BruceG
Great article, as usual. I've always felt that one factor working against Blyleven being voted into the Hall has been has lack of a catchy nickname. (Would the Wizard of Oz have been a first-ballot choice if his name had been Bob Smith?) So, althought I wish Bert had actually been "The Beast From Zeist" while he played . . . alas, it's pronounced Zaste (rhymes with waste). I apologize if you already received this message, but my computer indicated to me that it didn't go through, so here it is again.
11:10 PM Feb 11th

Kev
To Ventboys,

I still feel the point is being missed. The comments on steroids are addressing the health of baseball. An example is your latest, pointing out the relationship of spitballs and steroids. Spitballs cheat the game; steroids cheat and can ruin and even kill those who play the game. Look at the football players and wrestlers (I know, but I am referring only to their bodies). In 10 or twenty yrs. some users will be crippled, others dead. Think of Lyle Alzado. I'm with you on Perry: he cheated, wasn't caught, and baseball survived. Compare that to a baseball player who uses steroids--baseball will always survive, but unlike Perry, the steroid user is playing with dynamite, and if successful, practically assures its further and more widesprad use.
8:19 PM Jan 17th

ventboys
I couldn't agree more with those who attack steroid use from the perspective of "protect the children", as far as looking forward. This article is not about that, though. This is an article that deals with what already happened. If you want to deal with punishment, I guess that's germane, but I'll go another way.

Baseball went through this before. The spitball, emory ball, shine ball, etc., were every bit the scourge of the game in the 1910's that steroid use was in the last decade. They weren't exactly the same problem, but they had a similar effect. The "spitball" era had the same funhouse mirror effect on the numbers as the steroids era did, just in the other direction.

Baseball cured this problem not with punishment, indictments and Congressional hearings, but by looking forward. They kept new balls in play, prohibited defacing the ball (with a few exceptions, the last one retired in 1933), and moved on. There are several spitball pitchers in the Hall of Fame, who are treated the same way as non spitball pitchers.

What are those 5 stages of grief? Anger, denial, etc., I know that the last one is acceptance. baseball made it to acceptance with the spitball. Baseball will make it there with steroids. Guys like us will always use steroid use against certain players, of course, but some of the posts here still hold the spitball against Gaylord Perry. He's in the Hall, and I would guess that, eventually, most of the steroid guys will make it as well.
3:51 PM Jan 17th

THBR
A law on the books that isn't enforced isn't a law, and it can be (and is) argued that such a law has no validity, in that if you suddenly start enforcing it, the breakers of it can go free because the law is being slectively enforced.

In the same way, admitting that Gaylord Perry broke the law of baseball and was STILL voted in to the Hall of Fame because he was "cheating to WIN, not for personal gain" is simply endorsing cheating. I don't care that he was cheating to win -- he was cheating, he's an admitted cheater, and he gets voted into the Hall. That means that cheating is okay. It means that you can knowingly break the rules and you'll be rewarded. Taken to its logically absurd end, it means that if you murder someone in order to get elected President, and you GET elected President, it was okay -- the successful end justifies the means. That is abhorrent to me, it is abhorrent to most of Western civilization, and it should be abhorrent to baseball. But it isn't. Which leads to the conclusion that baseball is abhorrent. I don't think baseball is abhorrent, but I can see why someone would think so, especially when buttressed by the case of Gaylord Perry. Stalin was a guy who murdered millions (or had them murdered), who signed pacts that weren't worth the ink used to sign them, who believed the end justified the means, and whose ends AND means were pretty evil. And yet he's admired by millions in the land of his victims ... that's what "cheating to WIN is okay and justifies election to the Hall of Fame" means in the real world.

Look on it as my exaggeration if you like, but understand that in the long run, it's self-destructive.
11:45 PM Jan 16th

ventboys
What if you gamble on your team to win, but not all the time? This seems to be what Rose did. Also, if you look at some of his lineups, you would come away wondering what the heck he was thinking. He would have Esasky and Davis on the bench, and have Concepcion playing first base. Well before Rose was accused of anything sinister, he was questioned by many for his lineup selections.
11:03 PM Jan 15th

DaveFleming
THBR asks: "If Pete Rose is banned for gambling, why isn't Gaylord Perry banned for throwing spitballs?"

The answer lies in the intention behind those actions. Perry cheated, but he did so to better position his team to win. His actions were wrong, but their aim was in keeping with the basic motivation of sport: to win.

Rose's actions were far more murky than that. His ambition was to win money for himself, and there is the possibility that in pursuing his own ambitions, he placed the team's priorities below his own needs.

THBR is arguing that all illegal acts should be treated the same. I disagree. Rose and Joe Jackson were banned not because they committed illegal acts, but because the illegal acts they committed were against the basic intention of sport. While the steroid users and the spitballers and the beanballers cheated to win, the likes of Jackson and Rose cheated for personal gain. To my mind, that is an important distinction.
8:06 PM Jan 15th

elricsi
Don't get me started on the injustice of excluding Parisan Bob Caruthers.

A little too much group think here, eh? I would have expected more of a diverse opinion on the voting.
9:00 PM Jan 14th

Richie
Cap Anson was inducted into the Hall back in '39. According to Wikipedia.
7:05 PM Jan 14th

evanecurb
Dave:
I voted for McGwire. He is an obvious choice based solely on his home run total. Throw in his on base percentage and other peripheral stats and it becomes more obvious. Steroids, schmeroids.
Steroid use in baseball was not policed until the last five years or so, and while most PEDs were absolutely illegal in this country and technically illegal in baseball, they were used widely by baseball players from 1988 +/- till 2005, without any penalties for their use being applied to the players, their teams, or their teams' officials. The use of anabolic steroids in the NFL followed a similar pattern prior to the NFL's implementation of sanctions. The use of amphetamines in baseball began in earnest in the 1960s and followed a similar pattern, with no penalties applied for many years. Because there were no sanctions for their use, both steroids and amphetamines were, in effect, an accepted tool for use by players within the game. If McGwire, Bonds, Clemens, Sheffield, et al are excluded from the HOF because of PEDs, then the following officials also should be excluded, because the evidence of PED use was right in their faces, and they did nothing in response:

Bud Selig
Sandy Alderson
Tony LaRussa
Don Fehr
the 1993 Philadelphia Phillies

taosjohn:

I disagree very strongly with a portion of your post regarding the benefits of PEDs (10% improvement). While we don't know when most guys started using, we do know when Barry Bonds' usage began (1999) and the results in his case are astounding. While there are many many factors that explain the power explosion of the 1990s, PEDs are not the least important.

Rhetorical question for everyone: Why is there no outrage over amphetamine use? I guess it's because they are perceived not to be performance enhancing in the same way or to the same degree as PEDs, and not as harmful as cocaine and other recreational drugs that have been a big problem in the past.


10:26 PM Jan 13th

Bucky
Dave, I think you are pretty right in that as a group we are more likely to see a player as Hall-worthy if his "pre-PEDs" excellence is enough. This assumes that we are (1)making a guess that the guy used PEDs, (2) that we can make a good guess as to when he started, (3) that we can semi-accurately guess what the rest of his career would be like without them.

So for me, Mac seems like a candidate to have begun taking roids in 1996 at the age of 32; this is when he first cracked 50+ HR. He may have begun sooner, I don't know, although we know that he was taking something (at least some of which was then-legal) in 1998.

I don't see him in the Hall without it. I think of him as almost done by 95, with under 400 HR, very low Black Ink scores, and having averaged 21 HR a year in the previous four years and dipping down to 9 in two of them. His body was breaking down.

Without the help, I don't see him as worthy. So I agree with your premise on how to evalute players of the Steroids Age...I just don't agree that Big Mac should be in based on his pre-PED use.
4:08 PM Jan 13th

Richie
Rivera is a shoo-in because of his postseason run, not because he has 4 more regular-season saves than Smith. Has nothing to do with it, clearly. Nothing at all.

Hard to see where Smith was dominant. If he was, then dozens of closers have like claim on dominance.
12:35 PM Jan 13th

taosjohn
Nice, thought provoking article-- thanks.

As far as McGwire goes, it'd be pretty close to the truth to say I couldn't care less what he took.

The popular myth is that there has been a "steroid era" in baseball and that it more or less corresponded to Barry Bonds' Home Run Years. I don't buy the myth for a variety of reasons. I first heard of steroids in my playing days in the mid sixties, from something Alex Karras talked about somewhere; I simply dont believe that the drugs took twenty years to find their way into baseball (any more than I believe "greenies" were disappeared after the seventies.) In addition I believe that steroids at least are likely more advantageous to pitchers than hitters, and that they are likely more advantageous to marginal players than stars. Its the middle reliever looking for an extra 3" on his fast ball and an extra few hours recovery time in his arm so that he can be effective four days a week instead of three, and its the corner infield/outfielder bench guy who needs to slug 410 instead of 395 to have a job next year-- thats where I think the story really is.

Maybe McGwire or Bonds or Palmiero hit 2% more dingers than they would otherwise-- but a. they didn't need to to be HOF quality-- multiply their achievemnts by .9 and I'll still vote for them-- and b. if they did, they did it off pitchers who were 2% better themselves because of the conditions of their day. Unless we're going to vote no one from those years in, its silly to worry about it. And if we are going to vote someone in, why leave the best out and vote for second best? McGwire hit 49 as a rookie-- was he already juiced? If not where did he start? When Wade Boggs hit a bunch of homers one year, was that the year he tried the drugs? Frank Thomas came over from football and ran a bunch of spectacular numbers-- what evidence do we have that he's clean? Junior kept hurting himself over and over like steroid users supposedly do, and he was raised in a jock environment-- why does everyone think he's so innocent? Saint Cal had a somewhat inconsistent career, and he lost his hair early...

Once you start there's no stopping if you hold everyone to the kind of standard the Designated Cheaters are being held to. These people are outliers, the Hall of Fame candidates of their time-- of course there are some unusual numbers in their record... there would be if the drugs had never been created.

Gambling is anathema to baseball-- it threatens the most basic element of the game, the convention that everyone is trying to win. And baseball is the one major sport known to have had its flagship event sold to gamblers. So Pete Rose' exclusion seems to me to be for reasons which make sense.

But PEDs are used in the effort to win-- there may be a health problem there, but its not really the health of the game itself as it is with gambling. There may need to be rules, but we don't need to regard them as Commandments; and we certainly need a higher standard of evidence than we collectively have been accepting.





I wonder if as much light might be shed on the process by asking people how they ranked the candidates as by who they would vote for. I look at a HOF ballot, and usually see a few names which seem to me to be obviously ahead of the others-- so most years my ballot would have three or four names only. But the results might get closer to consensus if the overall rankings were visible; Trammell and Raines very nearly got my vote, and Smith, Murphy, Dawson and John required some consideration to reject...

Bill once wrote something to the effect that what a player does in his twenties makes him a candidate for the Hall, and what he does in his thirties determines if he gets there. The election of Rice seems to me to run contrary to that observation, and I wonder if it will someday be regarded as a mistake...
4:46 AM Jan 13th