It's Baseball's Hall of Fame time again – and there's still no place for cheaters

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/jan/07/baseball-hall-fame-bonds-clemens-mcgwire-sosa

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On Wednesday, baseball’s version of the OJ jury will announce its verdict – the Hall of Fame election results.

No topic in the game generates more passion, frustration and anger than the voting by the Baseball Writers' Association of America. This year, a generation of fans are angry that the stars of their era will not have a plaque at Cooperstown.

Barry Bonds, the all-time career home run leader in the game, isn’t getting in, and likely won’t ever. Roger Clemens, one of the all-time winningest pitchers with 354 career victories, isn’t getting in and shouldn’t make plans for induction any time soon. Sammy Sosa, with 609 career home runs, won’t get sniff. Neither will Mark McGwire, the hero of the 1998 home-run race, when he broke Roger Maris’ single-season mark with 70 homers. Rafael Palmeiro, with more than 3,000 hits and 500 career home runs, will have to visit Cooperstown, like everyone else, if he wants to get in.

Last year, in these players' first year of eligibility, Bonds got just 36.2% of the vote; Clemens 37.6% and Sosa only 12.5%. McGwire, who has been eligible for several years, got 16.9%. Palmeiro, also eligible for a few years now, got 8.8% of the votes last year and is now in danger of not receiving the 5% required to stay on the ballot.

None of those lukewarm to poor endorsements came from me. I didn’t vote for any of them on my ballot – a paper ballot, mailed to voters, with boxes to be checked. I didn’t vote for any of them in the vote that will be announced on Wednesday, either. And I won’t be voting for any of these stars in the future.

I won’t be alone. It takes 75% of the vote to qualify for Hall of Fame induction, and last year, when no one was elected, none of the red-hot performance-enhancing drug players were even close to that figure.

This year, with such high-profile first-time candidates as Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas untarnished by steroid links, it should be even harder for the cheaters to get the votes to qualify. And so it will be in years to come. In the next five years, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Ken Griffey Jr, Chipper Jones and Mariano Rivera will become eligible. The crowded field will only diminish the tarnished stars' chances of baseball immortality.

That’s what it is – baseball immortality. It’s not a birthright. It’s a privilege, an honor.

Sportsmanship, integrity and character

This is not a court of law. No one is going to jail. There is no standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. There are six criteria for election to Cooperstown, under the rules of the Hall of Fame. Three of them are sportsmanship, integrity and character. It is up to the voter how much they want to weigh each of the criteria. I have chosen to take them seriously.

Yes, there are all sorts of reprobates, weasels and cheaters in the Hall of Fame. But I didn’t vote for any of them, and I am not bound by every vote that has taken place before me.

Those who would admit the cheaters would argue that everyone used steroids during that era, so how can you tell if the players you are voting for didn’t use as well? I can’t. But I do know that based on reasonable circumstantial evidence – grand jury testimony, a credible report, failed drug tests – some players did use.

What kind of judgment system is it when you can’t judge anyone because you don’t know about everyone?

Bonds is an admitted cheater, telling a grand jury that he took “the cream and the clear” but claiming he didn’t know what he was using. Clemens was acquitted of lying to Congress when he denied the allegations in the Mitchell report. But, call me irresponsible, I tend to believe a report by George Mitchell, a former US senator who brokered a peace agreement in Northern Ireland and who used some of the top former federal prosecutors to compile his report into baseball, over Roger Clemens.

Sosa was reportedly on a 2003 list of players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. McGwire, after refusing to answer questions in Congress about steroid use, has since come out and admitted using performance-enhancing substances. Palmeiro failed a test for steroids.

None of them get my vote.

I did vote for players like Mike Piazza, the greatest power-hitting catcher of all time – 396 of his 427 career homers came when he was behind the plate – and Jeff Bagwell, with 449 career home runs and 1,529 RBI. Both players have been the subject of steroid suspicions, but neither falls under my category of reasonable circumstantial evidence. So I have drawn my line in the batter’s box.

In addition to Piazza and Bagwell, I voted for the following: Maddux, Glavine, Thomas, Craig Biggio, Fred McGriff, Jack Morris, Mike Mussina, Curt Schilling and Frank Thomas.

Biggio was a seven-time All-Star with 3,060 career hits. McGriff and his 493 home runs are my nod to non-steroid induced power; Schilling was a dominant strikeout pitcher and the best postseason hurler of his era, with an 11-2 record and a .2.23 ERA in 19 postseason starts; Morris, well, you had to be there; and Mussina was simply the best pitcher I’ve ever seen. His record of 270-153 carries a .638 winning percentage – the sixth-best in baseball history among pitchers with at least 250 wins. He did this in the American League, facing the designated hitter.

I struggled as always with Tim Raines and Larry Walker. I revisit both every year, based on the ballot.

Death knell for the Hall of Fame?

The angry generation will claim that this – the refusal to include the cheaters – is the death knell for the Hall of Fame. They point to dropping attendance at Cooperstown. This is a flawed argument. Attendance is an industry-wide problem for sports museums. Attendance has been down four of the last five years at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton. Are those fans upset about Mark McGwire as well?

Do you really think fans stay away because of a lack of a plaque for their favorite cheater?

The Hall of Fame does acknowledge the steroid era – just not the way its critics want it to. Bonds' record-breaking 756th home run is on display – complete with the asterisk that the fashion designer Marc Ecko gave it before he donated it to Cooperstown.

Every October, Cooperstown sponsors a salute to Character and Courage, which includes programs on the dangers of using performance-enhancing substances. Two years ago, their guest speaker was the Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg, who in his 2005 induction speech took the cheaters to task:

In my day, if a guy came to spring training 20lb heavier than when he left, he was considered out of shape and was probably in trouble. When did it become OK for someone to hit home runs and forget how to play the rest of the game?

It may have been OK for Bonds, McGwire and others to do so when they played the game. But it’s not OK to use it for admission into the Hall of Fame – and likely it never will be.

<em>Thom Loverro is a Washington, D.C.-based writer , who also co-hosts a sports talk radio show on ESPN 980 in Washington and is the author of 11 books.</em>

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