Today, at 11 o’clok AM we learned who was going to make the 2013 class of Hall of Fame Inductees. The people who made it: No one. Not Bonds, not Clemens, not McGwire, not Sosa. So the writers and the baseball officials put off the ever-looming steroid question for another year. But it’s much more than that. These players were great, some of the greatest of their era. But they cheated. Think about how dynamic Barry Bonds could have been if he had kept that electrifying speed he had on the Pirates and hadn’t decided to bulk up. He made a mistake. So did Roger Clemens, winner of a record 7 Cy Young awards and the greatest pitcher of the 90’s, with the possible exception of Randy Johnson. But he got old, and he got scared, scared that he couldn’t keep up with the Young Guns as he entered his late 30’s and early 40’s. Which was mistake that could cost him the Hall of Fame and irreversibly tarnished an otherwise sterling career. So he decided to cheat, like so many others. But if you let just one of these players who used Performance Enhancing Drugs into the Hall, it sets a precedent, much like a court ruling. If Bonds gets in, then Sammy Sosa will want in. He hit over 600 home runs. He hit 66 in a season. He and Mark McGwire single handedly brought back thousands of baseball fans.
All valid points. All true. But he also cheated. And if one person cheats and makes it, all the others will want in too, and they do, in a way, have that right because if a steroid user makes it into the Hall of Fame, it sets that precedent. And suddenly you’ve got fans of the Big Red Machine from the 70’s saying Pete Rose got 4,000 hits WITHOUT steroids. So why should he be denied entrance, when he never cheated? The debate will go back and forth, once again,on how “He never bet on his own team”, and the old “That doesn’t diminish his accomplishments as a player”. If Rose ever does make it into the Hall of Fame, and I believe he belongs there, there should be no mention of his time on the manager on his plaque. If you really want to push it, people will throw it back to 1919, the “Black Sox”. Eight Men Out, that whole debate again. I belive Joe Jackson shoud be allowed into the Hall of Fame, regardless of his teammates’s actions. He hit over .375 in that series! Nobody hits like that trying to throw the series. The 2013 ballot and many more to come, will have baseball’s darkest times and darkest events rear it’s ugly head, after so many attempts over the years to bury these embarrassing and cloudy situations. Baseball experts and Hall of Fame voters will have to make a decision-and it could be one that opens the floodgates.
Credit for the image goes to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Bonds. It is not my picture and all credit goes to the photographer and this website.
