The Mitchell report is out and it pretty much blasts the slow response of baseball to recognize — or perhaps care — that steroid use was widespread.
Obviously, the players who illegally used performance enhancing substances are responsible for their actions. But they did not act in a vacuum. Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades – Commissioners, club officials, the Players Association, and players – shares to some extent in the responsibility for the steroids era. There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on. As a result, an environment developed in which illegal use became widespread.
Given the list of names (which includes some we’d already heard — Jose Canseco, Gary Sheffield, Matt Williams, Barry Bonds and Gary Sheffield — and some we had not — among them Miguel Tejada, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettite, Todd Hundley and Paul LoDuca), the apparent widespread use of steroids by players and the broad responsibility for steroid use, it seems that targeting individual players for pentalties appears senseless.
Ruling out people like Bonds and Clemens from the Hall of Fame — well, that is a difficult question. Do you rule out an entire generation of players? Do you assume that only the small handful of Hall-of-Fame level players wouldn’t have risen to that level without help? Do you penalize Bonds and Clemens? What do you do with Sheffield and Rafael Palmeiro? Mark McGwire? Sammy Sosa?
I wish I had a good answer. I don’t. Baseball, its fans and the press — along with the entire industry that surrounds it — need to come to grips with this simple fact: The last 20 years of baseball history have been tainted.
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