You know the Apocalypse is upon us when baseball writers start earning our sympathy. Well, here we go.
Decade-long card-carrying BBWAA members are now being asked to parse an era of total uncertainty and enshrine their decisions in bronze for posterity. At a time when the tools to evaluate potential Hall of Famers are more finely honed than ever before, the writers are being asked to throw darts.
I speak of "performance enhancing drugs," of course, but only certain kinds -- the kinds that are illegal or against baseball rules for growing heads like watermelons. Baseball writers will judge some of the greatest performers of all time with absolutely no benchmarks against which to measure them. Are Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez and Ivan Rodriguez Hall of Famers? All have been linked to steroid use; all have HoF credentials.
Raise your hand if you are convinced that Barry Bonds used steroids? Wha? You in the back, yeah you, what's your problem? Oh, you're a Giants fan. In denial, I get it. How about you? Miss? What's that, she's deaf? Okay, that explains it. Everyone else, you can lower your hands. We even know when Bonds started -- 1999, by which time he had already put Cooperstown in a headlock. Do you deny him entry, or just make him sweat a few years before admitting him?
How about Rafael Palmeiro? His numbers argue in favor but his urine argued against -- at least in the last month of his career. Does one tainted sample erase two decades of accomplishments? It's worth noting that Palmeiro never exhibited the physical changes, like muscles the size of Rhode Island, that ignited snickering about McGwire, Bonds and Sosa. How about ARod, who has tested clean for several years and admitted using for a period long after he'd established his bona fides. Wherefore a guy like Sosa, who's a borderline HoFer even before you consider whether he cheated. If you shave, say, 10% off his performance, he probably doesn't have a case.
Speaking of cheating, is it cheating if everyone does it? How about if three-quarters of the players do it? How about half? (For the record, the lunatic Jose Canseco, who has been right about everything involving this topic, estimated that 70% of players were doping.) Wouldn't Roger Clemens have been among the best pitchers in the game even without that extra edge?
And what happens when Randy Johnson, John Smoltz, Craig Biggio, Derek Jeter and Jeff Bagwell come before the voters? Raise your hand if you know for a fact that they weren't also cheaters. (Of course, Jeter, Biggio and Smoltz have passed drug tests. On the other hand, the cracks in those tests are so wide Lindsay Lohan could get through them.) Hello? Hello?
Those poor writers. Besides blind faith, personal bias, rock, paper and scissors, what criteria can they use to determine? I see a few options here:
The Fatalist -- will throw his hands in the air and elect the top performers, no questions asked. (His cousin, The Denier, will get to the same result by denying that there's any proven advantage from using steroids or HgH.)
The Broad Brusher -- will black-ball anyone whose name is associated with steroid use, period.
The Philadelphia Lawyer -- will bar only those who have tested positive.
The Policy Wonk -- will create his own hierarchy of rules and apply them.
The Situational Ethicist -- will weigh the entirety of the player's career against the certainty and apparent extent of guilt.
One thing we all seem to agree on is that the five-year wait and the 15-year window give voters a chance to consider the issue with clearer vision and due consideration. We need some time to reflect before deciding a movie is an all-time great. (Except for that instant classic -- Mary Poppins. No, really.)
However writers vote, there's a legitimate rationale, as long as they acknowledge the level of uncertainty built into every decision. Personally, I'm the situational ethicist. Bonds, Clemens and ARod would get in, after a suitable period in the penalty box, for sustained greatness. I'd vote for Pudge in part because steroids don't appear to enhance defensive ability. Sosa and Palmeiro were both borderline candidates to me, so a nudge backwards drops them off pedestal. The rules on Planet Loopy are: two strikes and you're out. Nix Ramirez.
McGwire can withstand a small steroid penalty, but there does seem to be significant evidence that his home runs were synthetically generated for most of his career. (On the other hand, the reason steroids are illegal is that they are dangerous, and Big Mac suffered a lot of nagging injuries in his career that might have resulted from steroid use. Maybe the added punch and the lost playing time were a wash.)
The bottom line is that we'll never know the whole story. So I'll be cutting everyone a little slack on this, including the game itself.
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