Simple Poll

Seems easiest.

Mainly because I feel that we don’t really know who did and didn’t use steroids, and to ban only the people we know about is unfair. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the BBWAA is going to vote a steroid user into the Hall, and they won’t even realize that they did. It’s possible they already have.

“What the 75% vote yes means to me its that 75% of people think that cheating is OK…WHAT!?!?”

So, I assume you find it unconscionable that Gaylord Perry is in the hall, even though he threw spitballs? That’s the other thing about the steroid debate I don’t like: it’s not about cheating, because there are certain forms of cheating (such as spitballs and scuffballs) that we accept, but we’ve decided that steroid-use is different.

How about we just toss the whole HOF and start over? It’s a mess now anyway.

If you haven’t read Ball Four, please do so. Steroids are not new. And the best players get the best stuff first.

The way the question is phrased, it leaves room for some players who used to be rejected on those grounds if voters feel that it was especially egregious/matters to their performance. But PED users shouldn’t be rejected prima facie.

I agree with the notions that the Steroid era joins the ranks of the Dead Ball era or wartime where it affected a lot more players than we think. That being said, I’m also of the opinion that those who we know are guilty should be held to a higher standard – not in their stats, but with a note on the plaque stating “Tested positive for steroids.” No you won’t get everyone but having your legacy visibly tainted for posterity should hopefully be some kind of deterrent.

If baseball’s serious about fighting PEDs, then they should acknowledge how pervasive they became by making the known users wear a scarlet letter on their plaque for future generations to observe.

I think basically players should be judged against their peers. You can’t look at Babe Ruth’s record in exactly the same light as Hank Aaron’s record, or Barry Bonds’ record. They were all greats of their time.

They were great players. They did it by steroids? So what, still great.

Want to act like so little of baseball was doing them as to adjust numbers instead of just calling in an era? Well that’s fine, do that, but if you completely take away a player’s performance with steroids instead of just attempting to adjust it reasonable you’re being insincere. And I have little reason to think many players were taken from out of the Hall of Fame argument to easy Hall of Famers.

What I am strongly against is penalizing a player from a rule that never really existed outside of a damn memo. You want to keep players out who have failed a test SINCE steroids were banned and tested for I can deal, outside of that you’re going to boil my blood.

They broke the law? K, everyone who broke a law is out of the Hall of Fame.

It’s the steroids era. It’s regrettable, I wish it had been more strongly avoided, but it’s still just players doing what they can to be as good as possible, which is what they should do. And baseball should stop them from doing it by means we may find unsavory.

I don’t respect players for using steroids, but I have no reason to think those who performed well enough don’t belong in Cooperstown.

Many of my reasons for doing so have been touched on in greater detail, but in summation;

Steroids weren’t against the rules until 2004. Lots of people are playing the “But using illegal drugs was against the rules!” card, but that argument doesn’t hold a whole lot of water. The purpose of that specific rule was to give teams an easy out if players developed a drug problem, and similar clauses are found in the contracts a lot of people sign with their employers. If you believe that steroid users should be excluded from the Hall of Fame for violating this rule, you also believe that anyone with a similar clause in their contract should lose their job for recreational drug use. If you believe that, fine, but I don’t. (And this certainly isn’t the place to discuss it.) The point is, the league didn’t have a specific banned substances policy in place before 2004.

I think that steroid usage from the mid 1990s through the first part of the 2000s was ridiculously high. Like, Canseco-claim high. I do not doubt for a second that at least a few of my childhood heroes used steroids. I do think, however, that much of the usage was short term; to help a player battle through an injury, or as an experiment, or in a contract year. A lot of the hysteria surrounding this whole issue is based on an imperfect understanding of what PEDs actually do and of what it takes to be a good baseball player. Other people have written about these issues with much greater clarity than I could hope to, so I’ll leave it there.

And finally, there’s this, and I think this is the most important thing for me. I love baseball. I obsess over it, I live and die with it. But in the end, it’s just entertainment. I take far too seriously, but it’s entertainment nonetheless. So while I’m glad there’s a testing program in place and I would hope that the game is cleaner than it was five or ten years ago, I just don’t really care that there was a period of time where a lot of players were using PEDs. Nothing those players did invalidates anything Babe Ruth or Henry Aaron or Bob Gibson or Walter Johnson did. I said this in another thread, but I’ll say it again here; baseball players should be judged for greatness against their peers, not players from other eras. PEDs were a fact of life for baseball for a period of (at least) ten years, just like greenies, the spitball, the dead ball, etc were part of life during other eras. We could spend all of our time obsessing over it and wringing our hands about it and worrying about the sanctity of the game, or we could just realize that it’s a game and that these guys are nothing more than entertainers and that whether or not some of them used PEDs doesn’t change a damned thing. And I just really don’t think it does, so I say let ’em in.