As far as we know, Mickey Mantle never used PED, but he did consume some stuff that may have forced him to excel in spite of himself. – Ballplayers are human beings first. They are not the gods we once wished them to be as children.
What’s wrong with the picture in the chart below on the top 100 home run hitters of all time?
The answer is easy and obvious. From the top down, look at how many are so deserving of recognition in any complete record of major baseball accomplishments, but who may never be inducted into the Hall of Fame due to their admitted or presumed use of PED on their ways to doing great things between the lines of the game. And this list doesn’t even include the harder to detect or suspect pitching greats.
We could each go down the list from the most notable Mr. Bonds at the top and find a group list that probably would not offer a lot of significant variance based on our fairly common exposure to the same media information, but that common view would still not stand as an established conviction – nor would it make the long-range question go away – “How can baseball have a real Hall of Fame if it never does anything more than handle the era by ignoring the feats of those who did the most to break some of the game’s most cherished records?”
On my list of the top ten home run hitters of all time, half were steroid users. Is your list on this top sub-group any more or less tainted than mine?
Tainted or not, these records still exist, and they need to be handled by more than a hushed footnote pasted in dull lighting on the museum’s exposition walls – or stored away in some records stack file at the national baseball library. As for the record-setters themselves, this Hall of Fame is a place for recognizing both the records and those who established them. It is not a body of character-building role models, as some would like the world to believe it is. Such thinking is the incubator for nose-snubbing votes for the Hall of Fame that are based on little more than libelous gossip and all the other perceptual facets of distrust.
My apologies. I promised to let the Biggio Hall of Fame snub go for a while after yesterday. I apparently spoke too soon. This whole thing has really awakened me on some new level to the fact that baseball needs to either realistically deal with its hypocrisy or suffer the loss of credibility that is coming soon, if it does not.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
January 12, 2014 at 4:02 pm |
In addition to his reputation of being a virulent racist, Ty Cobb was rumored to have belonged to the KKK. Should he get the “bell, book, and candle” from the Lords of Baseball and their scribes in Cooperstown?
January 12, 2014 at 5:13 pm |
Cobb was not merely a racist, he also physically attacked and beat fans and players including one often reported incident when the fan had lost his hands in an industrial accident. He was by any account a thoroughly unlikable guy.
January 12, 2014 at 5:58 pm |
Not disagreeing with the Cobb stuff, but those behaviors didn’t give him an edge over his peers between the white lines. Bill’s question is more substantive: how does the issue of the PEDs users get resolved over time? I believe it will sort itself out, but hypothetically speaking, let’s say it sorts itself out with all the juicers eventually getting a plaque in the HOF, If that happens, what should be done about PEDs testing? Should MLB ditch the PEDs rules it currently has in place, and should the CBA ditch the enforcement policies it has in place? What would be the point of those rules and policies anymore, if all the known and proven juicers get in? Or should they be retained, although retaining them would essentially be window-dressing under those circumstances.
January 12, 2014 at 6:29 pm |
Everyone from the PED era who becomes eligilble for HOF voting should be required to take a lie detector test. If he fails he should be taken off the eligilbility list. If he is inconclusive, he would have to retake the test until he completes it successfully or fails. A refusal to take the test would result in removal from the eligibility list.
January 12, 2014 at 6:57 pm |
The Hall of Fame, it seems to me, is there to honor the players who stood head and shoulders above the competitors of their era and possibly others too. In order to fairly assess this, the player in question should never have been involved in any activity which taints the outcome of such competition: gambling on baseball, or juicing being among them. (Reasonable people can disagree about whether Gaylord Perry, a known spitballer, should be included). Aside from that, it is not a Hall of Nice Guys, the Politically Correct, or People We Like.