The Pecan Park Eagle

The two-homer game of Albert Pujols earlier this week has pushed the MLB 500 Plus HR Club membership to 26 men, with Pujols himself being the only active player in the group.

The 500 Plus MLB Home Run Club.

Of the 26 men who have hit 500 plus home runs in their major league careers, 15 of the 26 men (57.7%) have already been admitted to the Baseball Hall f Fame,

Among those 15 members of the Hall of Fame, none, unless you count the few  extremists who suspected new member Frank Thomas for having a powerful, muscular body, and I don’t, were suspected of using steroids during their careers.

Of the remaining players, only one of the 11 have been clearly established as a non-steroids-clouded person. That would be Ken Griffey, Jr. Those who come up for induction at least once, so far, have all failed to receive the 75% support that each candidate needs for induction.

For now, it is the miscreant players who are paying he price for doing what Messrs. McGwire and Sosa made so famous in the summer of 1998, saving baseball from the strike year of 1994 and making it all the way to the then important cover of Time magazine on the juice.

And they did all that salvation work without the owners ever knowing about the steroids? I guess. I guess it’s just like 1919 all over again – when only the players were dirty – and the owners were clean.

Sometimes two-faced people are so carried away sometimes by a subtle to not-so-subtle personal conviction in their own brilliance and mastery of denial and slight-of-hand that they either forget or lose sight of the fact that it is still possible to kill the Golden Goose business that has paid all their dream barrels for a century, at least.

It isn’t the empty seats that any major league club needs to fear. It’s what caused them to be empty that’s the heart of the problem. And for everyday empty seats, it won’t be lousy baseball that does it, or direct competition with an NFL or NBA home game in the same city on the same day, or the lack of a way to follow the team on television due to the general malaise into inaction fed by greed, or even school starting early tomorrow that has ground things to halt. It’s indifference. – If that day’s  does come home, it will be the drooling beast of apathy that kills the beauty of our dear beloved baseball.

Let’s work against that taking positive action. Here are a few suggestions:

(1) Wait until we get a new commissioner to even try;

(2) Ask the new commissioner to appoint a special panel to consider all the eligible HOF candidates whose way to the Hall may simply be blocked by them being seen as members of that “dirty group.”

(3) Ask the Steroids  Candidate Committee to examine the records of each player for the presence of accomplishments too large to ignore versus the presence of proven offenses that are too large, to date, to ignore.

(4) Expect the SC Committee to hrow out hearsay, innuendo, and improperly handled evidence. Go with what is evidential to date as a basis for approval or denial.

(5) If a man is innocent, or not proven guilty, and he deserves the HOF for his accomplishments, either take him into the HOF and recognize his accomplishments accordingly – or else, ban him for life and further consideration.

(6) Don’t ignore a suspect by leaving him in the regular voting line with the kind of support that normally goes to .210 hitters and 6.00 ERA pitchers.

(7) No man should be left to twist in the wind of uncertainty. Unless we can come up with a way that realistically proves that steroids may create greatness, it seems to me that we need to recognize those who set or broke records during the “owners look the other way” steroids era, while doing all we can to make sure it never happens again.

That would do for a start. And it would beat ignoring Bonds and McGwire and Clemens as human beings who once did great things on the diamond that were not all caused by steroids.

I may be wrong, but it’s been my experience that wrongs we treat as non-events lead to apathy and repetition – and not to healing.

What do you think?