A response to the readers
After writing my controversial opinion about players from the Steroid Era being selected for the Hall of Fame, I’ve received a lot of feedback. I’d like to address some of that here, since it raised some excellent questions.
“Ed” commented that:
Other eras that had statistical jumps in pitching or hitting did so on a physically even playing field. Those that deny Bonds and McGwire are steroid ridden monsters are just lying to themselves.
The thing is, it was a level playing field. Everyone had access, and many, many players used PEDs in that era. And I’m not denying that Bonds and McGwire used PEDs. In fact, I’m saying that no one should forget that. But the key here is that the Hall has a long history of looking at just the numbers for selection.
My argument is that since we cannot know which players, or how many, were using PEDs, we have to treat them all the same. We must induct the best from the era, or none at all. We have to assume that everyone was on the juice, or that no one was. We can’t single out those who we think were on it, because then we’d have to make certain that others were not; an impossible task.
If we’re going to put Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken, Jr. in the hall, then we have to include everyone from that era for consideration. I don’t think that Gwynn and Ripken were on anything, but I can’t be any more certain of that than I can be that others were on something.
It has to be an all-or-none consideration, anything else would warp the process, and be unfair.
As much as I dislike Bonds for using PEDs (and being kind of a jerk), he still has the numbers to be in the Hall. His peers may or may not have been using PEDs, but he put up better numbers in the same environment. That’s the bottom line, and all that the Hall has really been concerned with from the beginning.