Will any of the players who have been suspected of using steroids make the Hall of Fame?
Can we have a Hall of Fame without the home run record holder as well as the most hits record holder?
I do believe that there is enough smoke to tell me there is a fire. McGwire, Sosa, Palmeiro, Bonds, and Clemens probably did use steroids during their careers. Should they be kept out of the Hall?
There is no way to prove how rampant use was. If it has not been proven how can you deny them. I believe they used but that is not sufficient. Can you deny Bonds numbers?. How many homers off juiced pitchers.? I do not like it but the steroids have to be ignored.
They will not be kept out on mere suspicion. If some court (or even a commission empaneled by MLB) makes some specific finding that certain players took steroids against the rules, those people will be kept out.
Otherwise, you may as well say that all player and team records between years x andy will not count because the players might have been taking steroids.
I think a few guys will be made examples of (McGwire and Palmeiro), but the sportswriters will vote in most of the suspected cheaters, if their numbers are good enough and if the writers liked them.
If a smoking gun turns up, everything changes. But if it doesn’t, Sammy Sosa (to use one example) will be elected easily, even though he conveniently forgot how to speak English during Congressional hearings.
I think we have to define “mere suspicion” more clearly - it doesn’t apply to most of these guys. Palmeiro failed a test for steroids. Clemens and Bonds were both discussed extensively in the Mitchell Report, and Bonds is being charged with perjury by the government. Four years from now, we’ll know how that played out, and we’ll know what the government ultimately does with Clemens, too. For practical purposes, McGwire confessed by refusing to answer questions and by vanishing from the baseball scene. I guess you could say Sosa is a case of “mere suspicion.” Ultimately the question isn’t “did these guys use steroids and HGH and other drugs,” because it’s obvious they did. The question is how much does it matter to the sportswriters, and I think most of them will probably do what astorian suggested.
The main impact will be the delay of entry. Based on stats, Bonds is an obvious first ballot guy. But, I’d be willing to bet if the vote was today, he wouldn’t make it for a couple of years.
Sure- Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine are shoo-ins, and there’s nobody with a sane neuron in his body that thinks they juiced.
There will be a problem coming up around the early teens. There will by that time be so many qualified and borderline candidates on the ballot that they will start to crowd each other out. This is not a commentary on the voters so much as on the system. You see you only get 10 votes as a voter, but by 2014 they likely have to choose from Clemens, Bonds, Maddux, Glavine, Smoltz, Schilling, Biggio, Big Unit, Big Hurt, Mike Piazza, and yes Palmiero. On top of that we’ll have reasonably qualified guys like McGriff, Bagwell, Larkin, Edgar Martinez, and Trevor Hoffman, along with holdovers like Raines and Trammell. Given the 10 vote limit the more borderline candidates will be seriously interfering with each other. The problem is that the 10 vote rule was created when we only had 16 teams, but now we have 32. It’s taken this long for the latter to catch up to the former, but it was pretty much inevitable.
Then, on top of that, throw in the specific accusations against certain players along with the more general suspicions, where some voters may very well refuse to vote for anybody from this era, and a lot of guys who would have been first ballot slam dunks will now be waiting for several years (if not longer), while some of the more borderline guys may very well have trouble getting the minimum 5% to stay on the ballot. And as we get more and more overqualified holdovers, new guys like Chipper and Manny will come along to claim their meager shares of the votes. It won’t take a huge percentage of the voters who are just POed at everyone and turn in blank ballots (or w/ just a few votes) to create a real mess.
My take is that they will have to let them in eventually, and with time and perspective the candidates will get their real or impugned sins forgiven, even if they have to wait for the Veteran’s Committee.
There are only 30 teams. Your point is valid, though; the system is such that it imposes a practical limit on the number of guys who can get in in any one year. However, the 15-year-on-the-ballot rule will keep the stronger candidates around long enough.
My guess is that the steroid issue will become a mitigating, not disqualifying, factor. Players who aren’t in the steroid mess, like Ken Griffey Jr. or Tom Glavine, will be swept in. Players like Clemens and Bonds will be voted in, noses held, by enough sportswriters saying “Well, yes, he’s a dirtbag, but he was never punished for breaking a rule and would have been a Hall of Famer anyway.”
The players whose chances are seriously damaged are Rafael Palmiero and Mark McGwire - the former because he was openly caught out as a cheater and a perjurer, and was sort of a weird candidate anyway, and the latter because the voters will probably (and, in my humble opinion, quite correctly) conclude that there is a very good chance he would not have been a Hall of Famer without steroids.
Just to add a point, these really are not comparable cases to the Jackson and Rose cases. First of all, they aren’t out for cheating, they’re out for violating the rules against gambling. Secondly, Jackson and Rose haven’t been left out by the sportswriters; they CAN’T be elected, because the Hall of Fame will not permit it. (Jackson, for many years, could have been, but was shunned; it’s only relatively recently that it became popular to tout his case.)
I find it amusing that for all the years that Pete Rose had his apologists clamoring for him to get into the HoF, they never mentioned Shoeless Joe. To me, they were a linked pair. Either hold 'em both out or let 'em both in.
Even Bonds and Clemens?