Tag: steroids

With Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro trapped in Hall limbo with Pete Rose, we are now facing the prospect that the greatest hitters of the last two decades are likely not to make the Hall.

Consider the man who announced his retirement today, Manny Ramirez. There is no doubt that Ramirez is one of the greatest hitters to ever step in a batter’s box — he hit for average, power and was a flat-out RBI machine for the bulk of his career.

The same can be said for Gary Sheffield and, of course, Barry Bonds, who faces all kinds of legal woes.

Here is a list of the Top 20 homerun hitters in baseball history:

Seven of them have a steroid asterisk next to their name (or would have were it to exist). Add Sheffield to the list of plus-500 homer guys with an asterisk and then consider this: Only three power hitters of the last 20 years — Ken Griffey Jr., Jim Thome and Frank Thomas — are without asterisks and there are writers who question Thome and Thomas’ credentials. (This doesn’t take into account the pitchers, by the way.)

I am not advocating for voting all of these guys into the Hall, but we have to address this in some way. The reality is that the game was badly tainted by the accusations and its best players, for the most part, were all involved.

So, here is my question: Can we continue to ignore these hitters without ignoring an entire era?

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It appears that we can add Manny Ramirez’s name to the list of tainted sluggers, based on today’s report that he is about to be suspended 50 games for a positive steroid test. The interesting question, of course, is what this means not only for his Hall of Fame chances, but for the Hall of Fame chances of all players from the present era — players who played the bulk of their careers over the last 20 years.

Consider this list of players from the era who slugged at least 500 home runs (from Baseball Reference):

1. Barry Bonds 762
2. Ken Griffey 613
3. Sammy Sosa 609
4. Mark McGwire 583
5. Rafael Palmeiro 569
6. Alex Rodriguez 553
7. Jim Thome 545
8. Manny Ramirez 533
9. Frank Thomas 521
10. Gary Sheffield 500

That’s 10 players — of the 25 all-time — who played the majority of their careers after the mid-1980s. Of these 10, only three — Griffey, Thome and Thomas — have not been linked to steroids. McGwire, the only one on the list eligible to enter the Hall, has been snubbed for two years now, which seemed to make sense — until you consider that the steroid era has tainted so many players of all abilities that we can’t be sure that the players we think are clean really have been.

A-Rod is the case in point. He was the one guy — along with Griffey — who everyone viewed as squeeky clean on the issue and who nearly everyone was rooting for to pass Bonds and remove the taint on the record. Now, however, he is mired in steroid controversy, his accomplishments called into question.

I don’t think steroid users should be rewarded, but we have to acknowledge that the homerun barrage that has left the record book a shambles was not a product of steroids alone. A host of factors — smaller parks, more sophisticated workout regimens, awful pitching, a tendency to swing for the fences — contributed.

But the one thing that I think has become clear — at least to me — is that guys like McGwire, A-Rod and Manny have been playing by the rules as established by the culture of baseball and are likely not exceptions.

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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