Judgement Day

Tomorrow we find out whether Mark McGwire will go to the Baseball Hall of Fame on his first ballot. Based on what we have been hearing, he will be overwhelmingly denied. But there have been a number of good articles lately. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

From Jayson Stark at ESPN:

It was baseball that allowed all of this to happen. In a sport with no rules, no testing and no punishment for using the hottest substances of the day, this was no tiny problem, involving a few obvious home run trotters. This was the culture inside the game, just as amphetamines were part of the culture in the '60s and '70s and '80s (and beyond).

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And now here it is, Hall of Fame election time -- and cleaning up this glop is supposed to be our problem? Sorry, the only way to be consistent about this generation is to apply the Gaylord Perry standard -- and evaluate what the sport allowed to go down on the field. Either the '90s happened or they didn't. And we all saw them happen.

We saw hitters on steroids face pitchers on steroids, as hundreds of players all around them used the same stuff, looking for the same edge. But we've never heard most of their names. So I feel more comfortable voting for players like McGwire than I do trying to pick and choose who did what, and when, and why.

From Thomas Boswell:

From a distance, baseball's problem is a comedy of its own making. The game's punishment -- massive confusion about the meaning of its sacred statistics and suspicion surrounding its stars -- seems to suit the crime perfectly. The game reaped what it sowed. However, to more than a thousand of my writing colleagues who still have their Cooperstown ballots, this is no joke. They study, debate and take their votes seriously. I feel bad for them. Any vote on McGwire (583 career homers) now or on Sosa (588 homers) in a few years seems inherently flawed.

One response is to throw up your hands and say, "Let 'em all into Cooperstown." Just ignore the steroid era. Since the sport itself, as well as an adoring media, were complicit, give everybody clemency. For me, that's no answer. Imperfect justice is better than no justice at all. Every juiced ballplayer knew he was cheating.

And my favorite (mostly because of how snarky it is towards the press - a group that ignores its complicity in all of this), Bill Simmons:

Normally, I enjoy the week the Baseball Hall of Fame inductees are announced. Not this year. With Mark McGwire's inclusion on the 2007 ballot, we have officially entered the Let's Blackball the Potential-Steroids-Guy Era.

Some writers won't vote for McGwire because he probably used steroids -- keep in mind there's never been proof that he did, other than a visible bottle of andro and those 135 pounds of muscle he added from 1990 to 2002 -- which would be fine if they weren't so pious about it. Not content with simply dismissing McGwire's candidacy and moving on, they need to climb on their high horses and rip the guy to shreds. Of course, many of them would appear on any radio or TV show for 50 bucks and a free sandwich. We're supposed to believe they would refuse the chance to take a drug that would enable them to do their job twice as well and make 10 times as much money? Yeah, right.

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When a painful strike canceled the 1994 World Series and nearly killed the sport, two events got people caring again: Cal Ripken's breaking Lou Gehrig's consecutive-games record in 1995, and McGwire's and Sosa's battling for Maris' record three years later. Watch the end of "61*" sometime, or reread Mike Lupica's gushing book, "Summer of '98." (Note: Lupica now argues that Big Mac doesn't belong in the Hall. He never says anything about returning the profits from his book, however.) The home run chase meant something back then. And by the way, when it was going on, we all chose to overlook the fact that McGwire was a can of green paint away from being the Incredible Hulk and that Sosa looked like he was developing a second jaw. Let's not forget that.

The fact is, this is a hard decision, which is why I have written about it so many times. MLB turned a blind eye - but so did the press and so did the fans. We wanted to believe in baseball so badly that we told ourselves all the incredible feats were natural. This is why I have a hard time acting sanctimonious about this - unfortunately many in the press don't have any trouble.

This issue is going to be with us for a long time. As Boswell said, the choice boils down to imperfect justice or voting everyone in and acknowledging the era they played in (I think we have to admit that with current testing we aren't necessarily out of the steroids era.) Neither answer is very satisfying, and so Hall of Fame induction ceremonies will also feel the same way, not very satisfying. To paraphrase Thomas Boswell, we reap what we sow. It may sound trite, but I think it captures the situation perfectly.