The Baseball Hall of Fame ballot was released Wednesday. And on it for the first time, three figures notoriously associated with steroid use (I list them alphabetically): Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa. And now, the hypocrisy begins.
First, let's go with the obvious. We all know that the Baseball Writers' Association of America members were among the biggest cheerleaders during the great home run chase of 1998 between Sosa and Mark McGwire, who has failed to make the Hall in his previous attempts. So all their sanctimony about not letting steroid cheaters into Cooperstown is laughable. At least, most of the writers -- and sportstalk hosts -- have admitted that they screwed up, not paying attention to what was going on, not asking the tough questions, etc.
Truth is, the BWAA has a lot of holier-than-thou members, who think that they are the Divine Protectors of the Realm. Five writers did not vote for Tom Seaver when he first showed on the ballot -- not because he didn't deserve it, but because they were protesting the fact that Pete Rose wasn't on the ballot. (Rose, in case you don't know, bet on baseball, which has been explicitly forbidden for almost a century. He's banned for life, and can't be on the ballot.) There also apparently is this idea that some players are Hall of Famers, but some are first-ballot Hall-of-Famers. So: you are good enough to make the Hall, but you can wait a year. Or fourteen, in the case of Jack Morris.
(I understand that some players get evaluated differently in the passage of time. It took forever for Phil Rizzuto to get in. But seriously: either you belong or you don't. )
The Writers can be petty too: Mike Schmidt didn't get a unanimous vote mainly because the guys who didn't vote for him didn't like him personally. There will probably be a Boston writer or two who won't vote for Derek Jeter the first (and only) time out.
But this steroids thing is going to bring it to a new level.
USA Today's Christine Brennan keeps it simple: no. The steroid three, and anyone else tainted, don't get in. On his weekly radio show, Daily News columnist Mike Lupica made it plain: if I think you did steroids, you're not getting my vote. And, Lupica continued, I'm not going to go on the air and explain my votes after they are cast.
We always knew that there's nobody more thin-skinned than members of the press, especially sportswriters. They dish it out, but they don't like to take it.
It doesn't matter that none of the steroid three ever failed a drug test. It doesn't matter if any player from the steroid era did or didn't test positive. If the Gatekeepers of the Hall "believe" that he did steroids, then Mike Piazza, or Jeff Bagwell, or Julio Franco (just kidding) is dirty and can't be in the Hall. Lupica says, hey, this is not a court of law, I'm not ruling on anyone's life. True enough, though you are ruling on someone's legacy in a sport that you hold to be sacred.
This is not unlike the Republican state legislators saying "I feel that voter fraud is going on, I can't prove it, there are actually no cases of it in my state, but I'm going to pass voter ID laws because I just feel it will prevent cheating that I can't prove has happened."
What we're going to see from more than a few writers in inconsistency and rationalization. Bonds and Clemens, so the narrative goes, were already Hall of Famers when they started taking steroids. (Because we know for sure when they started... even though Clemens denies ever taking PEDs and successfully defended himself against perjury charges on the subject, and Bonds admits nothing.) Sosa and McGwire would not have their numbers if they had not juiced.
And we know this how? The same way Bush knew Iraq had WMDs?
(Digression: when the debates raged over Clemens' trial, why did that become a partisan issue? Why did the Republicans support Clemens and the Dems condemn him? Really? )
In the fifties, if your name was in Red Channels, you couldn't find work in TV. It didn't matter that you weren't Communist, that you didn't know any members of the Party, and that all you did was sign some petition about Spain in the thirties: if the former FBI agents who published the book suspected you, you were done. The only way to clear yourself: name names.
I suppose it could be arguably just as wishy-washy to say, "we don't know who did what, let's just forget the steroids, put up a plaque, and hope for the best." It's really not an easy job, and I don't know that it should be done on a case-by-case basis.
What bugs me is that these selections seem to be done more on a whim than they are rooted in a specific experience. And that to me de-legitimizes the process of voting even more than the presence of a Bonds in the Hall of Fame de-legitimizes the Hall itself.
You're not going to vote for a guy because he was rumored to have juiced? Such thought process is dangerous.
I'm not blind or naive. It's pretty evident that a lot of guys were using PED's That said, I wish there were some way medical science could prove that people have never taken steroids, and that some guys who didn't get into the Hall because of the the Writers' sanctimony can prove he never took the stuff. I'd love to see them crawling back and saying, "sorry"! I'm not defending anybody who took PED's; I just want the writers to get off their horses and stop the hypocrisy.
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