The Baseball Hall of Fame and its “Steroid Era” Problem
To me, the Baseball Hall of Fame is the most prestigious and meaningful of all the sports Hall of Fames. I think a big reason for that feeling is that the Baseball Hall of Fame covers a much longer time period than the other sports. The baseball Hall of Fame has legends of the game from the 1800s, a time at which professional football and basketball did not yet even exist. In order to best uphold this reputation, I think the Baseball Hall of Fame should strive to honor the full history of the game and should include all the games’ best players from the past.
Over the last 10 years I have looked on at some of the recent Baseball Hall of Fame inductees with disappointment. When I was growing up, the Hall of Famers that I would study all seemed like such legends and giants of the game to me. Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Cy Young. Then over the last 10 years, when players started getting elected to the Hall of Fame that I grew up watching, I was a bit surprised at some of the players that were getting elected. Growing up as an avid fan, some of these players didn’t seem at all to me like the Hall of Fame legends that I remembered learning about when I was younger. Larry Walker, Joe Mauer, Scott Rolen? I definitely remembered them being all-stars and great players, but I never would have thought that they needed to be in the Hall of Fame alongside the older legends of the game.
The diminishing standards of players being let into the Hall of Fame is an unfortunate byproduct of the Baseball Writers Association of America (“BBWA”) making their own rules and keeping any player associated with steroids, in any capacity, out of the Hall of Fame. Instead of electing players like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and Sammy Sosa to the Hall of Fame, they then end up voting in a lesser tier of players into the Hall of Fame, to avoid the perception that they are not electing enough people into the Hall of Fame to represent the 1990s and 2000s era of baseball.
As a fan growing up and watching baseball during the 1990s and 2000s, those players that the baseball writers are excluding, to me are the players that defined that era, and they are of the same stature as the past legends of the game. When Barry Bonds was chasing down Hank Aaron’s career home run record, I remember how ESPN would stop whatever game they were showing and cut into the Giants games to show Bonds’ at bats. How can you not have the career home run record holder in the Hall of Fame? The same thing was also done when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were battling each other to break Roger Maris’ single season home run record in 1998 (which Bonds later broke again in 2001). These were some of the most iconic events in baseball in the 1990s and 2000s.
While I certainly don’t condone their steroid use, and I do agree that rampant steroid use put a significant black eye on the sport, I don’t think that steroid use was the main reason that those players were great. Consider their careers before their alleged steroid use. Barry Bonds with the Pirates, Alex Rodriguez with the Mariners, Roger Clemens with the Red Sox, Manny Ramirez with the Indians, and Mark McGwire with the A’s. All of them thrived in the early parts of their career, and there is no indication that they would not have become Hall of Fame caliber players had they not been associated with steroids. By keeping these players out of the Hall of Fame, are the baseball writers saying that they attribute all of their performance to the supposed use of steroids?
Additionally, steroid use was pervasive across the game of baseball at many levels during this era. These stars were not the only players using steroids. Many lesser players were also using steroids, and those players clearly did not turn into superstars once they started using steroids. Even if many players were using steroids during this time, the players that I mentioned above were still significantly outperforming their peers and separating themselves as superstars due to their talent.
Perhaps these players should have to address their alleged steroid use if they were to be elected into the Hall of Fame, or perhaps there could even be a special wing in the museum that focuses on the “Steroid Era” in baseball. While I am not necessarily saying that these players should be completely absolved for their alleged past transgressions involving steroids, I do feel strongly that making a broad overarching decision to exclude them from the Hall of Fame is not the best choice.
You can’t tell the story of baseball in the 1990s and 2000s without these players, and not having them in the Hall of Fame is an extreme injustice and reflects poorly on the sport. Not only are these players not enshrined in the Hall of Fame to tell the story of their era, but in their place, lesser players are getting elected. In the future, young fans like myself in the 1990s will think that Larry Walker, Joe Mauer, and Scott Rolen, were the superstars of the 1990s and 2000s, while they were really just all-star level players.
While the baseball Hall of Fame is not run by Major League Baseball (“MLB”), I would be interested in seeing what the MLB’s stance on this matter is. The MLB has not come out and specifically said that these players should not be in the Hall of Fame and has not banned any of these players from being associated with the game in any capacity. Instead, baseball writers have taken it upon themselves to keep these players out of the Hall of Fame for their own moralistic reasons. For the baseball writers, the exclusion of these players may seem like the right thing for them to do today, but I think the true gravity of this mistake will be felt in the future, when fans will look back and not be able to have the full picture of what baseball was like, and who the true superstar players were, during the 1990s and 2000s.
While we’re at it, let’s also put career hits leader Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame. The baseball Hall of Fame should be for legends of the game and to educate future fans about the most important stories and players of every era.
