Not long from now, the National Hall of Fame and Baseball Museum will induct its class of new Hall of Fame members, as voted on by the members of the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA). Congratulations to the new members, you all belong there and will do honor to the institution.
Sitting on the outside include a couple guys who each garnered maybe 35% or so of the vote, with 75% needed to gain election. You might have heard of them -- an outfielder named Barry Bonds, and a pitcher named Roger Clemens. In their own space, Bonds and Clemens were in the top ten of players ever, and Bonds easily in the top five hitters as well as a good baserunner and almost always an above-average defensive player.
They are, however, sitting quite unhappily on the outside of the Hall, looking in, and we all know why that's the case -- we are compellingly persuaded, at least the BBWAA is, that each was a user of performance-enhancing drugs through a significant part of his career, and in the morality of the press, that constitutes "cheating" and therefore renders them ineligible for election.
There are not many, and probably not any remaining arguments that have not already been used either to justify their enshrinement or their disqualification from the Hall of Fame. You've heard them all if you've read this far -- one side claims that the numbers are what they are regardless of what drugs they took, and that they were already Hall-worthy before they started taking PEDs, and that there's really no proof or test that says they did, and that for a time it wasn't really against MLB rules, and that there are guys already in the Hall who did worse, like drunks and wife-beaters and greenie-poppers and, of course, racists (always the worst).
The other side reminds us that cheating is cheating, and that the numbers were inflated because of bodies built beyond God's design, and there's a character clause in the Hall election guidelines, and, well, they cheated.
I don't have a vote. You have to be a member of the BBWAA for ten years before you get to vote, and I'm not even a member and have not covered baseball for a newspaper since writing columns covering the Jackson High baseball team back in 1967. But that doesn't prevent me from having an opinion, in this case blissfully removed from political convention -- I don't even know if more liberals or more conservatives feel one way or another about Bonds and Clemens, and I don't care.
If I had a vote, though, I put both of them in. Aside from what anyone might say to advocate one side or the other, I rather imagine that a Hall of Fame without Bonds and Clemens is essentially denying their existence as top-five or top-ten greatest players ever. I think that in 100 years, it will be looked back on as a strange denial to have left them out, given their incomparable performances. I think that their performance on the field will be remembered as being immensely worthy of the Hall and, given that, I say "Put them in."
I also say, "Remember what they did." It is not the same as putting the proverbial asterisk on their plaques, because their field performance and their PED use will both be remembered, and the former will be qualified in our minds because of the latter. But to omit them from the Hall is less rational than to include them, because they were indeed great, and their PED use will be remembered right along with them, an emotional asterisk.
As, of course, it should be.
Copyright 2017, 2015 by Robert Sutton
