The National Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, N.Y., is more than a shrine to the great players of the past; it’s a museum of the history of the game, from its mythical beginnings in a nearby cow pasture. The small-town setting evokes baseball’s connection to rural America; there is only scant mention of the big-city corruptions that tainted the game, such as the say-it-ain’t-so fixing of the 1919 World Series.
But now the Hall of Fame has little choice but to address another stain on the game: the period that has come to be known as the steroid era. From roughly the late 1980s until the early 2000s, the use of steroids, growth hormones, and other performance enhancers was rampant in baseball. Assessing the extent of the problem will require intensive fact-finding, because players are still lying about their use of illegal substances; for some stars, it’s a way of preserving enough plausible deniability to get elected to the Hall itself.
Comments
Also, the entertainment industry should take note of actresses that had breast implants before issuing awards.
I am not a believer in the “purity” of the baseball Hall of Fame, or of the “purity” of the sport either. (When the voters for the Hall decide to revisit the inductions of players from the fifties and the sixties and the seventies who would grab a couple of “greenies” on their way through the clubhouse, I’ll think about changing my opinion of the voters’ “purity”.) There is no reason baseball or any sport should avoid any facet of its history. Perhaps the Hall voters should vote for the players who put up the numbers and leave it to the Hall of Fame, which in the words of your editorial is the appropriate organization and venue to study this period, to develop a presentation, an historical enquiry for the “steroid era” and its practice and practitioners that is accurate as best can be determined today, with big questions left hanging over the heads of some of the greatest players of that era. Let those questions hang publically and prominently, perhaps perpetually. Let them be addressed by the individuals in any way they see fit. It is these questions that should be kept in the minds of baseball professionals and baseball lovers. What better place to do that than the Hall of Fame. In fifteen years we may have no more factual information than we have today, so there may never be conclusive answers, neither confessions nor demonstrations of guilt or innocence, regarding Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens or others. In a large sense, it doesn’t matter. There already are men in the Hall who by today’s public behavior standards would not be elected. There is so much information available about public figures today that a particular individual’s decision about how to address questions about their life is only one part of the understanding we have of that life. Sports figures are larger than life, and they are a part of public history. Even the most personally flawed of those individuals who achieved success in their sport have a legitimate place in the museums that tell the history of that sport, no matter their personal stories. These men should be shown and discussed in the Hall of Fame, though they may never be exalted.
What freakin idiot wrote unlike Bonds Clemens was a shoe in for the hall of fame? BS! Clemens last 4 years before Toronto and juicing he averaged 10 wins per season. BondsKhadijah the numbers before he started juicing to keep upwith the Mc Guires etc. go read Mc Donough's columns on Clemens if you want to see what a fame that guy was. Cripe' get somebody who knows baseball yo write these things please.. Mc Grory you should know better.