Jan

8

Stunning MLB HoF Reversal

January 8, 2008 |

I have discussed previously that if keeping Mark McGwire out of the MLB Hall of Fame meant that we could keep Bary Bonds out of the Hall of Fame then it was a sacrafice I was willing to make.  My basic premise was two-fold.  1) We shouldn’t let steroid users into the Hall of Fame.  2) I think Bary Bonds is a jerk so I don’t want him in the Hall of Fame.

I am here to state today a complete reversal of my position.  I made this decision a couple of weeks ago and decided to sleep on it a while.  I have slept on it and decided that it’s the right way of thinking.  My primary motiviation isn’t to find a way to allow Mark McGwire into the Hall of Fame because I think he is a nice guy.  I’m not sure that even if he didn’t use steroids he belongs in the HoF.  My primary motiviation is to find a reasonable way to judge this era in baseball.

Anything that lasts a hundred years won’t stay the same over that time.  Baseball is no exception.  One of the problems of comparing players of vastly different time periods is that the game was different and was played different in those time periods.  When looking at who belongs in the HoF and who doesn’t we don’t try to equate the periods.  We decide whether the specific player was a HoF player during his era.

Right or wrong, good or bad, pretty or ugly, the recent era in baseball will be known as the “Steroid Era”.  There is simply no going back.  This era in baseball is marked with the knowledge that some players had an unfair advantage over others because they used performance enhancing drugs.  They’re not all clean but I doubt they are all dirty either.  That is the simple fact of the era.  So, given what happened during the era we have to decide “who was best and deserves HoF status?”

The fact is Mark McGwire (might have been) one of the best of the “Steroid Era”.  Barry Bonds is one of the best of the “Steroid Era”.  They deserve consideration for the HoF independent of whether they used steroids or not because they were some of the best of their “era”.  Does that mean that some will not be considered because they chose to play by the rules?  Yes.  Could they have been considered if everyone was clean?  Yes.  Is that unfair to them?  Yes. When deciding who is the best of an era we simply cannot play “what ifs”.  We don’t have the ability to go back in time and re-calculate performances based on “what ifs”. It would all be speculation with a wide margin for error.

So, we look at what really happened and judge it from there.  It’s all we can do. 

You don’t know how much it pains me to come to this conclusion because it pretty much, in my mind, puts Barry Bonds in the HoF.  But I think it is the only reasonable way of judging people of the era available to us.  We’ll never know the whole story of who did and who didn’t.  The only reasonable options are to drop steroid use from consideration or not to let anyone in from the era.  I think the second choice is a lot more unreasonable than the first choice.

So, there we have it.


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2 Comments so far

  1. G Mitchell on January 8, 2008 11:38 pm

    This forgiveness/get-out-of-jail-free type of thinking continues to get way out of hand.

  2. Nathan on January 22, 2008 3:59 pm

    I think you have to look at it that way. Honestly in any sport you’ll always have people wither stretching or breaking the rules. It’s funny how those people are sometimes revered such as in the case of HOF pitcher Gaylor Perry.

    Here is an interesting article on cheating in baseball:
    http://espn.go.com/page2/s/list/cheaters/ballplayers.html

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