The Major League Baseball Hall of Fame is a place where the greats of our nation’s pastime are immortalized for their contributions to the game. It is where fathers will take their sons to see relics of sluggers such as Babe Ruth and revel in the sport’s history for decades to come. It pays tribute to the men who helped build the tradition of baseball. Or at least, that is what the voters who select inductees apparently believe the Hall to be.
Baseball has come to one of its toughest crossroads in dealing with the steroids-era and the rampant use of performance enhancing drugs in the last fifteen years. The use of steroids in the game has not only cast a dark shadow on this era, but also made the current situation much more confusing than it needs to be. The voters for the Hall of Fame made quite a statement, though, last week when they shutout the entire set of 2013 candidates. The all-time home run leader Barry Bonds and 7-time Cy Young winner Roger Clemens were the most notable rejects.
Reaction to the vote’s results has been fierce.
“The ballot’s announcement means a river of sanctimony is about to be unleashed, where a pack of holy writers band together to block Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens from the Hall, because won’t somebody please think of the children?!,” wrote Jonah Keri of Grantland, a supporter of inducting steroid users.
The clause that all those who voted against the accused PED users like Bonds and Clemens are hung up on regards the athlete’s character. When informed on what the voters should take into consideration when voting, the Hall stresses that it is not just the players’ achievements on the field, but their conduct and behavior that makes them a Hall of Famer. Is this really that hard to expect from a game so heavily grounded in tradition
It is surprising that the uproar saying these steroid users should be admitted is so large when we have seen this character clause used in action before. The all-time hits leader Pete Rose was banned from the Hall of Fame for betting on his team when he played for and managed the Reds. In past years, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro were kept out of the Hall as well due to PED use. The attitude that baseball should stop considering character in voting for Hall of Famers is unrealistic. Weakening the standards of the Hall of Fame does nothing positive for baseball.
Baseball received a ton of grief for its relaxed testing back in the day of PED use and has reformed itself over the years to rid the sport of steroids. Almost immediately following the announcement that the Hall would not be inducting any new players was an announcement from Commissioner Bud Selig saying that Major League Baseball will now be instituting one of the most stringent and comprehensive drug testing policies in professional sports. This includes drug testing before, during, and after the season. Baseball has been making hard strides in an attempt to bring back the legitimacy of player performance. It cannot reasonably be expected that after all of this work and effort, steroid users would be celebrated by being inducted.
The sport is trying to eliminate cheating in order to create a more honest and enjoyable competition. There would be very little logic to making all these efforts if they were just going to turn around and grant PED users baseball’s highest honor. This shutout makes a firm declaration that the use of steroids will not be tolerated and that those who use them are not the kinds of players that baseball wants to praise. The numbers that some of these athletes put up were the best baseball has ever seen, but this is not what a sport should be about. If players want to gain an unfair advantage, then the Hall of Fame is not where those numbers should be celebrated. Their place can be in stat books with the rest of the numbers.
This fight for induction is not over though, not for a long while. Each player gets 15 years on the ballot to be voted in and must receive at least 75 percent of the vote to be chosen. That means that Bonds and Clemens still have 14 more years to argue their cases and appeal to the voters. With the trend moving away from supporting steroid users though, they may face a steady decrease in votes while new candidates shuffle through.
The new system put in place by Major League Baseball will hopefully flush out the illegitimacies of the past decade and a half and reinforce baseball as true competition. Although players will continue to try to find new ways of dodging detection, the sport is moving quickly in the right direction and the message has been put out there. Steroid use has no place in baseball and the Hall of Fame is backing this precedent.
Steroid really has no place in baseball why others do that. Just keep the game clean.