OFF THE MARK: A case for the steroid gang in Cooperstown

I first went to Cooperstown, New York in 1999.

I was 8 years old.

I don’t remember much from that trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum—there were the plaques and Doubleday Field—but what I remember most vividly is the exhibit on Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Ken Griffey, Jr.’s home run chase the year prior. McGwire and Sosa were already in the Hall then and there, but they remain snubbed by the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) on the enshrinement ballot.

McGwire, Sosa, Barry Bonds and the other elite players of the “Steroid Era”  should be in Cooperstown. So should the rest of the steroid gang when they become eligible.

The Hall of Fame’s motto is “Preserving History, Honoring Excellence, Connecting Generations.”

It’s a museum, and the BBWAA has somehow forgotten that as the years have worn on. The writers have become the jury in a court operating on the assumption of guilty until proven innocent, and the history of the greatest game in the world hangs in the balance.

Baseball needed 1998 in the worst way. That home run chase brought America’s pastime back from the brink of irrelevance it had teetered upon since the player’s strike cut the 1994 season short. McGwire, Sosa, Griffey and the other home run hitters of the late 1990s encouraged a whole generation of avid baseball fans like myself.

We aren’t naïve. We all knew those guys were juicing. Major League Baseball knew it; they just didn’t do anything about it.

The steroid era is another evolution of the game, as is the subsequent testing and suspension procedure and the brand of baseball it brings with it.

But the MLB and the BBWAA are operating on different sets of criteria. If a player tests positive once, he receives a suspension. Teams are still willing to sign them—and for big bucks, too, if you look at the contracts guys like Melky Cabrera and Jhonny Peralta have gotten this year—but even an implication in some quack’s “tell-all” book and you may as well be Joe Jackson or Pete Rose in the eyes of the writers.

(Those two guys should be enshrined, too.)

Cheating, by the way, isn’t exactly new to the game. Amphetamine use was prevalent in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Paul Molitor, an admitted cocaine user during his playing days, was still inducted. Gaylord Perry doctored baseballs his whole career and was still enshrined. George Brett’s infamous pine tar bat is on display in Cooperstown even as I write this column.

Even the racial prejudice of the game’s antiquity played into the favor of the racist stars of that day. The efforts of Hall of Famers Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker and Cap Anson to keep baseball segregated undoubtedly kept the MLB diluted from black baseball’s best, which would have certainly endangered their status as the game’s best players.

I could go on to cite the moral shortcomings of half the Hall of Fame, but I think my point is pretty clear: these men, as much as any others, are part of the history of the game. Let them in.

The most egregious travesty is leaving out those who have never even tested positive or been named in any official reports, such as Mike Piazza and Jeff Bagwell.

But even those who doped and admitted it (or didn’t admit to it) should be allowed in.

These men, cheating or not, were some of the greatest baseball players in history and contributed something irreplaceable to the game, and they deserve enshrinement for it. It’s not a court of law or morality. It’s a museum.