Your Criteria for the Hall of Fame

but what bothers me even more is the lack of accountability. It may seem cheesy but Hall members should be and should always be held to a higher standard. I always had a soft spot for Pete Rose as far as getting into the HOF, but when he came out after years of denial and admitted he bet on baseball and his team to sell books, I lost all respect for that guy. I never want to see him get in.

they don’t see a random sample of players – probably associated with folks with similar attitudes about PED.

Also they self justify by saying ‘most do it’. If “everybody” cheats, there is no moral reason not to.

He used to do interviews in front of his locker in St Louis with a bottle of andro (a banned substance now bc it boosts testosterone and digests into nandrolone) in clear view .. no one in baseball said anything about it. Instead they said, “look at this huge man. What a great guy. Look how far he hits the ball. We can’t wait to honor him for breaking the 61 mark.”
The hypocrite baseball writers that are punishing him now never asked questions, they only praised him for putting the people back in the seats and caring about baseball again. Bagwell somehow avoids all mainstream criticism. I’m not against him at all, but like you said, because he never said anything, he gets a pass?
Bottom line, MLB and ESPN and all the national writers rode McGwire’s coat tails back into the spotlight because they needed him. How many people watched Ripken Jr break Gherig’s record? Less than half as many as the number of people who watched McGwire hit #62. They needed him, and they turned on him after he gave everybody what they wanted.
Anyways, if people want to recognize steroids as a huge part of that era, fine. They need to at least acknowledge the greats of that era though. Because if anyone trully cared they would have demanded testing in 1990-1995 when guys started bulking up, and not after it became cool to sh*t on Mark McGwire.

But not on the hall-worthiness of McGwire’s numbers. He’s 10th all time in homers, and he did that in 7660 plate appearances. Nobody else in the top 25 has fewer than 9500 plate appearances. He’s probably the best right handed pure power hitter in history. He hit for extra bases and home runs at a higher rate than any other right hander ever, right on par with Ruth and Bonds.

Look at the peak: from 1996-1999, he put up the greatest power show in history with an average of 61 bombs a year despite missing a bunch of games and walking a ton. Look at the context, since it was the home run era, and he still measures up – 70 fWAR and 63 rWAR in a relatively short career.

There’s no hard evidence that steroids provided any significant benefit. Sure, there’s a general consensus that they probably did, but that is opinion and is not supported by evidence. And if we’re getting into how much they helped, then we’re really making stuff up. Posnanski wrote a nice post a few years ago on other possible causes of the home run era.

One thing that really gets me is when writers or people I talk baseball with casually toss out that so-and-so who had a home run spike “must have been juicing that year.” It’s a lazy and idiotic statement. Seriously, Brady Anderson hit 50 home runs one year and then decided, “No, that’s enough. I’ll stop using my magic home run hitting potion now.”? In something with samples as huge as baseball, there are going to be random spikes, like Roger Maris hitting 61 and never making it to 40 in any other season, or Davey Johnson’s top 5 home run seasons: 43, 18, 15, 10, and 10.

Here’s a question for you, Dan (or anyone else): Let’s say we know that steroids do help you become a significantly better baseball player. And let’s say that we have a test that is 100% accurate, and can give us a yes or no answer on whether any player, past or present, used steroids. Do all users still get in? Do no users get in? Is there a cutoff of around 2006, when penalties were enacted? And how far back to we go – if Babe Ruth used some kind of drug for bulking up horse muscles in the 30s, do we exclude him?

…doesn’t balloon your stats
beating a person out of hate doesn’t help you hit 50 HRs
Being racist doesn’t improve your reflexes
Perry: another cheater, good point
Cepeda paid his due to society for a crime off the field
and again: being racist doesn’t make you a better player

When it comes to Hall of Fame voting, I don’t think character should be taken into consideration at all; just the stats. When the stats are artificially inflated, that has to affect your vote.

So let’s say you’re in AAA, and you’ve never touched anything stronger than Mountain Dew. Skill-set-wise, you are pretty much tied with the other fellow on the roster at your position, who is also “clean.”

Then his skill-sets take off. He’s bulkier, a little bit faster, bat speed is faster … but you know he’s started using something. Something; you don’t know what. Yet.

You’re playing for league-average. So was he, but he just got called up because of his improved numbers. Now HE’S playing for MLB minimum; about 4-5 times what you’re making. You’re the same player.

If you DON’T do what he did to get there, you’re probably a career AAA player. Because you can bet he’s not going to stop what he was doing to get there.

And HE’S limited because the guy who has been up for 10 years already … well, in the past, THAT guy retired because of age or injury by the time he was 33-35. But NOW? Now that veteran just signed a 5-year deal worth MILLIONS. Nobody has to wonder why so many guys in their 30’s are still playing. Do the math. So the only way the just-called-up guy, the bench warmer, is ever going to break that ceiling is to do more of whatever he did to get called up in the first place.

So if playing ball is what YOU do for a living, what the hell are YOU going to do? Stay at AAA, because you want to stay “clean?” Or are you going to reach for the syringe?

Because Aaron, Mays, McCovey all played in the ‘greenies’ era, and amphetamines definitely enhanced their performance on the field, and presumably their lifetime statistics. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence and testimoney about Aaron and Mays. By the standards that are being applied to today’s players, they are guilty, too. They were taking ‘PEDs’, in the sense that PED = ‘Performance Enhancing Drugs’. Not to mention that they ALSO played during the less-well-known early steroid era. Steroid use was rampant among Soviet and east German Olympic athletes back into the 60’s, at least. You have no proof that baseball players of the time didn’t also use steroids. You do have proof that body-building was frowned upon in baseball before the Bash brothers and Dave McKay, not that steroids weren’t used- just not in conjunction with body-building.

How do you know those previous generations’ records are untainted?

EVERYBODY who is a lifetime fan knew SOMETHING was going on; NO amount of weight-lifting was going to account for the across-the-lineup HR count doubling or tripling. And the proof to that particular claim, ever were some to say “Hey, that’s subjective” is the last couple years the number of HR’s across-the-lineup have been declining rapidly.

So if the average fan knew something was going on, darned sure trainers, coaches, managers, general managers, owners and commisisoners knew something was going on. Then when the s-storm started, these guys universally put the back of their collective hands against their foreheads and gasped “Well, I nevah.”