2013 MLB Hall of Fame Screechfest

Dick, really. Just set the absurd comparisons aside.

Ask yourself this: did major league baseball establish a clear and specific policy to detect and punish the use of banned performance enhancements prior to 2004?

Ask yourself this not to exonerate players, but to consider with greater clarity why Hall of Fame voters should be made to retroactively clean baseball's house when baseball itself was unwilling to do so.

 

But the obvious next question is: So is it then OK to drive 80? Are laws the laws that are written? Or laws the laws that are enforced?

I know I'm being completely annoying. I just find moral philosophy interesting.

 

And ask yourself this: Should the players have, nonetheless, known better?

 

One more thing....

It sort of pisses me off that the commissioner and the owners and the GMs and the players association and the players and the media could just cover their eyes and ignore something for 30 years and now retroactively turn to me and say...

"We really screwed up by doing that. Can you clean it up for us?"

 

I'm not sure anyone has asked you to do so.

 

No, but the question is "How morally objectionable is it to break that particular law?" If my daughter wanted to marry a guy who drove 80, could I object on the grounds he lacked integrity? If I was hiring someone for a job, would I feel like I couldn't hire that person? If the APSE were giving that guy its highest writing honor, would I object and say "he's a bad person"?

No. It's not that big of a deal.

 

Is MLB really doing that, though? Seems like if that were the case they'd be flat-out telling you to keep out all known PED users. But they haven't done that.

I suppose you could argue MLB's complicity in what's happening simply by them having made PEDs illegal in the first place, but I think their hand mostly was forced by moralizing Congress critters.

 

Because it's part and parcel of the "baseball condoned it" argument. If your premise is that they aren't wrong, then "baseball condoned it" falls away. It doesn't matter. When Gee argues that baseball condoned it, hence it was OK, by implication I believe that he is saying that, objectively, they would be wrong.

 

What makes you think that's your job or that anyone has really asked you to do such a thing or that it even needs to be done? Seems like an insular observation

 

Is the argument whether Barry Bonds is a good person or not, though?

It seems to me it's quite narrow: Did he cheat the game?

 

Exactly. If not for McGwire and Sosa (and to a much, much lesser extent Cal Ripken), MLB probably is somewhere between the NBA and NHL in ratings and popularity. No one gave a shit about baseball from 1995-97. And many of them likely would have continued ignoring the game if not for the run on Maris' record. And now we're supposed to demonize McGwire and Sosa as filthy cheaters who impugned the sport? Fuck that. They saved the sport. To keep them out of the Hall of Fame is the height of moralizing bullshit.

 

Known better than what?

Known better than trying get a well-compensated competitive edge - in a grey area without a specific set of bans and punishments set forth by the sanctioning body?