The Pecan Park Eagle

Roger Clemens is the only member of the 300 Plus MLB win club who is not in the Hall of Fame.

Rank Order of Totals for the 23 Pitchers with 300 Plus Career Wins:

Two Observations:

(1) Count The Pecan Park Eagle among those who think that Cy Young’s 511 career wins is the most unbreakable important record in baseball. Today’s great pitchers make too much money to pitch themselves over the two decades it would take to even challenge Young. Twenty wins over twenty years only brings a guy to 400, still 111 wins short of the Cy-Master.

(2) Of the 23 men who have crossed the Rubicon mark of greatness by attaining 300 wins, only Roger Clemens of this totally retired group has been ignored by the Hall of Fame. – How long will Roger Clemens and others be denied this honor for merited accomplishment by the smearing shadow of allegations from the steroids era that were never proven in a court of law? Denial sucks and is no solution for anything – and treating someone like Clemens as a pariah on the basis of suspicion, without a trial, except for the one that many people carried out in their own minds, based on Clemens’s congressional testimonials, is not enough, nor is it fair or a real solution. If a player has not been convicted in a court of law, give him the honors he’s due for his accomplishments. – Treating people as though they no longer exist does not solve the problem.

We also think that baseball is guilty of enormous hypocrisy here. Back in 1998, baseball celebrated McGwire and Sosa for the way in which their incredible battle for the MLB home run title had helped the game and its fans forget the bad taste of the 1994 shortened season and cancelled World Series. We have always felt that they were implicitly giving other MLB players the unofficial green light to compete with McGwire and Sosa for the money and attention they also could earn by joining the wrecking ball attack on the power hitting record marks. Intended or not, Barry Bonds saw what he needed to do to outshine McGwire – and what do you know? Down came McGwire’s 7o HR mark and up went Bonds’ new 73 HR standard, as a few others also greatly improved their performance numbers – and pitchers learned that certain HGH products made for quicker recovery from arm injuries. I even remember an article about McGwire in which a reporter caught him rubbing something in his arm in the clubhouse as they were about to begin an interview and the “what’s that?” question came up. In words that read innocently, McGwire just told the guy that it was a cream he discovered that helped heal the soreness in his body quicker. I cannot remember what it was, only that it sounded like a topical HGH product.

Then what happened? The practice got too widespread to escape the attention of reporters who fed on stories of wrongdoing. Baseball leaders were soon pressured to publicly comment on the growing reports of illegal use of steroids by some of the biggest stars in the game. And baseball leaders responded as they often do under public pressure. They responded as Captain Renault did in “Casablanca” when he was ordered by the Nazis to shut down Rick’s Casino. When asked by Rick for his reasons, Captain Renault answered, “I’m shocked – shocked to find that gambling is going on here.” About the same time, a casino employee shows up with a handful of chips that he wants to deliver to the Free French police captain.

“Your winnings, sir!” says the casino employee.

“Oh, thank you very much!” says Captain Renault, as he quickly places the chips in his side jacket pocket.

That’s precisely how it struck me at the time. Baseball seemed to be feigning shock for a problem they had to have known was going on when McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds took the home run record into the stratosphere a few years earlier.

The players hadn’t changed. The owners had changed, at least, superficially. They did it under the force of public articles that were starting to surface about the use steroids in baseball. The leaders of the game could no longer practice denial in that other direction. Once they got past the public media rattles over Bonds, McGwire, Palmiero, Clemens, and, finally, Alex Rodriguez, baseball simply revealed that they had not really changed at all – they simply changed the direction of their preferred public position:

Before public exposure of the HGH issue, baseball simply pretended it did not exist. After its media exposure, baseball had to do some public saber-rattling as a goodwill gesture approach to the idea of problem-solving. By the time the problem fell from much public attention, baseball had installed some more stringent player use testing measures and penalties, but was left with the unfinished business of what to do with the suspected abusers during the HGH halcyon abuse days.

Baseball simply went to its always easiest card. Whereas, before the media blast, baseball had pretended the problem did not exist, they now pretend that all high profile suspects no longer exist.  Baseball may not see it that way, but psychologically, that is exactly what MLB is doing.

Under this plan of action, players like Roger Clemens will not be banned from baseball, but it is unlikely that he or any other highly suspected high achievers will be admitted to the Hall of Fame because of what was never proven or disproven. We are hoping that Jeff Bagwell will prove us wrong in the 2017 Hall of Fame, but if Bagwell does, it will only be cause all that MLB has on him is that he had the arms of Popeye during his latter playing years.

As for the recognition that people like Clemens deserve, they will show up on lists like the table we’ve prepared for this article, but that’s about it.

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  Bill McCurdy

Publisher, Editor, Writer

The Pecan Park Eagle

Houston, Texas

https://bill37mccurdy.com/