Why steroid users should not be elected to the Hall of Fame

Baseball writer Larry Stone in a recent reticle in the Seattle Times said he votes for players known to use steroids on his Hall of Fame ballot. His reasoning is, to quote from the article, “The steroids era was a part of baseball, enabled by all parties, with statistics that still count in the record book; we don’t know definitively who used and who didn’t, and to try to make those distinctions is such a slippery slope I choose not to go there.”

Just because a slope is slippery does not mean it can’t be navigated safely. Yes the statistics still count in the record book. The problem I have though is saying the steroid era was enabled by all parties. True both the owners and Players union looked the other way. However, there was no sign in the clubhouse stating it was okay to use steroids. Not all players used steroids, so not all players were enabled and the playing field because of that was uneven. Some players cheated, some didn’t.

If there were no steroids how close would the known users stats have been to the clean players? Steroid users created a wide gap in performance numbers and clean players numbers pale in comparison and were cheated; it was not just the game, not just the records, not just the fans, but the clean players who were cheated as well. So why reward the dirty players?

While it is true that we don’t know all who did or didn’t. But we do know that Mark McQwire, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Alex Rodriquez, Rafael Palmeiro, and Roger Clemens are the most prominent users. We know their Hall of Fame numbers are distorted, corrupted, warped, perverted and defiled. If I were a clean player from that era I would not want to see steroid users rewarded. Until someone comes up with a sound formula to determine who from that era can be admitted, keep them out.

Larry Stones article, which is about why Edgar Martinez should be in the Hall of Fame is here. http://seattletimes.com/html/sports/2025226539_stone14xml.html