The National Baseball Hall of Fame has done a poor job acknowledging some of the top players in MLB history in recent years.
Each and every year when the Baseball Writers Association of America’s Hall of Fame voting results are revealed, some great ballplayers are forever enshrined with a plaque in Cooperstown. But when the latest inductees are announced on Tuesday, you can expect the voters to ignore great players who are confirmed to have used performance-enhancing drugs.
This includes the league’s all-time home run leader Barry Bonds (762 home runs), Roger Clemens (who won more than 300 games and struck out more than 4,000 batters), and a handful of others. Anyone who watched baseball during the “steroid era” knows just how great these players are, so the Hall of Fame ignoring their contributions to the game is wrong and flat-out ignoring history.
Who are the writers to decide what players can and can’t put in their bodies to make themselves the best players possible?
The players are assuming the physical risks involved with using steroids, and it does not guarantee they are going to be good. After all, a hitter only has about four-tenths of a second to react to a 95 mph fastball, and they still have to make solid contact to do anything with it. They also have to work hard in the weight room for it to make any difference. Plus, pitchers still have to throw strikes and mix their pitches well to enjoy any amount of success.
The Hall of Fame should be about recognizing the achievements of the players, regardless of what it took for them to do it. Are we supposed to just pretend Barry Bonds never set the all-time home run record or that he never hit 73 home runs in a season? Are we supposed to pretend the great home run chase of 1998 between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa never happened and did not help the league’s popularity after the 1994 strike? How about Roger Clemens’ two 20-strikeout games? Those must not count either, right?
To pretend these confirmed steroid users are the only guys ever to have used drugs to their advantage in baseball is another case of revisionist history.
There are a large number of them who took “greenies,” an amphetamine, before games in hopes of boosting their play. The Alcohol and Drug Foundation says amphetamines are “stimulant drugs, which means they speed up the messages travelling between the brain and the body.”
Hall of Famers such as Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Mickey Mantle have admitted to using such substances, and no one is questioning their rightful places in Cooperstown. Sure, it’s not exactly the same thing, but it is a drug they used with the intent of improving their play. They should be celebrated for doing whatever they could to make the games better and more exciting, so should the performance-enhancing drug users.
Odds are Bonds and Clemens will be voted into the Hall of Fame at some point, but the same cannot be said for a number of other performance-enhancing drug users whose numbers are good enough and did not receive much support on the ballot. That said, hopefully some of the veterans committees comprised of former MLB players should recognize this in the future and correct the wrong made against their former peers.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
