Steroids in the Hall of Fame?

Steroids in the Hall of Fame?

Just like free agency before, Steroids and PEDs have created an unwanted, irritating visitor that intrudes on almost every baseball discussion. I like baseball. I like thinking about it, playing it, watching it, discussing it, reading about it, and so on. Without any sentimentality for the reserve clause, I would love to recreate a simpler time, when a baseball conversation would suffer no influence from the informational fields that govern salaries, contracts, collective bargaining, strikes, lock outs, agents, or, more recently, anabolic steroids, HGH, PEDs, random testing, Balco, testimony, suspension, Radomski, McNamee, denials, apologies, and anything else related to steroid use. Those days are gone. That stuff isn't baseball, but it imposes itself, and has an undeniable effect on what happens in baseball. You now have to understand those elements in order to understand the game.

I think, looking back, that steroids must have triggered a kind of grieving process. I have been through phases, denials, rationalizations, emotions unearthed, and an assault on moral assumptions. In the early revelations of misconduct, and even in the earlier suspicions, there were conflicting pressures on the concepts of what is acceptable, what is right and wrong concerning central aspects of baseball, which is a problem for a fan who has mostly felt very sure of his opinions. I remember Jose Canseco's denial and indignation, during the 1988 World Series, when answering allegations that he was using steroids. He mentioned how irresponsible the reporter, Tom Boswell, was, not considering the worry it would cause Canseco's family or the damage to his reputation. I remember thinking that such claims were indeed irresponsible, and that, even though Canseco seemed like a prick, publishing loose accusations about him was uncool.

I was undecided about steroids at that point. The issue was in its infancy for me. I remember filing it in the same folder with the spitball. That folder is titled "it's only cheating if you get caught." Lots of laughs and bravado in that folder. "You do whatever it takes to win" is in there. I use that folder to compartmentalize an anti-establishment permissiveness. The rationalizations contained in this folder derive from an admiration for the guts to bend the rules, to find a way to get a competitive edge. The drive to win is what makes champions, and if the human flaw in some athletes is an overwhelming, uncontrollable drive to win, then kudos to those crazy bastards. If you're not cheating, the saying goes, you're not trying hard enough. Most of us don't "try" hard enough, so we vicariously bear the cross of those who want to win so bad they do something outside the rules. We feel a kinship forged by the spirit behind the misdeed.

There's not much room in that folder for introspection or critical assessment of the sportsmanship code, the one that makes outright cheating absolutely shameful. That goody-goody stuff is in another folder. That folder is probably titled "play the game the right way" or something faggy like that. We dust off this folder when we're coaching kids. But it's not faggy then; it's a righteous legacy. There are rules. This is not 'Nam. When we teach kids, we teach them how to play right. We teach them the rules. We teach them not to cheat (by "we" I mean a little more than half of the guys we know, so a majority).

We might even get pissed off when unwritten, ambiguous "rules" are broken. This will not stand! For instance, I remember attending a game at Candlestick, Dodgers blowing out the Giants, total laugher, too late in the game for Dodger youngster Roger Cedeno to be stealing second. He did it anyway. I remember the scene vividly. I looked back at Eric Karros, the batter, as he stepped out and, with subtle body language, said to Cedeno, "thanks shithead, now I get one in the ribs." It was comical, but what I loved more was Matt

Williams, standing at his third base position, flashing the longest, fiercest stare-down at Cedeno as he sheepishly took a six-inch lead from second. It was intimidating from where I sat, and I could only see the back of Williams head. Some fans were yelling mean words. There is no rule in the book against Cedeno stealing that base, but he definitely did something wrong, and it was a consensus.

Baseball people know those situations. We've invested vast time in learning the nuance of etiquette and sportsmanship codes involving beanballs, takeout slides, showing up just about anyone, etc. These codes aren't written; you have to be paying special attention, over time, in order to understand. Any dilettante can read the rule book and spot an according-to-hoyle infraction, and that's why the rule book rules are for amateurs (except for the obscure ones). With the advent of HGH and anabolic steroids, a new stormy sea of unwritten rules has to find its level. Arod got thrown at, basically for actions outside baseball, but involving his own steroids case. Is anyone supposed to know if that is kosher? There are gray areas.

As a fan, I waver on the subject of steroids. I move between these judgmental fields from one conversation to the next. There are rules against steroids, and those who break the rules should be accountable. It is cheating. It is over the line. I wouldn't refute that. I wouldn't want kids to learn the game in any way that invites steroid use. My opinion has moved away from its early leniency, but not because I now gravitate toward full-scale piety. I'm in the gray area. What makes it tricky is that we're talking about baseball, but not really. The part of me that still wants it to be strictly about baseball has it easy: you're either safe or out, and since you broke a rule, you are out. The part of me that wants to understand this in a realistic human context has work to do. It reminds me of the moment I remember most from "North Dallas Forty", when Shaddock says to Coach Johnson: "every time I call it a game, you call it a business; and every time I call it a business, you call it a game." It's lenticular, a fancy word I learned in college that describes those 3-D baseball cards, how it looks like a picture of one thing, but when you just look at it from a different angle, even though you're looking at the same card, the picture is completely different. 'Steroids are some lenticular shit', I think, would be an apt usage. Anyway, now that steroid-era players are eligible for the hall of fame, I feel like I should know where I stand. It isn't a hypothetical question anymore. It has been in the incubator, and now the question is alive: should players who used steroids be allowed in the hall of fame?

First of all, steroids now has an "era." It is a period of time in baseball culture and history. It is a black sheep in the flock of baseball eras. There is no "corked bat" era that I know of. That Canseco memory I brought up earlier was more than twenty-five years ago. Testing for steroids didn't really start until a little over ten years ago. Considering the length of time and the widespread estimated steroid use, this is a complex issue involving all of MLB operations. There are a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what-have-yous. I may seem to be skirting the issue, talking about the owners and MLB administrators, instead of whether or not players who used PEDs should be considered for the hall of fame, but the point is that it is all of one piece.

In fact, the owners should be most ashamed. If player salaries rose sharply during these times, imagine the owners' profits outpacing them. The business of the game, declining in the aftermath of another labor dispute, began to thrive on the newly explosive performance of the players. Team owners - business men - were surely not the last to find out that some players were using steroids, nor about their effects on performance, nor the resulting market growth. These savvy business men surely became curious enough, early on, to make inquiries about these very profitable trends, and just as surely weren't in a hurry to find ways to halt them. Home runs put butts in the seats. MLB rejoiced as commissioner Selig proclaimed that McGwire and Sosa had saved baseball.

Nowadays, McGwire and Sosa would be on the Mount Rushmore of steroid infamy, and the commissioner's office would be the ones to put them there. But this isn't to suggest that the players are innocent of breaking rules. They had to take their medicine, the ones who got caught, and that's the way it goes. What is disgusting is the owners' sanctimonious indignation, after the steroid issue became a scandal, pointing fingers and conducting investigations, supposedly appalled at the behavior of their co-conspirators. It wouldn't do to just accept their portion of responsibility and proceed along the high road, seeking a mutually beneficial end, with the player's union, to the use of PEDs in baseball. That would just look like they were willing to sit idly by and watch wholesale cheating go on with impunity, right before their eyes, which, ironically, is exactly what they eagerly did. A big part of "they" is the commissioner, who, as Marvin Miller repeatedly found it necessary to remind us, works for the owners. Bud Selig himself owned a team. His pastiche of incredulity belongs also to the complicit owners, and so does the bullshit strap-on law keeper role, pretending to bear the unpleasant burden of cleaning up the sport, now that someone is on to them, so it won't look like they had anything to do with it.

The fault I find with the owners isn't an exoneration for the players; I just don't judge the players the same way. The player is the one who takes the needle, that is a fact. For many people, that is the whole story, and anything else amounts to a pile of excuses. But this is a highly competitive profession, not the Boy Scouts. A player who would never entertain the thought of taking steroids sees the people in his industry gaining an unnatural advantage that he can't match, even with an extremely diligent and disciplined work ethic and fitness regimen. These others are reaping huge contracts as a result of their enhanced production. This is a player's livelihood, his vocation, and the stakes are rising, and the scales are tipping increasingly against him. Many players, more all the time, are using, and it becomes apparent that steroid use is basically, unofficially, sanctioned by MLB. If the organization you work for is on board, if the ones in charge of enforcing rules are on board, it creates a de facto green light, if not a mandate, and everybody wins. That becomes the nature of the game. That culture is created and driven by industry leadership. I'd like to see the commissioner and all the team owners stand in front of a camera every time the subject comes up and admit that they sponsored, profited from, and encouraged wide spread cheating, and that they claim an equal share of the guilt with the players who go in front of the same cameras. That will never happen, and I'd like to see the same restraint that prevents it from happening applied to players.

Baseball Writers have, so far, shown an unwillingness to elect to the hall of fame players with confirmed connections to steroid use. This is a powerful way to make a stand for integrity. But they may also exclude, may have already excluded, players worthy of the hall who are only suspected of steroid use. And will induct, perhaps already have inducted, other players who took steroids but didn't get caught. Cal Ripken is beloved, so his iron man run elicits adoration but no suspicion. Frank Thomas looked physically roidish, which is enough to finger some players without evidence, but not the Hurt. Pujols? I'm not saying, claiming, or suggesting that these players used PEDs. These are all seemingly good guys, and immune to the whisper campaigns surrounding the likes of Bagwell, Piazza, and maybe even Biggio, whom I include only because I can't imagine what else would keep him out of the hall. Those last guys never seemed to be bad guys either. It's a mess. We all know there are many more players who used steroids than just the ones confirmed to have done so. But you can't just throw around insinuations. Realistically, even good guys, community boosters, charity founders and donors, class-act type players, did steroids. It would be naive to assume the "good guys" never used steroids, and, in my opinion, it would be an error to assume that using steroids would make them "bad guys." Not in this context. We don't know, and won't know, the entire list of players who have used PEDs.

But enshrining McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, or Clemens, just for a few examples, wouldn't feel right either. Why not? Because their records are artificially exaggerated, that's why not. The numbers are padded because of cheating, to state it plainly. Electing known PED users into the hall of fame essentially erodes baseball's legitimacy, and disrespects all the players who came before. I know that, when I make that claim, there is a chance that I am partly defending against what amounts to my own obsolescence. I can't help but identify with the game as I learned it, so I try to stave off the inevitable emergence of a new generation that will eclipse mine. I act like I am defending Aaron and Ruth, but that's the same sort of cause championed, a generation or more before mine, by those who wanted to defend Ruth against Aaron, or Maris before that. Ruth's records didn't fall with help from steroids, but Ruth's defenders felt that the new records were achieved with an unfair advantage, whether it took more games to break them, or smaller ballparks, or watered-down pitching in baseball's expansion. Those conditions weren't made-up; they were real, and they did have an impact. With all those changes helping modern hitters, many wanted an asterisk to appear in the record book next to the new record holders to make it clear that the new records were of questionable legitimacy. Nobody wanted an asterisk next to Ruth's name, to accentuate his distinctiveness. The game changes. As time passed, the baseball world came to embrace the records Maris and Aaron set, and lost no esteem for Ruth in the process.

But there's still the cheating - wholesale, top-to-bottom, MLB, front offices, pitching, hitting, cheating. The cheaters paint everyone else into a corner of hypocrisy. I'm not sure which proposition I hate worse: taking a hard-line stance for show, when everyone knows it is a facade, or rewarding cheaters for blatant cheating. Perhaps the best way to devise an approach to the steroids can of worms is to envision a way to make it right for the ones who suffered the most damage: the ones in the steroid era who played by the rules. The most fair thing to do would be to identify and separate out all the users from the non-users. Then, those SABR guys could come up with a formula that would balance out statistical performance with some sort of equivalence index, or whatever, in order to retroactively establish an even-steven playing field. None of that can be done, because the first part can't be done (I'm guessing the SABR guys are way ahead of me on their part), but even if it could be done, it wouldn't do anything for the clean player. No part of this solution offers any justice for non-users, because those years, those careers, and those games can't be replayed in real life. Fans and pundits concern themselves with statistical reparations alone, but the players will also be haunted by being cheated out of matchups and competitive moments on the field that might have been different. Meanwhile, keeping only known PED users out might make MLB feel good about itself, but the clean player will watch as former teammates and opponents - players he knows used PEDs - are elected and enshrined, and players only suspected of PED use are frozen out solely because of that suspicion. Any solution that doesn't involve a time travel do-over will fail to grant justice to the clean players.

The Hall of Fame might not be the most salient point of contention anyway. Team owners and GMs don't have the Hall of Fame at stake, and MLB doesn't handle Hall of Fame voting. If Barry Bonds, for example, is not enshrined, his accomplishments will not be stricken from the record. He played the games and put up the numbers, and he did it against many pitchers using PEDs. If Bonds is enshrined, the message is that cheating is acceptable, which is the part that doesn't sit right with me, or anybody else. But that is the exact message that baseball already composed and published. That message is what baseball is, or was. For whatever period encompasses the steroid era, baseball made itself into that message, that image. MLB may now regret that, but it can't change it by acting indignant, and it can't correct it by punishing only the players for only their part of the program. And why disregard the whole era, even if you could accurately define it? It is, after all, the MLB Hall of Fame, and that era is just as MLB, just as actual, as any other. Baseball before 1947 refused to include black players - is the steroid era more shameful? Shouldn't we only count the games played after integration? That wouldn't really make things right. That's not what baseball should have been, but that's what it was, and willfully so. We all have to learn to live with that.    

    

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"I think it's fair to say that Major League Baseball could have been more hard-nosed about their approach, but it's more fair to say that even any effort that they made, or would have made, would have been rebuffed by the players association," La Russa said. "... Why does the players' association do things that is really not in the best interest of the game as a whole? They're really concerned with their constituents." - http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=1992667


Gonzalez's name came up again in the Mitchell Report in regards to the 2001 incident and in that same year (2007), Rangers owner Tom Hicks was asked what move he regretted and answered, "Juan Gonzalez for $24 million [in 2002] after he came off steroids, probably, we just gave that money away." While answering questions about the response to his statement Hicks said, "I have no knowledge that Juan used steroids. His number of injuries and early retirement just makes me suspicious, In any event, we paid him $24 million for very few games."  - http://www.complex.com/sports/2012/07/the-25-best-alleged-and-confirmed-steroid-users-in-baseball-history/steroids-15

Today, when the BBWAA elects either no one or, at best, two of over a dozen deserving candidates into the Hall of Fame, a lot of people will say they’re OK with that because it’s better to err on the side of caution than it is to allow a PED user to enter Cooperstown’s hallowed halls.  When they say this, remind them of the following passage from page 28 of the Mitchell Report:

In 1973, a Congressional subcommittee announced that its staff had completed an “in depth study into the use of illegal and dangerous drugs in sports” including professional baseball.  The subcommittee concluded that “the degree of improper drug use – primarily amphetamines and anabolic steroids – can only be described as alarming.” - http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/01/09/reminder-there-are-already-steroids-users-in-the-hall-of-fame/comment-page-1/#comments 

Poetic rhetoric aside, what did the commissioner know and when did he know it? Admittedly, Selig wasn't the commissioner in 1988 when Tom Boswell wrote his piece for the Washington Post regarding Canseco, nor was he commissioner when a dying Lyle Alzado acknowledged in 1991 his abuse of steroids in football. But it is ridiculous, if not bordering on perjury, for Selig to tell Congress that it was only in "the period of time following the 1994–95 strike" that he began to "hear more about the possibility of the use of performance-enhancing substances by players." After all, the owners were trying to get a steroid-testing policy in place during the strike. Does Selig really expect us to believe that the most myopic, backward thinking of the major professional sports only sought such a policy out of concern for the game—and not in response to a problem that insiders knew had existed for some time? 

In a word, yes. "It was a sound proposal that reflected foresight on the part of the leadership of the game," Manfred told Congress. Just like baseball has always been on the forefront of innovation concerning integration, collective bargaining, free agency, the designated hitter, cocaine abuse, fan loyalty, promotion of blacks and Latinos, interleague play, and a whole host of other topics. In much the same way that former commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis was able to state during the thirties and forties that Organized Baseball had no "formal policy" prohibiting its member teams from employing black players, Selig can now argue that he took decisive action once the problem of performance-enhancing substances reached his desk. After all, until an informal testing program was introduced in 2003, baseball had no tangible proof of steroid use, right? Only in Bud Selig's universe could such logic pass for truth.

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I would never suggest that Jose Canseco is a particularly credible spokesperson for the state of the game. But he sure appears to be speaking Bud Selig's language—whatever's good business is good for baseball.

After all, it's Bud who talked incessantly about baseball's "renaissance" in 1998 and used that analogy over and over again in his quest to build a new stadium in every city with a major league team. And it's Bud who had no concern about remaining owner of the Milwaukee Brewers while serving as commissioner, somehow convincing himself that the obvious conflict of interest could be circumvented with the sleight of hand that created a sham blind trust. So why should it surprise us that Bud would turn a blind eye toward steroids? Why kill the golden goose?  -  http://www.efqreview.com/NewFiles/v22n2/noisefromthedugout.html


The report on steroids commissioned by Major League Baseball, produced by former senator George Mitchell, concluded more or less the same thing: "There is validity to the assertion by the Players Association that, prior to 2002, the owners did not push hard for mandatory random drug testing because they were much more concerned about the serious economic issues facing baseball."
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Baseball players before 2003 had nothing to fear from regulation or league policing, since there was absolutely no testing in place. It was impossible to get caught, and the league sent the message from the very top that it would not only countenance but greatly reward those who cheated. This official license to cheat began to shift the norms in the league; as more players began using drugs, the moral condemnation that might once have attached to cheating dissipated. Cheating will always be present in any competitive environment to some degree, but systemic corruption comes about when it moves from anomaly to norm. - http://deadspin.com/5927199/the-steroids-era-was-just-like-the-housing-bubble-how-mlb-incentivized-widespread-fraud

Story after story after story came out either explicitly stating the Steroid Era was over or implying as much by referencing it in the past tense. Bud Selig, the oh-so-lovable commissioner of MLB, became the spokesman for the explicit camp when he said in January of 2010 (via the New York Times): "The so-called steroid era...is clearly a thing of the past."

Yes, clearly.

As long as you ignore the nine failed tests at the major league level since Selig entered those words into the public record. Not to mention the countless minor league suspensions and Ryan Braun's failed test that was subsequently waived on a technicality.

As long as you ignore the fact that baseball's testing protocol focuses on urine samples instead of blood samples, which is the most effective way to detect HGH use.

Not to mention that carbon isotope ratio testing is only used if initial tests turn up something suspicious despite CIR being the most effective way to detect the use of synthetic testosterone, according to Balcofounder and doping savant Victor Conte (via SFGate.com).

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Absent any reason to the contrary, the individual is entitled to a presumption of innocence, and genetic lottery winners definitely do exist. Toss in the evolution of training, pregame preparation, dietary understanding and, voila, you have bigger, stronger athletes breaking records.

Furthermore, I don't advocate heaping scorn on those players whohave been caught up in the PED net.

If you have a problem with performance-enhanced athletes, you should direct your animosity at the league front offices, the owners and the players unions' brass before taking aim at the players. Those are the entities that are charged with the protection of the game, and they are the ones with the most realistic power to do so.

You do not ask the lunatics to run the asylum.

Owners and leagues have been known to lock out players over financial concerns, yet they throw up their hands as if they're powerless when it comes to PED use.

The unions would, of course, fight any attempt to force the most effective doping tests into a CBA even though they would help dispel suspicions and protect those players who want to compete while clean (which should be the majority if the Steroid Era is dying out, right?).

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1382102-the-steroid-era-has-given-way-to-the-age-of-hypocrisy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6mpHW3SMcc