2023 Baseball Hall of Fame Class

I got no problem with Joey Belle getting inducted. He deserved the 1995 AL MVP over Mo Vaughn. Just saying that Dick Allen, who was similarly slighted for being mercurial, shoulda been inducted years ago and remains for me the most glaring Cooperstown omission. Especially since they just inducted Oliva, who was an exact contemporary and not of the same caliber as Allen.

 

Whitaker ends up getting screwed by the racism of the 1970s-90s Detroit press corps, which continuously blathered about the gritty gutty hardworking Trammell while dropping snippy snotty remarks about the lazy lackadaisical slacker Whitaker who coasted by on sheer natural talent, setting the narratives for non-Detroit focused voters.
In fact both are very well qualified Veterans Committee-category candidates, ranking well above the median level of previously inducted HOF middle infielders. (Both are entirely well qualified statistically, with Whitaker's numbers a tad bit better.)
They both should be in, but pretty much because Joe Falls got a bag of maggots up his asshole when deep-dyed Jehovah's Witnesses Whitaker and Chet Lemon consistently stiffed him on interview requests, he decided to sandbag Whitaker's HOF chances. Falls was the Sporting News correspondent in Detroit for most of Whitaker's career, and in the pre internet days, the SN correspondents in each town were considered the baseball authorities nationwide by the heavy hitters in the media megalopolises.

 

Not everyone used and it wasn't fair to those who didn't because their careers had no chance of having the same life as the roid users. But PEDs didn't magically make everyone a 35-home-run-per-year hitter nor did it magically allow pitchers to get 300 strikeouts per year. A large number of the guys caught for steroids were those just trying to stay in the league. The numbers, albeit aided, are still impressive.

And let's not forget that the roids era saved baseball. The fans flocked to stadiums to watch these guys hit them farther than before, more often than before and throw harder than before. The writers who are wringing their hands now weren't trashing baseball then and only a few even questioned it. Bud Selig happily let the money roll in and only after the Mitchell Report did he suddenly clutch his pearls.

Ain't none of us innocent in any of this. Let's acknowledge the best from 1996-2007 because they were the best within the culture at the time. We admit what happened and make that part of the story. But we can't pretend it didn't happen and we can't pretend these guys weren't great. The ethics of it have passed. Now we are wondering how do we capture the history of the era. Holding people out doesn't change any of it and doesn't deny what we saw with our eyes.

 

Completely agree it's not easy. But having a vote for the Hall means wrestling with these exact questions.

Part of the responsibility.

 

If amphetamines are like just 2 cups of coffee why are they treated the same as PED’s these days.

 

The BBWAA Career Excellence Award ballot arrived yesterday. Winner gets into a wing of the Hall. Hardest decision I can remember in several decades of voting. The candidates are:
-- Gerry Fraley (died 3 years ago), Dallas-Fort Worth Chapter.
-- Bruce Jenkins (still working), San Francisco-Oakland Chapter.
-- John Lowe (recently retired), Detroit Chapter.

 

Well if Pete Rose says so. And it’s not about which has a greater effect it’s that greenies allowed players to play that would have not been able to without them.

 

Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle admittedly used greenies, IIRC. Doesn't make them not Hall of Famers.

And I'm totally fine with banning current PED users following a failed league-sanctioned drug test and the ensuing appeals, etc. You knew the rules, you cheated, you're out. So if that permanently DQs A-Rod and Manny Ramirez, I can live with that. Leaving out the others who never broke a rule is the joke.

 

Pete Rose of course would know plenty about the effects of steroids, since he lived for six years with Tommy Gioiosa, who was later convicted of dealing steroids. Of course one of the major effects of steroids is to improve the ability of aging athletes to recover from exertion.

 

moral panic


BASEBALL; New Drug Tests in Baseball Stir Debate Among Players (Published 2003)

Even so, players appear to be much more tolerant about the use of amphetamines than of steroids, recent interviews with players and executives indicate. Gwynn said, ''Guys feel like steroids are cheating and greenies aren't.''

Although baseball bans the use of steroids and amphetamines, it had not tested for any performance-enhancing drugs until the steroid testing began, largely because the players union has been opposed to testing on the grounds that it infringes on players' privacy rights.

 

I don't care what the players think. If we let players police themselves, we'd have dozens of beanball-induced deaths by now.