Baseball's Hall of Fame and The Steroid Era: "Let The Bastards In, Already!"

Canseco.  Sosa.  McGuire.  Palmeiro.  Rodriguez.  Clemens.  Bonds.

Ask any casual but knowledgeable baseball fan what comes to mind when he sees or hears the foregoing names, and the answer is both immediate and unanimous.  “Steroids.”  One word.  Plain and simple.  No emotion, no outrage, very matter-of-fact.  Next question, please.

Ask the same question of a baseball purist, however, and you’d better be prepared for the lengthier, epithet-laden outburst that is almost sure to follow.  “Steroids.  Performance-enhancing drugs.  Liars!  Cheaters!  Bastards, every one of ‘em…!”

 To that colorful, albeit abbreviated list of predicate nominatives, I’d like to add one more: “Hall-of-famers.”  No, let me expound on that.  “First-ballot Hall-of-famers.”  Yes, you read that right.

 (Pause.)

Admittedly, this may seem a strange time to make the case that these “bastards” deserve to be in the Hall of Fame, what with Bonds and now Clemens under federal investigation for perjury and facing the very real possibility of being voted into a penitentiary a few years from now.  And yet, I can’t help but think that it’s the perfect time to explore the Hall-of-Fame merits of the steroid gang and the arguments to be made for and against.

Let’s start with the most obvious and potentially damning objection to their candidacy, which goes something like this: 

Point: They cheated.  They knowingly and willingly took performance-enhancing drugs and thereby gained a competitive advantage over their contemporaries and a statistical advantage over the baseball greats of earlier eras.  What’s worse, they compounded their cheating by lying about it.  They betrayed the public trust.

Counterpoint: Yes, they cheated. But what, exactly, did they cheat or violate?  The truth is, they violated only the “spirit” of the then unwritten law that you don’t take banned or illegal substances to gain a competitive advantage.  Prior to 2003, Major League Baseball didn’t have a formal policy banning the use of steroids and other PEDs.  And so, however guilty they might be in the court of public opinion, where the spirit of the law holds sway, all that matters (or should matter, anyway) in an actual court of law is the letter of the law.  And where there is no formal policy banning PEDs, as was the case prior to 2003, there is no letter of the law to be applied to most, if not all, of the players named above whose drug use, confirmed or alleged, largely predates the formal policy. 

Along these lines, it would be naïve indeed to castigate the players for violating the “spirit” of an unwritten code without also implicating, to varying degrees, the commissioner of baseball, the owners, the coaches, the players’ union, and the media, all of whom were complicit by aiding and abetting the players and their PED use, whether by actively condoning or even encouraging it or by willfully turning a blind eye to it.  Think what you will in hindsight about the Steroid Era and its motley band of juiced thugs, but until the curtain fell and revealed the truth behind the steroid-addled heroes and their enablers, it was a dizzying, glorious, unparalleled era for baseball, with balls soaring, records falling, and attendance booming.  (And the money.  Let’s not forget the driving force behind it all—the money.)  You didn’t have to be a baseball fan to get caught up in the theater and dramatics of the season-long home-run derby staged by McGuire and Sosa, whose pursuit and eventual passing of Roger Maris’ single-season home-run record stood out, at the time, as the most memorable event in baseball in a generation.  Who dared think at the time that it would become the signature event of a tainted era, a house of cards that wouldn’t stand the test of time?  Why spoil all the fun?! 

No, that would come later, in the wake of a tell-all tome` by Canseco and in front of a panel of posturing, publicity-seeking politicians with too much time and money on their hands.  By then, of course, the accused players had very few options, none of them savory.  Admit their mistakes, their shared hamartia, and they would meet with untold scorn, humiliation, and condemnation, or so they feared.  Deny, and there was a chance, however implausible, that the charges would never be proven, that the public would grant them the benefit of the doubt, not wanting to believe that they had been deceived.  And so the players lied, or simply refused to answer, or pretended not to speak English, and an entire era began to unravel, revelation by sordid revelation, until only a few years later even baseball purists were numb and could no longer summon any outrage over still another marquee player found to have been juicing.

Point: What about the law of the land?  Surely these players broke the law of the land and, on that basis alone, should be banned from the Hall of Fame.

Counterpoint:  Please.  We’re talking baseball here, a children’s game masquerading as a serious livelihood for a few grown men, a significant percentage of whom were looking to get a needle-pocked leg up on the competition and who represented no real or imagined threat to anyone but themselves.  We’re not talking weapons of mass destruction, drug-trafficking, or arms-dealing. On a related note, it’s utterly laughable and ironic that our Congress, itself riddled with corruption and faced with an economy in the tank, national debt numbering in the trillions of dollars, and a broken health care system, would take the time and resources to drag Bonds and Clemens to moral reckoning in what can only be described as one of the most sanctimonious, self-righteous displays (not to mention abuses) of political power in our nation’s history.  Over what?  Lying under oath about steroid use?!  You’ve got to be kidding me.  That’s the political equivalent of prosecuting someone over spilled milk, not gulf oil.  Small wonder that our country is in dire straits and our government so inept.  But I digress.

Point: As a direct result of their drug use, these players have artificially inflated statistics that cannot be compared on a level playing field with those of players from earlier eras.

Counterpoint: Fair enough.  But comparing players and statistics across different eras is an inherently flawed and difficult exercise.  Case in point: Who’s the greatest pitcher of all time?  Walter Johnson? Cy Young? Sandy Koufax?  Bob Gibson?  Nolan Ryan?  Roger Clemens?  What about the greatest hitter?  Bonds?  Aaron?  Williams?  Ruth?  What are the selection criteria?  Ask five baseball historians the same question, and you are likely to get five different answers to that question.  The game, like the players, evolves with time.  The fairest, most pragmatic approach is to identify and honor those players whose sustained excellence separates them from their contemporaries.  How they stack up historically against the best of earlier generations makes for great debate but, in my opinion, is of secondary importance when considering their worthiness to be enshrined in Cooperstown.

Which brings me to another point—the Steroid Era.  It happened.  It was unfortunate.  But any attempt to undo or wash away the stain of the era will not make it go away.  Holding hostage the best, albeit steroid-tainted players of that era is to willfully ignore that most, if not all, of these players were, by almost any measure, the best of their generation.  What’s more, even if you could somehow quantify with relative certainty the performance benefit of steroids and then subtract it from the equation, the career-defining statistics of these players still compare favorably with those of the game’s greats from earlier generations.  Does Bonds break Aaron’s record if he doesn’t take “the cream” and “the clear”?  Probably not.  But, when considering Bonds’ candidacy, does it really matter? 

For all his arrogance and the hatred he inspires, Bonds was, without question, the greatest player of the Steroid Era.  He could hit for power and average, could run, throw, and field.  He was a sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Famer before his hubris got the better of him and drove him to follow in the footsteps of McGuire and Sosa, whose steroid-fueled exploits had made them beloved national heroes.  Yes, Bonds used steroids.  Yes, he cheated by violating the competitive spirit of the game.  Does he belong in the Hall of Fame anyway?  Yes, unequivocally so.  And no asterisk will be needed.  Fifty years from now, when walking the halls of Cooperstown and seeing Bonds’ oversized bust, anyone who cares enough to know anything about baseball’s history will not have to be told that this supremely talented, if pathologically flawed, individual represented both the best and the worst of the Steroid Era.  The same can and will be said about Clemens and his legacy, about Rodriguez, about McGuire and Sosa, and so on and so forth.  For crying out loud, almost a hundred years later, baseball purists, who are notoriously slow to forgive and even slower to forget (see Pete Rose), still remember the key figures and details of the White Sox scandal of 1919.  Of 1919!?! 

No, the memory of the Steroid Era is here to stay, and denying the best players their due, however satisfying the schadenfreude, will not rectify the wrongs they committed any more than admitting them to the hall will justify those wrongs.

Lest the guardians of baseball become too complacent now that the Steroid Era is winding down and its fallout being measured, we are probably only a generation or less away from baseball’s next scandalous era, one that threatens to make the Steroid Era, by comparison, look like a case of stolen Big League Chew.  Advances in medical science, specifically genetic engineering, are unlocking the door to a culture in which God-given ability will no longer separate the average ballplayer from the good, or the good from the great.  The moral and ethical dilemmas presented by genetic engineering extend far beyond baseball and are too complex for this essay.  Suffice to say, even as it struggles to come to terms with the Steroid Era, baseball hasn’t seen its last, or even its greatest, scandal go by the boards.  No, not by a 475-foot longshot into McCovey cove.

Finally, baseball is a game of tradition, of remembrance.  Long before professional football or basketball began to register on our national consciousness, there was baseball and the homespun heroes who inspired us.  Hence the phrase, “national pastime.”  For better and for worse, the legacy of the Steroid Era and those players who defined it will live on as long as the game—and, let’s not forget, it is just a game—is still played and casual fans and purists alike are inclined to reminisce about bygone eras and compare the latest crop of great players with those of yesteryear. 

So, what about Bonds, Clemens, Rodriguez, Palmeiro, McGuire, Sosa, and, yes, even Canseco?  Hall of Famers?  In my book?  Absolutely, for the reasons delineated above.  I can hear the protests now.  “But Canseco?!”  Why, as despicable a character as he may seem and whatever his motive, nobody—I repeat, nobody—did more to blow the cover off the Steroid Era and its culture than Jose Canseco, the former bash-brother-turned-whistleblower-turned-reality-t.v.-star who has been supplanted by Bonds and Clemens as the poster-child of the whole godforsaken era.  Had the other offenders followed his lead and been as candid and forthcoming as he when they had the opportunity, they would have saved themselves a world of trouble, both in the court of public opinion as well as in the courthouse.  As it stands, only Canseco has been able to move on without the specter of steroid accusations shadowing him every step of the way.

Let the bastards in, I say.  The Steroid Era happened.  Most, if not all, of the best players from that era were juiced.  They cheated.  They lied.  Get over it.  It’s just a game.