The Curious Case of Baseball's Past

The best baseball players go to a well known place called the Hall of Fame, just like in every other sport. Baseball's Hall is also known as Cooperstown, the town in which the Hall is located. Every year prominent baseball writers get a ballad of former players to vote on to be in the Hall. Players need 75% of the vote to be inducted into the Hall. Only the best of the best get inducted. Well most of the best of the best get inducted.

Baseball is the sport that took the hardest hit from the steroid crackdown that's been going since the middle of the last decade. Steroids are now for the most part gone from baseball, but they will never be gone from baseball's past. Of course by baseball I mean Major League Baseball. Commissioner Selig may have finally got baseball cleaned up, but the sport is several years too late. Now the Hall of Fame has to suffer..or does it?

The Hall voters have insisted that they refuse to induct steroid users into the Hall, but I don't see why. Congress made a big deal about steroids in the late 80s, early 90s with their Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 and it's replacement the 1990 Anabolic Steroids Control Act. But did baseball do anything to stop it? No. Then commissioner Fay Vincent just sent out a memo to teams saying that steroids were now added to the banned substance list, but there was no testing. Without testing it's pretty hard to tell if someone is on steroids, and so players continued use and use and use until they could be stopped. This means that there's a possibility that every player in played in the 90s could have taken steroids at one point. Leaving a whole decade out of the Hall seems a bit ridiculous, especially since the heads of baseball did not do much to stop the use of steroids.

Congress finally stepped in and basically ordered commissioner Selig to institute testing in 2002, more than a decade after it started its crackdown on steroids. Why Congress didn't do this when it first started its quest against steroids no one knows. Real testing in baseball, as in by the World Anti-Doping Agency, did not start until 2004. I think it's hardly the players fault that both Congress and the MLB muffed what to do to stop the use of steroids. I mean steroids were part of the culture of baseball up until the initial testing in 2003. It's hard enough to be a good baseball player, imagine competing with other good baseball players..on steroids.

I think the Hall of Fame should be based on stats and accomplishments only, not whether you took steroids or not and then look at stats and accomplishments. Players like Raphael Palmeiro, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens had great careers before their names got thrown into the fire due to steroids. The Hall of Fame never punished other players who had drug or alcohol problems in the past, and there are some very prominent Hall of Famers who had drug or alcohol problems including Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle. Refusing to induct known or alleged steroid users into the Hall will not make the Steroid Era go away, so why don't we just accept and embrace it?. When people question why, we can just say, "Yes he had his faults, but it takes more than drugs to be a good baseball player."

References

http://thesteroidera.blogspot.com/2006/08/baseballs-steroid-era-timeline.html