?  The Hall of Fame is filled with cheaters.  Baseball was built by cheaters.”  With no real comeback, the pens are forced to take the bait.  They point to the home run stats and how the record books, seen as one of baseball’s greatest assets, have been sullied.  The blood is in the water and the voices poke holes in the sanctity of baseballs’ precious statistics.  “Stats?!  What about the stats that were racked up before the color barrier was broken?  What about the dead ball era?”  And my personal least favorite (more on that in a minute), the golden arrow in the voice quiver picking apart the stats purity angle and the cheaters shouldn’t prosper angle at the same time, “what about the widespread use of amphetamines in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s?”  The pens are stuck  “…Yeah, but cheating is wrong.”  The voices are incredulous and the whole thing skips the rails in so many directions no one really has a clue what is being argued about.  “Cheaters are synonymous with baseball!  Why is the Hall of Fame all of a sudden some sort of moral high ground?  Ty Cobb is in the Hall of Fame.  He is the worst human being ever.  Are you going to pull him out of the Hall of Fame?  What about everyone else that cheated?  What about everyone else that used drugs?  And oh yeah, did we mention amphetamines?  The Hall of Fame isn’t a sanctuary.  Bonds and Clemens were Hall of Famers before they started using.  Why not let them in?  Why not have a disgraced wing of the Hall of Fame?  The Hall of Fame documents the history of the game.  These guys have to be included.  It’s hard to catch everyone.  Why not allow HGH?  What about when somebody has surgery and has a ligament replaced with a cadaver ligament?  That’s performance enhancing too, right?  Steroid era players should be all in or all out.  How do you possibly decide who is in and who is out?  You’ll never truly know.  What if you let someone in who used OR keep someone out who didn’t actually use?”  It never stops.  No one knows which way is up.  And that’s where we are today.  The pens stay silent until Hall of Fame voting time.  They make their statement.  Then the voices go through all of their whiny arguments again.  A few cycles have passed.  The pens have held strong, but the pressure is starting to mount as more and more big name steroid era players become eligible.  Some writers are starting to buy into some of the arguments and gradually the castle wall is starting to show a few cracks to the point where I wasn’t sure what was going to happen when this year’s voting results were announced.  Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, they are now all in play.  How long can the pens withstand the siege?  Only time will tell.

   

If you haven’t caught on, I don’t think Bonds, Clemens or anyone who used should get into the Hall of Fame.  Let’s go through it piece by piece…

“Cheaters are everywhere!  Corked bats, emery boards, Vaseline, AMPHETAMINES OH

MY!”

First of all, who cares?  Think of each instance of cheating as an individual crime.  If you didn’t prosecute somebody for one crime, would you totally ignore the next crime?  Just because someone got away with something 40 years ago doesn’t mean you’re obligated to accept cheating for eternity.  Second of all, yes, you technically can group all other drug use and rules violations along with HGH because they are all some form of cheating.   However, it’s a mistake not to look at it as a relative scale.  Stop throwing amphetamines at me like it even holds a candle to what went down in the 90’s (seriously, next time I hear it, I’m going to break something).  If you think of HGH use as the equivalent to armed robbery then using amphetamines is shop lifting.  I don’t think anyone would argue that amphetamines are no longer in the game.  When rampant amphetamine use stopped, did anyone notice?  When HGH became a dirty word and the MLB stepped up their drug testing offensive numbers dropped off a cliff.  Stop comparing the two.  Third of all, should admitted amphetamine users from the past be removed from the Hall of Fame?  Absolutely not.  I’m convinced nobody made a mint or even made their career on amphetamines.   There is no risk of amphetamine use coming back. Retroactively punishing users serves no purpose and even considering it is just distracts everyone from the issue at hand Focus on the issue at hand people!  What do we do with HGH users?  Instead of cheating, think of the scale as a performance enhancing scale with a line in the middle to separate what is and isn’t cheating.  Everything to the left is fair game.  Practice, sleep, nutrition, scouting, vitamin supplements, they’re all on the left side.  Practice is way left.  Vitamins are a little closer to the middle.  Stealing signs is just over the line.  Amphetamines are well over the line.  HGH is another few time zones past that.  Yes, there are shades of gray in the middle.  HGH is nowhere near any of those shades.  Why confuse yourself by considering everything all at once?           

 “It’s a matter of history! Cooperstown is a museum.  Why not let steroid era

players in?”

 Actually, I have no problem with including steroid enhanced players in the Hall of Fame.  I think it would be a mistake not to have an exhibit detailing what happened and who was involved.   What I don’t understand is why everyone thinks you have to elect players into the Hall of Fame to do that.  The baseball Hall of Fame has a museum that details the sport from its beginnings right up to the present and then it has a large hall with all of the plaques for the inducted players.  Fine, put Barry Bonds in the museum, but make it clear what he did and why he doesn’t have a plaque.  Even better, get creative with it.  Display all pictures of him as a silhouette in a uniform.  Have an exhibit where you could try on one of his batting helmets before HGH use and after.  Just don’t induct him.        

“If you lock people out for using, how do you decide who is in and who is out?”

and “It’s either all in or all out.” 

It is one of the most widely debated facets of the argument.  Ironically, the present method the pens are using is just about perfect.  It isn’t like we are talking about the death penalty here.  It’s the Hall of Fame.  So what if we get it wrong.  Nobody’s going to jail.  “But you might unfairly dismiss somebody’s career.”  Guys can still have their picture in the museum.  It just means they don’t get a bronze plaque, they can’t put HOF after their name, and they’ll make a little less money at card shows for the next 30 years.  We live in the information age.  Maybe for once, social media can be put to good use.  Tiger Woods can’t fart without everyone knowing about it, and we can’t somehow gather enough information to make an educated guess of who did and didn’t use drugs?  I have to believe we make the right call at least 80% of the time.  It sucks for the 20% that get unfairly labeled.  Sorry, Mike Piazza.  You are collateral damage.  Consider it a penance for looking the other way when this all went down.  Keep them all out doesn’t make sense.  In that case, you are falsely punishing way more than 20%, and you have to somehow decide where the era started and stopped.  “Let them all in.”  That’s a cop out.  “We might have to make some hard decisions and hurt some feelings, so let’s just give them all the thumbs up.”  What kind of message does that send?  It’s okay to cheat as long as you all do it.  Come on.  We can do better than that.        

“Don’t get all high and mighty.  Who are you to judge them?” 

If I were in their shoes would I have done it?  Who knows?  Fortunately, I have not been cursed and I have not been blessed with facing the same decisions they faced.  Why does that preclude me from wanting to hold them accountable for their actions?  Someone who robbed a bank to feed their kids still robbed a bank.  If others before them robbed banks and didn’t get punished, they still robbed a bank.  They still face consequences.  Is it really a moral issue to call them out on it?       

“Bonds and Clemens were Hall of Famers before they used PED’s.  They deserve to

be voted in.” 

Voices aren’t shy about calling out pens for being overly pious over the Hall of Fame yet they talk out of the other side of their mouth when they insist it’s absolutely necessary to include greats like Bonds.  Okay, it’s not that important or it really means something, which is it?  I’ve been beating around the bush because I wanted to clear out some of the counterargument clutter first, but I guess I should get to the point.  We don’t really care about the Hall of Fame.  We care about sports.  Many bemoan how much we care about sports, but for better or for worse they are a big part of our culture.   They thrill us.  They make us cry.  They teach us lessons.  They distract us.  They bond us together.  When we are old, they fill our memories.  When we are young, they fill our dreams.  Competition is compelling, so we watch it.  Competition of elite athletic talent takes it to a whole other level.  Play to a set of rules and may the best man win.  It is thrilling to see the athletic display and to see who comes out on top.  Did you see how far that guy hit that ball?  It’s less thrilling if the feat isn’t pure.  Sure, he hit it 500 feet but his testosterone levels are quadruple the levels of a normal man.  Blake Griffin dusts off the top of the head of a 6’8” tall man with his groin and millions of people search for it on Youtube.  If Griffin jumps high because he’s on drugs, the feat isn’t much more interesting than watching the mascot bounce off a trampoline to dunk at halftime.  Competition itself is affected similarly.  If one side has an edge, the incentive to watch drops way down.  Even if both sides are using drugs, how do you know if the winning team is better or if they just have better drugs?  May the best chemist win.  Yee haw.  The fact is PED’s tear at the fabric of sports.  A fast pitch.  Amazing speed.   A jaw dropping dunk.  What does it mean if the athleticism isn’t natural?  Why would we watch?  The truth is the pens and the voices think the Hall of Fame itself is important, but it really isn’t.  It’s a building with a bunch of pictures and statues in it.  The reason I care whether or not they get voted in is because it’s all we’ve got.  It’s not like we have to worry about whether the U.S. government is going to convict players any time soon.  It’s either yes to the Hall of Fame or no and so that’s what I’m clutching onto.  In absence of any other concrete sign of acceptance or disapproval, voting PED users in or out becomes symbolic.  Yes, it is probably naive to think Hall of Fame voting will have a major impact on PED use.  After all, money trumps all motives.  Yet, what if it causes one player to stay clean?  Or two?  Or three?  Or conversely, what if voting yes causes one player to use drugs?   It feels like voting yes does much more damage than voting no.  “If we think you did it, you’re out.”  To me, it makes

sense.           

After carefully trying to straighten out the refrigerator-box-filled-with-tangled-Nintendo-controller- wires-sized mess, the answer is still no, baseball’s steroid and HGH users should not be allowed in the Hall of Fame.  Why?  Because I’m still pissed at you, Barry Bonds.  What you did in combination with anything short of you pulling your own name off the ballot is the equivalent of walking into my house, stealing a $20 bill off my counter, peeing all over my 42” flat screen TV and then sticking your hand out and asking for a cookie.  Go away. Go crawl into your mansion and leave us alone.  You deserve less.  The market has been prematurely stretched to where front offices spit out $200 million contracts like watermelon seeds.  Why can they afford to do that?  The cost gets passed right along to you and me.  If that weren’t enough, sports themselves have been stained.  I can’t see anything amazing anymore without a little voice in the back of my head asking if it’s real.  No, I can’t pin all of that on you, Barry.  Many others contributed.  But the steroid era in baseball did plenty of damage for a sport that had previously only dabbled in PED’s.  These guys tainted records, World Series championships, Cy Young awards, MVP awards.  What’s next?  I’m afraid to answer.  The state of sports was never more evident than during the London Olympics.  The 100 meter dash should be one of the most thrilling spectacles in sports.  The world’s greatest sprinters line up, fire out of the gate and motor down the track like they have rockets attached to their butts.  Instead, the event spurs discussion about how the key to sprinting is to exceed your baseline testosterone levels by the maximum amount allowed without being disqualified.  Usain Bolt’s accomplishments over the last five years should seal him as one of the greatest athletes of all time.  Instead the first question anyone asks is whether or not he is clean.  Do we give up?  Do we accept the steroids era for what it’s worth and pretend it doesn’t lay the groundwork for the next generation of drug users in sports or do we make a statement?  “We’d prefer our sports clean, thanks.”  It might be too late.   The fight might be futile.  But for anyone who truly cares about sports, it’s a fight that is worth having.