Your Hall of Fame Vote, Post-Mitchell

It's a slippery slope, because it's tough not to vote for certain guys from the Steroid Era and not others. Sure, it's dubious to think Greg Maddux or John Smoltz were users, but I would've said the same about Hal Morris until today.

I think as a voter, either you say you're not going to vote for any of them because of the general cloud of suspicion over the past 10-15 years, or you decide to throw the whole steroid question out because there's no way of knowing for certain who was on what when, and judge each candidate based on his individual merits.

I'll be interested to see if there are any criminal charges for the players cited in this report who obtained stuff without a prescription.

 

This would probably fire up some of you, but I would vote for some of these guys, INCLUDING Bonds and Clemens. But with one caveat:

Each of these players must confess to what they did and for how long.

The list and type of players listed are expansive (Hal Morris?). After talking with a friend of mine who plays in the bigs (He's taller than 6'2" and skinny as a beanpole. If he's on juice, I'll eat my gym socks.), there are so many people not included that you'd be hard-pressed not to find a clubhouse with 10 or more juicers.

If these were just isolated cases, I'd say ban the cheaters and wipe their records out of the books. But since the problem is so wide-spread, there would be so many asterisks and whatnot that the whole thing would be a mockery and you might as well not count the years 1990-2008 or whenever the sport is "clean." You might as well follow Mitchell's suggestion and grant clemency to everyone, except for individual cases that warrant disciplinary action.

Ask yourself this: if the full list was revealed and I knew exactly how many players were using PEDs to gain a competitive advantage, am I willing to cross-out all these records? Give back these awards? Take away championships? Aside from the records, who do you give these awards & championships to if the majority of players are on PEDs? Can you make these changes and withstand even more blows to baseball's credibility?

Another big problem will be this: when voting for players directly linked to this scandal, how do you tell when said player was on PEDs & was he a HOFer before? In Bonds' case -- and possibly Clemens' case, too -- I would say, 'Yes, this man deserves to be enshrined.' Remember, there are plenty of low-lifes, scumbags and reprehensible people already in the Hall (Ex. 1a - Cobb, Ty). While some of the named-players have less-than desirable character, there are others who are, for the most part, good people.

So, if they are good people who just made a very bad decision, let them prove it by admitting they did wrong. No prepared statements, no lawyers at your side. Be honest and you will be forgiven and enshrined. Deny and forever be banned.

 

Even after the Mitchell report, I still would not vote to put Rush in the Hall of Fame.

 

I agree with every word of this post, PY. All of it. Come clean and you still have a chance, if you were in the class of HOFer anyway, to get in the Hall. There were so many guys that have been on it, or rumored, as it were, so you can't take everything away. I agree with Mitchell --- Look to the future, not dwell in the past. You can't take away what's already happened. There is now a testing program in place.

If I had a vote, I would vote both Bonds and Clemens in. No question about it.

 

Can you take every player on a case-by-case basis?

 

Outing alert: Oggiedoggie is really Jann Wenner.

 

You have the time and money to go through hundreds of players? Then by all means, go for it. What's done is done and cannot be changed for all practical purposes.

Now, if someone is dumb enough to get caught AFTER today, they should be banned for an entire calendar year. Caught a second time, and you're out of the game for life. And of course, the testing should be done by independent bodies, double-checked to make sure of no false-positives, etc...

 

Rice and Murphy have similar cases. Murphy was better defensively and was probably better overall (although it's close). Rice will get in this year or next. Murphy never will. That's because Rice played for the Red Sox and Murphy didn't.

 

Or maybe it's because Rice's lifetime BA is .298 to Murphy's .265 and because Murphy hit .300 twice with a high of .302 and Rice had six years of .305 or better and drove in 1451 runs to Murphy's 1266.

But don't let the facts keep you from preaching East Coast bias.

 

I think Bill James has written that Jim Rice was helped more by his home park than any non-Coors-Field good hitter ever.

I know Murph played in a hitters' park as well, but still ...

 

Well, if Bill James wrote it then it must be gospel.