Bonds and Clemens Belong in the Hall

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It seems that every year I end up writing a post opining the  "sanctimonious nonsense" of Hall of Fame voters regarding their personal hangups over voting for suspected steroid users:

It's ridiculous. I don't need baseball writers to teach me about morality, thanks all the same. I want to see the best of the era in the Hall of Fame, and if that includes PED users (and it most certainly does), so be it. Why should some players get the benefit of the doubt, while some get tainted by the brush of their peers?

This year we saw a little movement in the vote totals for players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, not to mention the actual election of one Mike Piazza. Rumors of steroid use have followed Piazza for years - and most people within the sport are reasonably convinced those whispers are true.

Steroids or none, Mike Piazza was one of the greatest offensive catchers in the history of the game, and he deserves his plaque in Cooperstown. But you know who else deserves to be enshrined in those hallowed halls? The best pure hitter of a generation, Barry Bonds, and the Rocket himself, Roger Clemens (both of whom were enjoying Hall of Fame worthy careers before they allegedly began dabbling in artificial enhancement).

There's no way for any of us to truly know who was clean and who was using; some estimates bandied about in the baseball industry guesstimate that up to 70% of players between 1990 and 2005 used performance enhancing drugs at some point. Even if the real number is much lower, who are we to make the judgment call about who was clean, and thus deserving of admiration, and who was dirty, and deserves to be ignored or scorned?

Baseball in the era of free agency is completely transformed from the pastoral game that once took up lazy afternoons across the country. The season is longer, the money has exploded, and with that there have been advancements enjoyed by today's players that those of yesteryear couldn't conceive of.

It's perfectly legal (and really, expected) for players to employ personal trainers and chefs, to get lasik eye or Tommy John surgery, and to generally take advantage of every modern edge they can to mold their bodies into the best possible tools to win. Decades ago, players drank and caroused all season, then spent the offseason working another job, because baseball didn't pay the average player enough to live off year round.

Why are some modern enhancements encouraged and others shunned as despicable cheating? Who does this line in the sand benefit? Anyone interested enough in baseball to visit the Hall of Fame already knows that Bonds, Clemens, Piazza, et al are suspected steroid users, but if it makes you feel better, we could demarcate every plaque between 1990 and 2005 with an asterisk denoting the era they played in, and the suspicions that accompany that.

Mike Piazza will enter the Hall of Fame in a few short months. Personally, I'm hoping that Bonds and Clemens eventually follow suit. You can scream about the sanctity of the Hall all you want, but so long as it includes avowed racists, drunks, and misogynists, that argument is absurd.

The Hall of Fame has never been the Hall of Saints. It's a place meant for the best of the best from every part baseball's illustrious (though sometimes shameful) history. If you don't think Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens fit that bill, I don't know what to tell you.

SoxCast in Syracuse: Episode 10

Sanctimonious nonsense from Hall of Fame voters

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With all the discussion and controversy surrounding the Hall of Fame voting this year, I'd like to propose a new rule: any BBWAA members who were covering the game from the late 1980s to the early 2000s who didn't make a fuss about rampant steroid use while they were witnessing it in clubhouses across the game are no longer allowed to make a fuss about it in their Hall of Fame voting rationale.

I said the same thing this time last year, but it is unbelievable to me that writers who were complicit in the longevity of the Steroid Era through their silence are so incredibly sanctimonious about their votes now that those players are appearing on the ballot.

There's a lot of self-satisfied talk about how the Hall isn't just an honor for players who were the best on the field, but a place for those who were also the most moral and sportsmanlike. It's an admirable wish, but if you're seriously a baseball writer who thinks a violent and racist (albeit incredibly talented) player like Ty Cobb represents the moral and sportsmanlike, even in the context of his era, you should probably take a refresher course in basic baseball history.

Of course, Ty Cobb is an extreme example, but if he was "moral and sportsmanlike" enough to be revered and remembered, who are the BBWAA members to say that players they personally suspect of drug use, or worse, those who just had the misfortune of playing during that time, are unworthy?

It's ridiculous. I don't need baseball writers to teach me about morality, thanks all the same. I want to see the best of the era in the Hall of Fame, and if that includes PED users (and it most certainly does), so be it. Why should some players get the benefit of the doubt, while some get tainted by the brush of their peers?

If a player dominated during his era, if his numbers set him apart from the rest, if he faced the best of his time and beat them, he belongs in the Hall of Fame. Fans understand the nuance of the era, so maybe the BBWAA voters can save the moralizing lectures for their children.

BBWAA: get off your high horse

I don't know about you guys, but I find it pretty rich that so many BBWAA members with votes for the Hall of Fame refused to vote for anyone with the "stain" of steroid use - especially when it was their silence for so many years that allowed a few users to turn into a full-blown "Steroid Era."

Do I agree with the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs? Of course not, but to say they made a mockery of the games and its records is laughable. You know what else made a mockery of longstanding records? The expansions of the regular seasons and postseason: more games results in more chances to break records, while more teams in the playoff field somewhat dilutes the dominance required to set a postseason homerun record.

Baseball is a game of nostalgia. I get it. If you pulled a player out of a 1903 baseball game and put him in a present-day baseball game, it would be nearly the only thing about the present day he would understand, and that's really special. But that's just on the surface of things; there are plenty of things about the game he would NOT understand. Designated hitters, pitch counts, airplane travel, Tommy John surgery, and beerless clubhouses are just a few of the things that would be endlessly confusing for our proverbial baseball original.

Modern players have all kinds of advantages over their predecessors, including but not limited to: full time training staff, laser eye surgery, innovative doctors on the team payroll (I'm looking at you, Curt Schilling - that bloody sock game doesn't happen in 1912), cortisone shots, and more. Even the huge salaries now commonplace in baseball play a role: not being required to work as a ditch digger in the offseason could certainly stave off retirement a few years and strengthen your HoF numbers.

Somehow we came to the conclusion that there are some scientific advantages that baseball players are allowed to utilize, like the aforementioned conditioning programs, cortisone shots, and even surgeries -but PEDs are off limits. And that's an acceptable distinction, since unlike most of the other methods here, steroids destroy your body in the long run.

But it definitely rubs me the wrong way when HoF voters, the very men (and a few women) who were in clubhouses in the nineties, watching as players ballooned up to comic book proportions, who looked the other way, get up on their pedestal and claim they're voting to preserve the sanctity of the Hall. Where were they when players were taking pills and injections and ruining the sanctity of the game? Most were pretending not to see, in order to preserve their clubhouse access and their jobs, which is understandable. But you don't get to do that, and then act like you're somehow baseball's magical savior when you vote to keep the very players you protected with your silence out of the Hall.

It's impossible to prove that anyone who played in that era was clean; Clemens and Bonds had the misfortune of being caught, but there's no saying who was clean and who wasn't. It's unfair to award Hall of Fame votes only to those who somehow escaped public suspicion. After all, perhaps they were just sneakier than those who were caught. I want to see players in the Hall of Fame who were the best of the era, and some of those who were caught were among the best. Anyone interested in baseball enough to visit Cooperstown will understand the Steroid Era numbers must be taken with a grain of salt, just as they understand that it's difficult to compare the Deadball Era to those that came after it.

No matter what the voters decide, there will be players who are unfairly penalized for playing when they did. Some of them will be the rare players that stayed completely clean, and thus unable to compete with the superhuman strength surrounding them. But mostly it's the fans who were cheated: we'll never know who of our favorites was clean and who was using, but the BBWAA has the gall to be all sanctimonious in keeping them out? When it was them looking the other way that sustained the drug abuse in the first place? The whole thing makes me ill.