I vote no for several reasons. First, Brad the Impaler covered it better than I could, but there’s always going to be controversy or hindsight that affects the way the future sees the past. Why are PEDs so much worse than amphetamines or segregation or any number of other cheats or moral issues?
Second, we can’t play a game where we just magically remove the PED use and see if the best players are different. In some cases, like Barry Bonds, he almost certainly would have been one of the best of the era without using PEDs. If we ignore the known and possibly the suspected users and pick the best from the rest, how do we know they were clean and they just weren’t investigated because they otherwise weren’t at the top? And why do they deserve it if their actual performance doesn’t warrant it? We’re basically stuck with either including the PED users or pretty much leaving an entire era out of the hall because those who aren’t suspected, in general, don’t deserve it as history stands.
Third, it makes the already questionably credible Hall even less credible. It doesn’t matter what the various writers think, it matters what the fans and history thinks. As mentioned up thread, Shoeless and Rose, by the judgment of most fans, belong in there, as I imagine most fans will feel about the likes of Bonds and Clemens. Discussion of the Hall these days is less and less about the list of great names that are in it, and more about the controversy of the players who aren’t, or sometimes players who are but perhaps shouldn’t be. These issues don’t exist to the same degree in other major sports, and where they do, at least they’re limited to on field performance and will generally be settled one way or the other.
IMO, the best way to handle it is to simply vote based on the numbers. I’d be okay with passing on a marginal candidate was strongly suspected or definitely tested positive, but this dispute isn’t about marginal candidates, it’s about players like Bonds and Clemens. That said, for players that have that controversy around their careers, include that information in their bio, and baseball historians will talk about the PED era. Let history be the judge.
If you’re playing for the love of the game, you’re not playing for millons of $ / year + bonuses and pitching diva-fits when someone cheats in a way you haven’t thought of yet. Pro athletes perform for the entertainment of others, and in exchange they get obscene amounts of money. As a fan, I pay for entertainment. I want to see the absolute best performance humanly possible. Sometimes that performance is enhanced by better equipment, sometimes innovative techniques & training, sometimes by compounds that make the body do extraordinary things. Professionals aren’t slaves, they make the choice to play pro or get a Joe-job. Singling something out like a PED makes absolutely no sense because in every other way a pro athlete today has little in common with his counterpart 75 years ago.
Some Biogenesis players did fail tests, but they were suspended in 2012 and not as a result of this investigation. But no testing method is ever going to be perfect.
It just doesn’t seem to me that any of the means of cheating before the steroid era made all that much of a difference in terms of what a player was capable of. Greenies might have kept players who used them from having what might have been some off days, but didn’t change their underlying capabilities. The grounds techniques often kept a mediocre team in contention, but I’d love to hear about the time they kept a team out of the postseason.
For those who could both master it and consistently get away with it, the spitter and its equivalents did actually improve the performance of some specific pitchers, like Whitey Ford and Gaylord Perry. But AFAICT it wasn’t the sort of thing that most pitchers could master, or else they would have.
But steroids were really a case of “here, take this pill, and a whole bunch of your fly balls will turn into homers.” They completely changed the norms of what was possible. We went from 50+ HR seasons being a rarity and having just two 60+ HR seasons in the history of baseball, to a group of seasons where 60+ HR seasons were suddenly common. I’d have been against that sort of redefining the norm by any artificial means: if it had been the result of lowering the mound another 6 inches, I’d have been equally against that.
Which is different from, say, a much greater abundance of 500-HR and 3000-hit careers, which are much more a result of players being able to extend their careers by staying in shape year-round rather than having to hold down offseason jobs to support their families.
I’ll stay out of the HoF argument, because I really don’t care about the HoF anymore. But I really do feel that the effect of steroids on the norms of the game was qualitatively different than that of greenies or the spitter. Saying “well, there’s always been cheating” is like someone 40 years ago saying “there have always been political scandals, what’s the big deal about Watergate?”
I’m not sure how you can say that definitively, RTFirefly. People have argued for years about the effect of steroids and HGH alone as opposed to what role they played in combination with amphetamines, the smaller strike zone, ballpark design, possible changes in the baseball itself, and some other stuff I’m probably forgetting. I’ve seen people argue that testing for amphetamines has made a bigger difference than testing for steroids and HGH.
I’m not sure why you, and others who make similar arguments in (loose) support of amphetamines, think these statements are different. What’s the difference between adding 5-10 homers to your yearly total and transforming 25-30 games of mediocre or absent play into full production?
… I’ve seen people argue that testing for amphetamines has made a bigger difference than testing for steroids and HGH.[/QUOTE
If that were true, then I’d expect to see at least half the failed drug tests come back as testing positive for amphetamines. Or I would want to see a paper trail to labs with substances that help mask their presence.
Self admitted PED users like Canseco and the late Camintti praised their value in adding power. And batted balls did travel farther, regardless of the size of ball parks.
Just saying that some folks claim that amphetamine testing has made a bigger impact has zero credibility without citation. There’s a lot of sources out there regarding the impact of steroids and HGH.
We might be just a generation away from having artificial limbs that far outperform those that we’re born with. Do you allow “bionic” arms in MLB, using Tommy John surgery as precedent. And there may already be procedures, short of full-on bionics, that fall in between, ligament replacement with artificial ligaments that are twice as strong as the “naturals” and will last twice as long.
Are these okay? If my kid and your kid are high school pitching prospects, would it be okay for me to take out a second mortgage to pay for enhancement surgery so he can throw 5 mph faster than your kid?
At some point, MLB has to establish some reasonable, and flexible precedent for dealing with issues that are not that far away. Otherwise, 100 years from now, sports will be nothing but a battle of technology, since it will be android vs android.
I watch sports to see human competition,with the elements of fatigue and frailty in play. And I think that’s what most fans enjoy, especially those that played the game(s), not nearly as well, and thus enjoy watching those that do what we wished we could have done… fairly. In our ignorance we may have enjoyed the ‘98 McGwire/Sosa HR chase, but once we knew what was going on, how many of enjoyed Bonds’ assault on Aaron’s record?
It sounds like you were thrilled, but I think you were in the minority. MLB HAD to something about it, or else the game would be doomed.
It’s a good point, Bellhorn, and honestly I don’t know where I’d draw the line. I’m just reasonably sure it hasn’t been crossed, with me, yet.
Pro sports are increasingly about strategy and quick thinking. One thing that I like about football is watching old age and treachery hold its own against youth and vitality (why yes, I really do want to see a SEA v DEN superbowl this year). Technological solutions to cartilage & ligament damage (or inferiority) can keep a great mind in the game for a longer time, allowing the player to gain and build on experience, and giving us new approaches to old challenges. As for making a player better as early as high school, I guess that’s a gamble I’d leave to the player and the parents. There will always be a finite number of professional jobs–I don’t think many at the mom & dad level would be willing to sink $100,000 in elective surgeries into their kid to make up for missing talent. And at the end of the day, if we don’t like the number of home runs, or the speed of pitches we can always make the ball heavier and/or softer, increase the distance between pitcher & batter, make larger outfields, etc. As long as everyone’s got access to the same stuff it’s all fair.