Nov 29 2012 08:55 AM
Re: 2013 HOF In Balloting Thread
November 28, 2012
The Doomsday Ballot
Posted by Ian Crouch
| History is messy; so is baseball. The Hall of Fame is full of players who spiked each other with their cleats or slicked up the ball or otherwise broke the rules. It is home to bigots and liars and drunks. And soon it may welcome, knowingly, a group of players whose successes may have been due, in part, to steroids. Five years have elapsed since Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Sammy Sosa retired from baseball. That means they are all eligible for election into the Hall on the 2013 ballot, which was released on Wednesday afternoon. The voting, results of which will be released on January 9th, thus is something of a nightmare scenario for a sport that has spent the past decade refusing to credibly confront the full implications of what is now known as the steroid era. The way the balloting unfolds over the next month and a half won’t just influence the way history views the past twenty years of baseball; it could end up calling into question the role and value of the Hall of Fame itself. In any other scenario, Bonds, Clemens, and Sosa would, deservedly, be all but guaranteed election to the Hall on this first ballot: Bonds is a seven-time M.V.P. and the majors’ all-time leader in home runs and walks; Clemens won three hundred and fifty-four games and seven Cy Young awards across three decades; and Sammy Sosa hit six hundred and nine home runs. Bonds and Clemens are perhaps the best left-handed hitter and right-handed pitcher, respectively, of all time. But there’s the other side of the story to consider, too: during his perjury trial, Bonds admitted to using steroids; Clemens’ DNA was found along with traces of steroids and human-growth hormone among drug paraphernalia kept by his trainer, Brian McNamee (Clemens has denied taking steroids and disputes this evidence); and Sosa reportedly tested positive for steroids in 2003 (though he too has repeatedly denied taking illegal performance-enhancers). For the past few years, the Hall of Fame has rather clumsily been trying to sort out what to do about the legacy of performance-enhancing drugs. The disgraced home-run hero Mark McGwire, who has been eligible since 2007, has never gotten more than twenty-four per cent of the vote in ballots cast—seventy-five per cent is the threshold for entry—and last year he received his lowest vote total yet. His candidacy appears doomed. Rafael Palmeiro, who had more than three thousand career hits but tested positive for steroids in 2005, got just over twelve per cent of the Hall of Fame vote last year, his second on the ballot. Absent the connection to steroids, both players would have been locks for induction at Cooperstown, yet a large majority of the more than five hundred voters from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America—the journalists who play gatekeepers for the Hall—have decided that confirmed users have no business being enshrined among the game’s greats. That decision may seem sensible and fair, but nothing about baseball’s steroid era is so simple. The Major Leagues didn’t even begin testing players for steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs until 2002, and it wasn’t until 2005 that a strict and coherent punishment plan was put into effect. This despite years of rumblings about P.E.D. use dating back to the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and nearly daily visual evidence that something was going on: McGwire’s arms, Bonds’s expanding head, the once-enduring records that were suddenly being smashed every season. We all looked the other way when McGwire, grown to Paul Bunyan in the flesh and keeping androstenedione on full display in his locker, whapped seventy home runs in 1998. Baseball writers, a group with members now wagging their fingers in disgust, penned paeans to the great slugger. Revisionists may point to Cal Ripken as the man who won baseball fans back after the strike season of 1994, but it was McGwire and Sosa who made baseball appointment viewing across the country. Both men violated a public trust, but the public was more than happy to meet them halfway. Now, with their uniforms hung up and their muscles melted away, we’d rather not think about them anymore. Further confusing the issue is that fact that neither McGwire nor Palmeiro—nor any other confirmed steroid user, for that matter—has been given an official post-retirement punishment or sanction. Pete Rose lives in exile, while McGwire was just hired as the hitting coach for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Bonds was welcomed back to San Francisco during the World Series in 2010 as a kind of beloved rascal. The current guidelines for voters, as ordered by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, include “integrity, sportsmanship, character” among the categories by which to judge a player. Yet that phrasing is patently vague—useful when a writer wants to come down hard on a steroid user, but markedly fishy when applied to some of the more ethically specious past inductees. Voters have no consistent way to judge confirmed steroid-users, since Major League Baseball doesn’t quite know what to do with these guys either—in other words, if these players aren’t banned from baseball, why is it obvious that they should be banned from Cooperstown? Things become even less clear when one considers a group of players who have never admitted to taking drugs and have not tested positive for anything, but who—because of their changing appearances, or just rumor and innuendo—have the taint of steroids attached to their name. Former Astros great Jeff Bagwell went from skinny-strong to gargantuan during his career. That turned heads and set people muttering, and despite a strong Hall of Fame case he has yet to get above fifty-six per cent of the vote. Joining him on the ballot this year is Mike Piazza, one of the best-hitting catchers ever, who has been followed by whispers of steroids as well. We don’t know if Bagwell or Piazza took steroids; they both say they didn’t. Few voters, it would seem, know for sure, either, and yet we are certain to see both players, and more after them, hurt by this lingering cloud. Jose Canseco, equal parts clown and whistleblower, was called a fool when he said that eighty per cent of baseball players took steroids. But Canseco has been right before, so let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that the true figure was anywhere close to his number. Were hitters cheating more than pitchers? How do you determine if players were using designer drugs that didn’t change how they looked? And, finally, who should be banned and who should be considered clean—what tools can baseball journalists use to label one player a cheater and another a saint? There are no good answers to these questions, and that’s Major League Baseball’s fault: when it ignored the steroid problem, it left an entire generation of players in historical limbo. If it wants to help the Hall of Fame maintain its relevance as shrine to the game’s great and a museum to its past, it should now offer voters official guidance. With so much confusion, the most equitable solution, no matter how unpalatable to the great moralists in the ranks of baseball reporters, is for the voters to do what they’ve always done and grant entry to even the tainted among the era’s great players, and for the Hall to use this as an opportunity to tell the story of the decades when the game was captivating and wonderful and blackened by scandal all at the same time. While they’re at it, it’s time for them to acknowledge another unpleasant part of baseball’s past—and the way it was overcome. The death of the famed baseball labor leader Marvin Miller reminds us that the Hall is also full of players who were denied a fair paycheck and the right to get a better deal from a team other than the one that owned them. In a Postscript about Miller, Malcolm Gladwell noted that the man who finally got the game’s on-field talent their due share of the wealth was never elected to its Hall of Fame. With his death, there is a growing chorus calling for that error to be corrected, for Miller to be voted in on the ballot for the class of 2014. Miller, of course, won’t be there to give the speech that he should have had the opportunity to deliver years ago, but at least one part of history will be set right. If, in a hundred years, mothers and fathers are still taking their sons and daughters to Cooperstown, they should visit the plaques to Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. But they should also hear the stories of Gaylord Perry’s spitballs, Ty Cobb’s sharpened spikes, and the decades in which the game excluded players of color. They should read phrases like “the reserve clause,” “antitrust exemption,” “free agency,” “strike,” and “BALCO.” And they should ask questions about how Roger Clemens, his legs like a bull’s, was still able to throw a blistering fastball well into his forties, and about Barry Bonds’s lightning-quick jerk of a swing, and all those baseballs that flew into McCovey Cove in San Francisco. Then they should get to read about what many players of this era did to themselves to be able to toss and bat those balls so well. |
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/s ... z2DcvsokLD
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On Baseball
Hall of Fame Voters Confront the Steroid Era and Its Questions
By TYLER KEPNER
Published: November 27, 2012
excerpt:
| Those three words — integrity, sportsmanship, character — are critical to some voters. “In each of those areas, players who used steroids fail the test — period,” Scott Miller, of CBSSports.com, said in an e-mail. “I know it isn’t the Hall of Choirboys. I know the stories about Ty Cobb and others who at times were miscreants. But I also know that the Steroid Era was one of the most shameful chapters in the game’s history. It made a mockery out of the record book. It pushed retired legends into the shadows when they should have remained in the spotlight, and it put the spotlight on others who never should have been there.” Miller continued: “To me, just because the commissioner, the owners and the players’ union abdicated their responsibility to the game for so long by looking the other way only increases the obligation for somebody, somewhere, to stand up for what’s right. And if I can do that even from my small corner of the voting world, then I’m grateful to have that chance.” Miller’s colleague, Danny Knobler, said he initially voted for McGwire, but felt bad about it and reconsidered. Knobler now has a zero-tolerance policy. “I decided that for now, I will not vote for anyone where there is a reasonable belief that he could have used,” Knobler wrote in an e-mail. “I know some people dissect a career and try to determine if a player would have been a Hall of Famer without help. While I respect that view, my feeling is that if I’m voting against you, it’s because I believe there’s a reasonable likelihood that you cheated the game. If that’s the case, I don’t want to vote you into the Hall of Fame.” |
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/sport ... oters.html
