Can you be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame as a known 'roid monkey?
An early sign will be how the voting goes for Bonds and Clemens, who were both locks for the Hall of Fame before they ever touched a steroid.
Not at this time, ask McGwire.
Care to expand upon that? While he never quit for all that long, he did so with some frequency, and quite publicly. There is also little doubt that there were far more frequent incidents that the Sox were successful in keeping behind the clubhouse doors. It certainly took a toll on Francona’s health.
It’s pretty damn hard to “overstate” the importance of quitting on your teammates, even if you do carry them on the occasions when you feel like it.
Never say never. By 2050 I suspect people will wonder what all the hubbub was about. Performance enhancements may be unavoidable by any governing sports body in the long run; we may have genetically engineered athletes in a 100 years.
I’m not going to defend the guy for being an ass, but his stats in Boston in 2007 and 2008 are pretty similar:
.296/.388/.881 (over 133 games)
.299/.398/.926 (over 100 games)
And I have to credit Bill Simmons for this part, but here’s how he played in July 2008:
So he acted like a dick for sure, but it seems like he was playing well despite quitting on the team. And I know he missed some games in there - around 10 in total. I’m not sure how many of those were in July but some of them were. I’m not going to defend the guy’s behavior. I’m just pointing out that from where I sit, the idea that he quit on the team looks overblown.
Yeah, the personal hell a multi-millionaire who never needs to lift a finger again.
Poor guy. He must be dreading it.
Doesn’t he always, or has he changed his hairstyle?
I’m a Mets fan, so I have no special interest in Manny one way or another, but I don’t get the hate.
He was a truly great player, he wasn’t a sociopath, and more than either of those he was interesting. He was fun to have in the league, and (I’m sure, most of the time) on your team. You can have great athletes who say all the right things to the press and have traditional, dull personal lives, but they don’t contribute as much to their sports as someone like Manny. Clearly defined, unusual, or just plain strong personalities give their teams character, and thus give us something to root for (or against). True, there’s a large extent to which we’re rooting for laundry – I might still be a Mets fan even if the whole team was in the Witness Relocation program and all I knew about them was their stats – but my most satisfying moments as a fan generally come about in part because I know something about the athletes’ personalities and I care. Dull players make for dull teams.
Of course, as regards Manny, all of that is predicated on my not thinking of PED-use as a hanging offense. YMMV.
There are plenty of people in the Hall who used PEDs. I think in the next 10 years voters are going to figure out that there were so many people in MLB trying to get an edge that it’s ridiculous to punish them for something that MLB officials turned a very aware blind eye to.
And plenty more who used amphetamines. We’d keep on turning just as blind an eye to steroid use, about which we all knew for decades so any indignation about it today is a pretense, if Canseco hadn’t rubbed everyone’s faces in it.
I never was a Ramirez fan, even when he was with my Indians. (Cliff Lee is another. I can respect their ability without liking them at all.)
It’s not that he didn’t try when he was playing, it’s that he would refuse to play in the thick of a tight pennant race when everyone else on the team was playing hurt and he wasn’t even really hurt. He even forgot what leg was supposed to be injured.
Manny was a wonderful hitter, best swing I’ve ever seen.
He was also the worst outfielder I’ve ever seen who played for a long time in the major leagues. You had to see him in person to understand how appalling he was, because you couldn’t really appreciate it on TV where you didn’t get a sense of his horrible positioning, he slow jumps, and the balls he threw to the wrong base. I watched a game in Toronto where Ramirez was not charged with a single error but cost the Red Sox at least four runs.
Baseball Reference says Manny was a career -12 WAR as a fielder - e.g. that he cost his teams 12 games over the course of his career that a backup outfielder wouldn’t have. I think that’s a really low guess. He was amazingly bad.
Sure could hit, though.
That’s pretty much what I was referring to. Do we know of anyone in the HOF that was using the more recent stuff? I know Schmidt says he probably would have if they had been around.
We don’t know that *anyone *was clean, no matter what they say.
Let’s just face it, steroids were an integral, widespread, and accepted part of the game for a couple of decades. Any clean-vs.-dirty distinction you may attempt to make is artificial, futile, based on incurable shortage of factual knowledge, and hypocritical. The Hall is for the most eminent players of their time, and there was a period when steroids were part of it. Bonds, Clemens, and Bagwell (somebody has to say it) were among the most the eminent players of their time. They belong in the Hall. Shut up and smile, people.
+1
I don’t think he missed the thick of the July 2008 pennant race. 
That the guy was a headcase is not in dispute. I did want to argue against a specific point, which was that he quit on his team to force his way out of Boston, because quitting on your team is regarded as a special sin against the game. I don’t think the evidence supports that accusation.
Interesting you should mention 2050. The futuristic roleplaying game Shadowrun was originally set in the year 2050, and by that time scientists had perfected the human-computer neural interface. One application of this was “skill chips” (actually, I can’t recall the specific term). A person with an interface in their skull could plug in a chip containing a specific set of skills, so that they could perform complex or difficult tasks without needing prior training (and could swap out skill sets depending on the situation). This applied to athletics as well — a baseball player could “chip” Babe Ruth’s or Nolan Ryan’s skill set. The difference, though, is that in the game world, this was perfectly legal, along with various cybernetic enhancements.
There’s not a rule against it, no, but as others note there might be some practicality issues.